🤔 "I don't have time to work on presentations". Why even bother making your presentations impactful? It's about the work, after all: We are not salesman, right?! 🤔 How to get unstuck when your ideas get rejected because "bosses don't understand" It's their problem, not ours, right?
🤔 Striking the Simplicity balance: Should we make it simple & risk losing important info, or should we show everything? Should we take the approach of "if you can convince them, confuse them"?
🤔 Are public speaking skills important? Can I be an effective presenter if I'm super nervous, introvert, not talented, and/or not spontaneous?
🤔 EQ & "The human touch": How it can make or break your proposal, and how we can better understand this and make little adjustments to be just that bit more convincing.
🤔 Lessons Learnt in finding the "black swan": Why some technically "correct" and "accurate", or even "obviously profitable" proposals still get rejected
🤔 Addressing Generation gaps - how do we handle people from different generations, i.e. Baby Boomers, Gen-X and Millennials?
🤔 How do you respond when get told to meet unreasonable demands or deadlines?
These are among the topics we discussed our recent Knowledge Sharing session on Impactful Presentations.
Alhamdulillah, a very fruitful 3-hours session as we facilitate an interactive 2-way sharing by opening up discussions on the floor for participants to share their experiences and case studies.
Beyond the "theory" of good presentations, we also shared some behind-the-scenes insight of real experiences of "lessons learnt" of past mistakes and Successes. And sharing also insights from the other perspective: how we feel and what we think when we are the chairperson, or our own subordinates present to us. These are the kind of practical insight I would have loved to learn back when I first started off as a graduate engineer.
Surprisingly, the topic which people found most interesting was about the importance of "tone of voice" (More on that next time 😁)
One insightful takeaway I got from the participants was that presentation is a team effort. Yes, presenter is the face and the voice representing the team - But he/she is only one member of the team: Success or failure is a collective effort, not just the messenger. And we have to remember that when a proposal gets approved or rejected by the decision makers, they also bear some responsibility - success or failure is attributed to them. That helps to put things in perspective.
I emphasized also that presentations are only a subset of a greater skill that is super important throughout the course of our career: Communication. With this sharing, I hope we successfully planted the seeds towards improving our emotional intelligence, communication, and relationship-building skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment