But first, connect with your audience

I do a lot of talks and because of this I also attend quite a lot of them. I’ve previously shared some hopefully useful advice on how to give a decent presentation. But there’s something I’d like to add.

I’m still somewhat on hiatus, but things appear to be going better!

To give the most effective presentation, you must always think about the audience. You are not there for your personal enjoyment. You are there to inform and perhaps persuade and/or entertain the people listening to you.

Now, audiences are already swamped by information. Torrents of it. On the day in question, your presentation might be the fourth one they listen to. And worse, you are also competing with social media, vital Hacker News posts and the latest developments in the international breakdown of climate, security and democracy.

A lot of talks are just incredibly bad. The audience will therefore have less than stellar expectations of your presentation as well. The default stance is “you’ll have to convince me your stuff is good”.

You could start your presentation right away, and hope that after a while your listeners conclude that it is better than they expected and that they should pay attention. But the window to make this happen is brief, and if you don’t deliver relatively quickly, everyone checks out. This is an uphill battle.

Photo by Omar Flores on Unsplash

There is one neat trick that can help. First, it is always good to figure out as much as you can about who you are presenting to. This allows you to predict what they’ll care about, what they (don’t) know already, what their interests and perhaps worries are. Tune your content with what you’ve learned.

Now, crucially, armed with this knowledge, you can create an early bond with your audience. Find something you and the audience can connect through. Something you have in common, something you share. Something that opens their ears to the possibility they could learn something from you.

Often the audience has no idea who YOU are. If you don’t spend any time on this, spectators will conclude that you assumed you were so famous that everyone should have known who you were already. Be humble and tell everyone who you are and (briefly) what your background is. To listeners, it really matters if the programming advice they are about to receive comes from an actual programmer or not, for example.

So, as part of your earliest remarks, make sure to talk about some kind of link you have with the audience. Preferably something the audience knows more about than you do. Give them something to feel good about, and feel good about listening to you. This opens up their ears & will make them care around 100 times more about the rest of your presentation.

Now, you might think this is pandering, or perhaps bribing your audience. And perhaps there is a little truth to that - but realize the expectation was that your talk wasn’t going to be that great or even worth their while. You need to quickly counter that expectation. And the quickest way to do that is to have listeners sit up because you are talking about their life, their experience, their skills.

It is of course very important to be sincere about this. I once attended a presentation over at a big four consultancy where a senior manager attempted to tell a cybersecurity department how much he cared about them. But sadly he did so by telling the engineers that the company needed them so much it had decided to put up with just how weird these nerds were. At least he was being honest, but no bond was formed.

Instead, work hard to find something you have in common. Perhaps tell the security engineers how much you value their expertise, and tell them that as a finance professional, you are also frequently amazed that even very senior management doesn’t get why some things are impossible. This is something you have in common. Heads will nod. Ears will be unplugged, and your actual presentation starts off on a neutral footing: people will give it a chance.

Now, at this point you might think I’m overdoing it a bit. And there’s of course no reason to go overboard with bonding with your audience. But I can assure you that if you don’t properly introduce yourself and position yourself favorably towards your audience, your initial content will struggle massively to resonate.

So with that, I urge all presenters: imagine how the audience feels about you showing up. Will they like you? Will they even have any idea who you are? Will they by default assume you are full of shit? And once you can imagine how they’ll feel about you, make sure to introduce yourself usefully, and start off with some kind of personal indication that you value your listeners, and that you have something in common with them.

And THEN your content can shine.

Good luck!

If you can’t find anything you can sincerely bond over with your audience, ponder if you should be doing a presentation in the first place.

Bonus content: some suggestions

• If you are coming from a more learned, experienced or senior position than the audience, find some ways to recognize the audience for their skills and expertise. This should be easy enough to do. It is for example generally true that management & visionaries have little hands on experience, so there is ample room to deprecate yourself a bit, for example. Although you must definitely be sincere, do know that people in general are enthusiastic about hearing that they have something to offer, that their views are worthwhile. But don’t overdo it of course.
• If you are ‘coming in sideways’, for example doing a presentation on project management to a bunch of engineers, the challenge is quite similar. The professionals listening to you aren’t that convinced you actually have something to teach them. They’ve been doing their thing without your help for quite a while now. In this case, you must find some kind of connection you agree on. For example about bullshit project metrics that have nothing to do with actual progress. And then of course present something better.
• If you are presenting to your equals, life is a lot simpler, but you still need to bond a bit over just why it is YOU that is presenting and not them.
• If you are presenting to more senior people, you don’t need to spend a lot of time telling them they are great. They think so already. But it never hurts to establish how happy you are that such wise people are willing to listen to your simple words. But next up, the senior people are very interested in how they can further their own lives by what you are about to tell them. And if you have something you think they might appreciate, do pre-announce that clearly.