When you’re at work, I’m sure that you face situations where you have to present what you’re working on. You may be in a situation where you are presenting to your manager, skip-level manager, or even just a peer or colleague. In all of these cases you have to talk about what you are doing, what you can do, and what you want to do. These can be tricky situations to navigate and some of the internal politics can be difficult to be able to present yourself well. In this post I hope to help you navigate some of these things with a few helpful hints and tricks.
When I first started in corporate life, this lesson was a big challenge to me and it took longer than it should have to really understand it. If you’re like me, then you grew up with lessons like “don’t brag”, “be humble”, or “don’t be proud” which made this lesson very hard. I have always been a hard worker and in the early days especially as I had to prove myself. I, however, missed this very valuable lesson. The first time this was presented to me, it was by a more mature co-worker who was above me and further along in his career who shared with me these harsh but wise words “if you don’t talk about what you do, then people will think you do nothing, and you won’t have a job for very long”. Although this was harsh, it was what I needed to hear, I didn’t perfect it (and haven’t really perfected it as this will always require careful examination to ensure that it’s being done right) for some time. Since that day I have found a few principles that I hope will help you.
- Outside in – think from the other person’s point of view
- Value – talk about what is valuable to the other people and to the organization
- Bigger is better – the more you have to talk about what others value most
- Props and Visuals – Have something to show
- Get Ahead of Problems – Talk about all the bad things early and often
Outside In
This perspective can be very hard for some people to master as there are many challenged. Perhaps you don’t know the person you’re presenting to very well, perhaps you can’t think from their perspective, maybe they are holding the cards close to the chest, perhaps they are hard to read. Whatever the case may be, do all you can to think from their perspective. Watch how they react to other people and other situations, this will give you great insight into how you can present. If they don’t react strongly to others, listen to what they are saying when they talk about when it comes time for them to present. Listen to how they present their information, mirror (as much as possible while still being yourself) their behaviour, mannerisms, language, etc. Listen also to what they are not saying. If this person is someone that is inside your organization and you are aware of some of the background to what they are saying, pay attention to what they are omitting when they present. Perhaps they are working on a project and they are omitting the bad things, note that. Perhaps they are downplaying the good things, mirror that. Perhaps they are omitting the failings of the internal teams and only bringing up the failings of the external teams, that is important to know. You will only be able to present yourself well when you know who you are trying to present to and what matters to them. I have heard too many times, people (myself included) trying to “pat themselves on the back” for what they are doing, being met with cold indifference to something that took a lot of time and effort.
Value
This goes hand in hand with thinking from the outside in. As mentioned previously, patting oneself on the back and being met with indifference is never a good thing. This is often because what is being presented doesn’t hold the same value to all people. Remember, when you think from the other person’s shoes you can start to get an idea around what you should present and what you should be doing. Thinking outside-in is crucial in understanding others values. As you are thinking about the other person’s perspective, you should be thinking about what they value so that when you present you can know what to present and how to present it. While you’re preparing your presentation, whether you have weeks, days, hours, or minutes notice, you can start to think about the values of the other person, but also, values of the organization. When putting this together, if you don’t immediately know what and how you should present then you need to think of what the organization values most. The values of the organization may not be the only or best thing to present as your team or department may have related but different (and hopefully not competing) values. If you are in a sales role then you may want to relate everything that you’re doing back to sales. If you’re in Operations or HR, then you may want to talk about how your work is relating back to training percentage or process efficiency. If you’re in the IT business function then you may want to present everything from an uptime perspective or a compliance perspective. If you’re in finance then you may want to talk about the accounts, audit, or cashflow. Whatever function, team, or department you may be part of, you will want to present your information based on what has the highest value for those that are listening
Bigger is Better
You may or may not have noticed that by this point in life, people are simple. There is nothing wrong with this, however, with everything going on in a person’s day-to-day life, the simplest thing is often what wins out. In presenting yourself well, quantity rules over quality. This is not to say that quality should be abandoned, rather, that quantity should shape the quality. To put an illustration on this point. Suppose you are working with a sales function and you are working on an RFP response that your company is bidding on. This RFP response may take hours of time to investigate and assemble all of the information requested by the client and take even more time to visually present this information. In presenting this information, if you were to share it as “I’m working on the big RFP”, others within the organization (especially those that are an arms-length from the situation) may not understand that it will take a lot of time to do this and do it well. It is also possible that those to whom you are presenting have done work for smaller RFP’s which have taken less time, which will mean that those listening may think less of you and your work because they are looking at it from the context of the small RFP(s) that they have worked on. However, if you were to look at this and to break it up into smaller components such as, investigate feature-sets of the product with the product design team, investigate capacity with the engineering team, investigate aesthetic of the product with the marketing, and evaluate costs and margin with the finance team. Even those that have worked on smaller RFP(s), which will be harder to persuade, should see this as a lot more work than simply “working on the RFP”.
