Impact – Measure and Increase Your Presentation’s Impact on Your Audience

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Bob Adams

We are competing for relevance. – Brian Solis

Award-winning author and presentation expert Nancy Duarte has a new book out: HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. This is the final part of a series outlining of each of the book’s sections as well as zeroing in on a specific topic.

Section 7: Impact

Build relationships through social media – engage with users so they’ll engage fully and fairly with your ideas
Spread your ideas with social media – facilitate the online conversation
Gauge whether you’ve connected with people – gather feedback in real-time and after your talk
Follow up after your talk – make it easier for people to put your ideas into action

As a visual learner, I have images and objects around my office that help me keep things top of mind. One very prominent image is a diagram from Bert Decker’s book You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard. It shows a presenter’s journey from information (focusing on education) to influence (focusing on motivation). If you are not urging your audience to do something, to take action, you should have just sent a memo.

The final section of Duarte’s book challenges you to do just that. All the ideas above are great, but here’s a little more about one that many presenters would run from:

Spread Your Ideas with Social Media

Use social media content the way you use stories, visuals, and sound bites: to reinforce and spread your message.

Social media activity usually spikes during a presentation, with moderate chatter beforehand and afterward. Facilitate the conversation at its peak by:

Streaming your presentation – post a live video stream of your talk so people can attend remotely
Time-releasing message and slides – use technology to automatically push key messages out at key moments during the presentation
Select a moderator – enlist a colleague to keep the social media thread constructive
Repeating audience sentiment – use the moderator to repeat and validate what live audience members are saying
Post photos of your talk – enlist someone to photograph your presentation and post online
Encourage blogging – invite bloggers, journalists, and social media specialists to attend and cover your presentation

If it’s worth speaking about the first time, it’s worth doing all you can to keep people talking about it.

This is the final part of a series looking at Nancy Duarte’s new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, highly recommended for all leaders.

When audiences see that you’ve prepared – that you care about their needs and value your time – they’ll want to connect with you and support you. You’ll get people to adopt your ideas, and you’ll win the resources to carry them out.

Leaders speak.

Delivery – Deliver Your Presentation Authentically

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Bob Adams

Never deliver a presentation you wouldn’t want to sit through. – Duarte, Inc. Golden Rule

Award-winning author and presentation expert Nancy Duarte has a new book out: HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. This is a continuation of a series outlining of each of the book’s sections as well as zeroing in on a specific topic.

Section 6: Delivery

Rehearse your material well – roll with the unexpected and fully engage with the audience
Know the venue and schedule – control them when you can
Anticipate technology glitches – odds of malfunction are high
Manage your stage fright – exercises to calm your nerves
Set the right tone for your talk – you never get a second chance to make a first impression
Be yourself – authenticity connects you to others
Communicate with your body – physical expression is a powerful tool
Communicate with your voice – create contrast and emphasis
Make your stories come to life – re-experience them in the telling
Get the most out of your Q&A – plan, plan, and plan some more
Build trust with a remote audience – get past technology’s barriers
Keep remote listeners interested – you’re fighting for the attention of multitaskers
Keep your remote presentation running smoothly – use a checklist to minimize annoyances

These are all great ideas, and I honestly couldn’t pull out a favorite – they’re all that good! Suffice it to say that delivery is critical to the success of your presentation. You may have the best content and message in the world, but if you fail at delivery, what good is it?

Next: Impact

This is Part 7 of a series looking at Nancy Duarte’s new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, highly recommended for all leaders.

Slides – Conceptualize and Simplify the Display of Information

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Bob Adams

At our studio we don’t write our stories, we draw them. – Walt Disney

Section 5: Slides

Think like a designer – visuals should convey meaning
Create slides people can “get” in 3 seconds – do they pass the glance test
Chose the right type of slide – bullets aren’t the only tool
Storyboard one idea per slide – plan before you create
Avoid visual clichés – make your slides stand out
Arrange slide elements with care – make your visuals easier to process
Clarify the data – emphasize what’s important, remove the rest
Turn words into diagrams – use shapes to show relationships
Use the right number of slides – size up your situation before building your deck
Know when to animate – and when it’s overkill

Create Slides People Can “Get” in Three Seconds

Audiences can only process one stream of information at a time. They’ll either listen to you speak or read your slides – they won’t do both simultaneously.

Make sure they can quickly comprehend your visuals and then turn their attention back to what you’re saying.

