Coaching staff for effective presentations in 4 easy steps

We all remember our first presentation: shuffling dog-eared notecards at the front of the school auditorium, fumbling with the mouse to trigger the fantastic flying, fading and shimmering text on the Powerpoint screen, looking around to a sea of disinterested faces, a few kids in the corner playing battleships, and a teacher with her clipboard and marking-pen primed.

Coaching your staff to give presentations is not only about helping them to overcome the fear of these early experiences.

It is also about teaching them how to deliver presentations that keep the audience amused, informed and, most of all, engaged. It is about developing their abilities to remember important points, to adapt their presentation to audience response, and to improvise when it all goes wrong.

To complement the skills described in this article, you might want to consider attending a project management training course where you can learn the essential skills of planning and managing projects.

1) Prepare

The most important thing to teach your staff is to prepare well.

This does not mean simply typing out a report. A well-prepared presentation is carefully researched and composed, with the audience at the forefront of the author’s mind.

Who is the audience? What are their expectations? What are the objectives of the presentation? How can the speaker achieve those objectives?

If the objective is to persuade an audience of five year olds that the country is being invaded by Martians, then the speaker might have to invest in more dramatic narrative, but fewer convincing examples than if his audience were a class of sceptical seventeen year olds.

Preparation also includes speech notes and visual aids. These should reduce the main points that the speaker wants to make down to the bare minimum. Speech notes should be clearly written or typed on one side of the card or paper. There should be enough notes to remind the speaker of what to say next, but not enough to encourage the speaker to read, rather than deliver, the speech.

Visual aids should be clear and to-the-point. Fancy graphics and amusing clip-art may have appealed in school, but in the vast majority of cases additional adornment only distracts the audience and speaker from the purpose of the presentation.

2) Rehearse

Get your staff to practice giving presentations to each other and to yourself. Teach them to practice their presentation in the shower, to their dog and on the telephone to their mother, until they know the structure and details inside out.

Ideally, speakers should be able to at least begin and end their presentations without using their speech notes. Help your staff to craft strong beginnings and endings, and then get them to learn these off by heart.

3) Crafting Strong Speeches

The Beginning

The start of a speech should include what the speaker will talk about and why the audience should hear it. Short openings are best. Catchy openings – using quotes, statistics or unusual anecdotes – can work, but should be tested on a range of listeners before using in front of a strange audience.

The Middle

Nobody likes a speech that drags. Teach your staff to focus on the three most important points. This keeps the speech short and focused enough to maintain audience attention for the duration.

The End

There are three key elements to a successful ending: a summary of the main points, fulfilment of the speech objective and a memorable closing phrase.

The fulfilment of the speech objective is frequently a call to action. If you are trying to persuade five years olds of the invading Martians, then your call to action might be a rallying cry of defence, or a suggestion that the listeners find suitable hiding-places. If the speech objective is to inform an audience of business managers about a software innovation, then your call to action might be a declaration of the product’s importance for businesses such as their own.

4) Delivery

Coaching your staff to prepare and rehearse engaging presentations will be fruitless if you don’t teach them how to deliver their speeches. When they are practising delivery, remind them to:

• Use eye contact to connect with their audience


• Use their body language to create a sense of confidence and authority


• Take their time: speaking slowly helps the audience follow the thread of the argument


• Improvise: sometimes listeners will ask unexpected questions. Your speaker has to be prepared to think on their feet, or at least to admit that they do not yet know the correct answer.