Props and Visuals
As I said earlier, people are simple, having something that you can show to others will go a long way. If you need to present numbers that you were crunching, try to visualize this in such a way that others will be able to see the output. If you have been building a report, try to print out the report for others to see physically in their hands to know what you’ve been working on. If you need to present the gravitas of a situation then bringing props or evidence of this can truly capture what you are presenting (e.g. Working with a loss prevention team to minimize the impact of a damaged shipment, bring some photos of the damaged product if you have). On top of getting the idea across better, this will also show that you are prepared to present your information. Being able to present something visually in a manner that appears complete will show that you prepared for this meeting and you took the time of the other people in the meeting seriously enough to prepare. When presenting props and visuals, the key to this is “seamless”. Be sure to present the visuals and the props in a way that will work, the first time, with little to know “fiddling”. This means you have some decisions to make. Should this data be printed physically or displayed visually? If it is going to be printed, does it look good printed, can I get this completed successfully (printed, stapled, collated, etc.) before the meeting? Is there a display (projector or other digital display) available to show this? Would it be appropriate to show from a laptop, tablet, or another device? Once you have the answers to these questions then you’re ready to share your props.
Get Ahead of Problems
This one is the one that I have only learned recently. This is also still a challenge for me to do well. I don’t like to talk about the problems I’m facing and it feels counter-intuitive to tell anyone (especially a superior) about the things that are not going well. This, however, is the most crucial to get right. I will start by explaining how this became most evident to me. It was explained to me by my manager who said: “you don’t want to go through a project saying that everything is good, then come to the end and say that you missed your deadline because of a list of problems”. When coming at it from that perspective it looks better to report all of the challenges you’ve been facing, all the challenges you will face, and all of the challenges that you have overcome or worked around. It is also crucial to express the challenge that you have had in overcoming challenges. This shares your value with all the parties involved such that they did not have to deal with all you had to deal with to get this across the finish line. There is a technique and a strategy to remember when presenting. The problem is, it is a balancing act. First of all, you don’t want to present any challenges that show your incompetence or negligence. If there is a problem in a project because of something that you were supposed to do, you can do it, and you are fully capable of doing, you mustn’t share this with the larger team. If there is a problem with something that is well beyond your control then you need to share that problem early and often. Some of these problems may be with other parts of the organization and by sharing this, you give other team members the opportunity to help work better together with other parts of the organization. Suppose the problem is with a vendor or an external stakeholder, by sharing the problem you give the opportunity for the problem to be escalated to someone with enough power in the vendor relationship to get the problem solved. As I said at the beginning, the last thing that you want is to reach the end of the project and miss your dates without sharing this out.
Overall, there is a lot here to digest in this post. My hope for this post is that you don’t have to learn all of this and don’t have to learn all of it all at once. My hope for you is that you were able to pick 1 or 2 sections and then start to digest and implement some of the suggestions provided.