Think of your slides as billboards on the highway: when people are driving by, they only briefly take their eyes off the main focus – the road – to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus on what you’re saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them.

To create slides that pass the glance test:

Start with a clean surface – start with a blank slide
Limit your text – keep it short, easy to skim, and large enough to be visible from the back of the room
Coordinate visual elements – Use one typeface for the entire deck, use a consistent color palette, and use photos of a similar style
Arrange elements with care – align graphics and text blocks, and size all objects appropriately

Streamlined text and simple visual elements help your audience process the information much more quickly.

Next: Delivery

This is Part 6 of a series looking at Nancy Duarte’s new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, highly recommended for all leaders.

Media – Identify the Best Modes for Presenting Your Message

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Bob Adams

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint – Steve Jobs

Award-winning author and presentation expert Nancy Duarte has a new book out: HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. Over the next few days, I will be posting an outline of each of the book’s sections as well as zeroing in on a specific topic.

Section 4: Media

Chose the right vehicle for your message – slide decks aren’t always the answer
Make the most of slide software – it’s not just for slides
Determine the right length for your presentation – keep your audience engaged by budgeting your time
Persuade beyond the stage – communicate before, during, and after your presentation
Share the stage – mixing in experts and media holds interest

Determining the Right Length for Your Presentation

What do all great presentations have in common?

They’re short.

It’s no secret that people value their time. People in your audience won’t scold you for ending early, but they will for ending late. Out of consideration for them and the day’s agenda, stick to the assigned time slot and treat it as sacred.

Doing that, however, is not so easy. It will cost you time to save the audience time. It’s relatively easy to ramble on for an hour or so; it’s really difficult to craft a tight, succinct 20-minute presentation.

Here are five ways to tighten your talk and keep your audience engaged:

Plan content for 60% of your time slot – that will leave time for Q&A or some other form of discussion
Trim your slide deck – put all the trimmed slides at the end of your presentation where they are available is needed on the fly
Practice with a clock counting up – if you go over, you need to know how much you’re over
Practice with a timer counting down – having set time marks at different places in your presentation gives you a running gauge throughout your talk
Have two natural ending points – if you’re running long, you can drop the second ending and still get your message across

Next: Slides

This is Part 5 of a series looking at Nancy Duarte’s new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, highly recommended for all leaders.

Designing Elevation Church’s Volunteer Culture with the Excellence of Nordstrom’s – Team Members

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Bob Adams

Reaction and comments from yesterday’s post and the correlation to the Ritz Carlton brings to mind another iconic retail establishment known for its customer service: Nordstrom’s.

Last fall, I was privileged to speak at the Worship Facility Conference and Expo on the topic of “Servant Leadership.” I had been doing research on Nordstrom’s customer service principles for several months, and found that they were easy to translate into the volunteer culture of churches. As a Guest Services Coordinator at Elevation Church’s Uptown Campus, it was easy for me to make some applications.

Taking the same 3-tier approach at Nordstrom’s, here’s a quick outline summary of the first tier and the second tier. Here’s a brief outline of Tier Three.

Part Three: What eTeams Can Do to Create a Culture of Servants

Create the Relationship: How Frontline Team Members Create Return Guests

Listen to the Guest
Understand the Guest’s needs
Be honest and sincere
Know the Elevation WE from top to bottom
Understand the foundation of the “One Day” principle
Take responsibility

The Experience Never Ends: There are 168 Hours in Your Week

Be a team player
GS excellence comes from practice, experience, observation, and personal commitment
Positive thinking comes from following simple steps that produce a WOW! environment for our Guests
Listen to the Guest

Play to Win: Encourage Teamwork at Every Level of Your Organization

Find ways to balance individual achievement and teamwork
Honor team achievements
Demonstrate the importance of the whole team
Encourage the team to take ownership of GS issues
Encourage the team to cite the teamwork examples of others
Publicize “heroic” stories of teamwork throughout the organization

Team members must buy into the culture and understand their role in maintaining and supporting the culture through their actions.

Team members are the ones who come closest into contact with your Guests, and therefore are crucial to your organization’s ability to serve them well. Team members must be empowered to establish relationships with Guests and find ways to take care of them. They must listen, understand the Guest’s needs, and follow-through with whatever needs to be done.

The front line is where the action’s at!

Designing Elevation Church’s Volunteer Culture with the Excellence of Nordstrom’s – Team Leaders

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Bob Adams

Reaction and comments from yesterday’s post and the correlation to the Ritz Carlton brings to mind another iconic retail establishment known for its customer service: Nordstrom’s.

Last fall, I was privileged to speak at the Worship Facility Conference and Expo on the topic of “Servant Leadership.” I had been doing research on Nordstrom’s customer service principles, and found that they were easy to translate into the volunteer culture at my church, Elevation Church in Charlotte NC.

Taking the same 3-tier approach at Nordstrom’s, you can read a quick summary of the first tier here. Here’s a quick summary of the second tier:

Part Two: What eLeaders Can Do to Create a Culture of Servants

#1 Strategy: Recruit the Smile

It’s not the role for everyone
4 reasons volunteers choose your eTeam
Recruit the smile, train the skill
Invest in your team

That’s My Job: Empower Teams to Act Like Entrepreneurs

Trust your team
Give them freedom to make decisions on the spot
Push decision-making responsibility and authority down to the lowest level possible
Encourage your team every step of the way
Use mistakes as tools for learning

Dump the Rules: Tear Down the Barriers to Exceptional Volunteer Service

Trust your team’s judgment
Simplify the process
Do what’s right
Promote one rule: The Golden Rule

This is How We Do It: Manage, Mentor, and Maintain Great Teams

Find ways to motivate your team
Treat the team with dignity and respect
Encourage new team members to find mentors
Promote a culture where team members mentor unselfishly
Provide coaching tools
Promote a culture of loyalty and ownership

Recognition, Competition, & Praise: Create a Sustainable, Emotional Bond with Your Team

Always find ways to praise team members for great acts of GS
Recognize and reward
Provide team members with information on how they are doing
Send notes, emails, phone calls to team members regularly

Staff and coordinators may create the atmosphere and culture, but it is up to the people on the front lines to put it into practice. Team Leaders at Elevation have experienced the front lines – that’s where they came from! Because of this, they know what to look for in a new volunteer, how to empower people, mentor them, train them, and praise them for a job well done.

Next: Team Members

Designing Elevation’s Volunteer Culture with the Excellence of Nordstrom’s – Coordinators

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Bob Adams

Reaction and comments from yesterday’s post and the correlation to the Ritz Carlton brings to mind another iconic retail establishment known for its customer service: Nordstrom’s.

Taking the same 3-tier approach at Nordstrom’s, here’s a quick outline summary of the first tier:

What eCoordinators Can Do to Create a Culture of Servants

The Elevation Story

An appreciation of what Elevation is all about cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of our culture
Know the history (past); live out the history (present); know where you’re going (future)
Vision

Spreading the Servant’s Culture: Publicly Celebrate Your Heroes; Promote from Within the Team

Storytelling and folklore of individual and team success
Stories of heroics are regularly shared – a standard to aspire to and even surpass
eCoordinators with a deep understanding of the Elevation culture and who really value it

Line Up and Cheer for Your Team: Create an Inviting Place to Serve

If leaders and team members are excited about the experience of serving at Elevation, they will exceed your expectations
Create something extra every week

How Can I Help You? Provide Lots of Choices

Make sure you have all the choices you need in order to give potential leaders and team members options to serve
Emulating the Nordstrom way
1. Cross-Training all area teams
2. Identify leader and team needs before they are expressed

While all team members need to have an appreciation and awareness of the organization’s history and culture, the eCoordinators are critical. They create, maintain, and support the servant culture.

Next: eLeaders

The Lineup at Elevation Uptown

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Bob Adams

It’s one thing to have a Credo, Three Steps of Service, and 12 Service Values like the Ritz-Carlton (see the post here for more details). Many businesses go through the exercise of defining key values or composing mission statements. They might even display them in their literature, or in imposing art displays on the corporate walls.

How many organizational leaders understand the importance of regular and repetitive presentation of the core aspects of their business – not only to management, but to their front-line staff?

Enter the “lineup” at Ritz-Carlton.

To truly appreciate the Ritz-Carlton leadership approach to repeated dissemination of the “Gold Standard” mentioned here, you would have to drop in on a section of the housekeeping staff as they prepare for their days work – or at the corporate headquarters – or in the kitchen of the fine restaurants that serve the hotel chain – or anywhere, and everywhere, throughout the entire organization.

You would observe that a meeting is taking place at the beginning of each shift. Not just any meeting, though: the leader in each group starts by sharing the Credo and talking about the importance of creating a unique guest experience. Another team member might share a guest story from a Ritz-Carlton hotel in another country. Another team member shares how what they do in their department helps create memorable guest experiences. Then a few quick announcements, special recognitions are given, and the meeting is closed with a motivational quote by another team member.

All in about 20 minutes.

Every day.

On every shift.

In every Ritz-Carlton hotel and office around the world.

The magic of the lineup involves the following:

Repetition of values – the core belief that values need to be discussed daily, and that values can’t be discussed enough
Common language – shared phrases across all tasks binds the team together
Visual symbols – The Credo is printed on a card that all team members carry at all times
Oral traditions – Personal, direct, and face-to-face communication makes a huge impact in a world increasingly dominated by e-mail, text, and voice messages
Positive storytelling – stories communicate life in a powerful and memorable way
Modeling by leaders – the active, daily presence of the leaders communicates the importance of the time together

What would “lineup” for each of your teams do to preserve the core values, communicate the importance of everyone on the team, and provide momentum for the day’s activities?

At Elevation Uptown, here’s what our ‘lineup’ looks like on Sunday mornings at 7:45 AM:

Or how about this word for the process? Alignment.

That’s how we roll Uptown!

Use Storytelling Principles and Structure to Engage Your Audience

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Bob Adams

Stories are the currency of human contact. – Robert McKee

Section 3: Story

Apply Storytelling Principles – make your presentation stick
Create a Solid Structure – storytelling principles provide a framework
Craft the Beginning – Establish the gap between what is and what could be
Develop the Middle – build tension between what is and what could be
Make the Ending Powerful – describe the new bliss
Add Emotional Texture – decisions are not made by facts alone
Use Metaphors as Your Guide – memorable themes help rally an audience
Create Something They’ll Always Remember – drive your big idea home

Create Something They’ll Always Remember

According to Duarte, placing a climactic S.T.A.R. moment in your presentation will drive your big idea home. That moment is what the audience will tweet or chat about after your talk. Use it to make people uncomfortable with what is or to draw them toward what could be.

Here are four ways to create a S.T.A.R. moment that captivates your audience and generates buzz:

Shocking statistics – if statistics are shocking, don’t glide over them, amplify them
Evocative visuals – audiences connect with emotionally potent visuals
Memorable dramatization – bring your message to life by dramatizing it
Emotive anecdote – use gripping personal stories

The presentations that are repeated have memorable moments in them. These moments don’t happen on their own; they are rehearsed and planned to have just the right amount of analytical and emotional appeal to engage both the hearts and minds of an audience.

Captivate your audience by planning a moment in your presentation that gives them something they’ll always remember.

Next: Media

This is Part 4 of a series looking at Nancy Duarte’s new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, highly recommended for all leaders.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Develop Persuasive Content in Your Message

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Bob Adams

Are ideas born interesting or made interesting? Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard

Section 2: Message

Define Your Big Idea – clearly state your point of view
Generate Content to Support the Big Idea – when you’re brainstorming, more is more
Anticipate Resistance – think through opposing perspectives
Amplify Your Message Through Contrasts – create and resolve tension
Build an Effective Call to Action – get things done
Choose Your Best Ideas – sort and filter
Organize Your Thoughts – outline your presentation by writing clear, active slide titles that hang together
Balance Analytical and Emotional Appeal – stay credible while you reel people in
Lose the Jargon – is your language clear enough to pass the “grandmother test”

Build an Effective Call to Action

Presentations should move people to act – but only if you explicitly state what actions you want them to take, and when.

Are you asking them to be doers, suppliers, influencers, or innovators?

Doers instigate activities. They are the worker bees. Once they know what needs to be done, they’ll take on the tasks. They also recruit and motivate others to complete important activities.

Suppliers get resources. They are the people with resources – financial, human, or material. They have the means to get what you need to move forward.

Influencers change perceptions. They can sway individuals or groups, large or small, mobilizing them to adopt and evangelize your idea.

Innovators generate ideas. They think outside the box for new ways to add value to and spread your idea. They create strategies, perspectives, and products.

(Duarte, p 39)

Whether your audience is corporate, political, scientific, academic, or religious, the people you’re addressing should fall into one of these categories.

Be explicit in your request – and about how it will benefit your audience.

Next: Story

This is Part 3 of a series looking at Nancy Duarte’s new book HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, highly recommended for all leaders.

Part 1

Part 2