An audience member’s question can tap a huge reservoir of knowledge you have.

It’s a good feeling when it happens.  You have total confidence in your ability to answer.  You are definitely a subject matter expert on this one.

Be careful.

You don’t want to go on and on until you have delivered an answer that could stand by itself as a separate talk.  Such an over-long answer will discourage additional questions and, potentially, divert attention away from your main theme.

Give a concise answer and then, if you think it will be appreciated, offer to speak to this audience member later.  If you would like to discuss the research further, catch me after the meeting.  I’ve unearthed some studies that are quite interesting but would take us off our topic if I talked about them now.

One of the most common questions in a presentation skills workshop is about slide quantity.  How many slides should I use?

An often-suggested rule-of-thumb is one slide per minute.  In other words, a twenty-minute presentation should have around twenty slides.

An article I recently read legitimately complained that this rule is arbitrary.  The author made the case that so many issues come into play that you can only really answer the “how many” question with “It depends.”

I agree.  It depends.

Of course, that answer doesn’t help if you’re struggling to work out an appropriate slide count.

I have a suggestion that can at least get you started on determining the size of your slide deck.

Imagine that the only visual aid you have to work with is a flip chart.  Anything you are going to diagram or write out is going to have to be done by hand before the presentation or while you are talking.

Then ask yourself: What visuals would you draw or write out despite the hassle?  What would be worth the effort because it had the potential to help you get your message across successfully?

That small number of visuals represents what your presentation really needs and what you are most inclined to fully utilize.

How many additional visuals should you create through the ease of PowerPoint?  It depends.  But I wouldn’t go too far beyond my imaginary flip chart count.  It’s OK to add some helpful-to-have slides to your must-have slides, but after that, slide excess starts setting in.

One popular training tip these days says that presenters should use their laptop as a monitor.  In other words, they should place it between themselves and the audience.  When they need to look at a slide they should look at their laptop, not at the projected slide that is showing on the main screen.  The main screen is for the audience only.

The rationale for this tip is that it prevents speakers from turning their back to the audience as they look at the main screen.  By looking at the laptop instead, they remain facing the audience.

It sounds OK in theory, but in practice, many presenters become detached from their audience.  They spend a large part of their time staring downward at their laptop, and they stop verbally referencing the slides.  Instead of saying “As you can see here on this graph…,” they just talk about the contents of the graph while the audience members do their best to follow along.

I still find that a better connection with the audience is maintained if a presenter speaks to the main screen, gesturing toward it and verbally guiding the audience members’ attention.  As you can see on the far right of the graph, there was a dramatic drop in sales in the fourth quarter.

Any tendency to turn completely away from the audience can be minimized by moving close enough to the screen that only a slight turn is needed to see it.  It’s when speakers get too far out in front of the screen that they are forced to turn their back to the audience in order to see the slide.

Well maintained eye contact, while referencing the main screen together with the audience, makes for a good audience-speaker connection.

Reading Seth Godin’s blog post entitled “But you’re not saying anything,” reminded me of something.

Early in my career, I worked for an ad agency that was occasionally called on to create an annual report for a corporate client.

Inevitably, the client would want something that was great looking, with exceptionally high production values.  After all, the company’s image was at stake.  Page after page of gorgeous photography, custom artwork, colorful charts and beautiful typography would be printed on the highest-quality paper.

What I could never get over was how the whole effort would also yield paragraph after paragraph of beautiful-sounding prose—that said absolutely nothing!  You could read any page and not remember a single thing you read.  But it sounded good!

This vacuous copy was not the agency’s fault.  The agency’s copywriters always presented the client with a strong, meaningful first draft.  But then the copy would go through multiple rounds of reviews with multiple executives at the client company.  Each time, any word or phrase that wasn’t absolutely safe would be watered down or taken out all together.  Anything that had to be included but might somehow raise an issue, would be so obfuscated you could read it multiple times and not get a clear sense of what was being said.

Is there any lesson from this experience that could be applied to presenting or giving a speech?

One lesson I take from it is that obsessive polishing that is motivated primarily by image and safety, will ultimately render a piece of communication that is void of substance.

It will have no impact.  It will stimulate no thinking.  It will persuade no one about anything.  It will generate no action.  But it will look good and sound nice.

In my last post, I suggested starting a speech or presentation by polling the audience with two or three questions (Start with Polling Questions).  This is a good way to get immediate attention and learn valuable information about your audience.

I have something I need to add to that advice.

When polling an audience, the typical procedure is to ask for a show of hands.  By a show of hands, how many of you attended last year’s conference?

When you do this kind of polling, please process the results.  In other words, say something about the number of hands that have been raised.  Oh, good.  I see that most of you were here last year.

Too many speakers ask for a show of hands, but say nothing about the number of hands that go up.  They briefly look around the room and then immediately go on to their next point.  They neither comment on the number of hands nor interpret the significance of the number.

The response you get to a polling question is not just for your private observation and interpretation.  Share what you have learned and comment on its significance.

Oh, good.  I see that most of you were here last year.  That tells me you are familiar with this issue.  It was discussed in several of our 2009 sessions.

When people are asked to participate in a poll—even a simple “raise your hands” poll—they are naturally curious about the results and what to make of those results.

Here’s a presentation-opening technique that can accomplish two things at the same time.

Polling the audience with two or three questions can serve both as an attention-getting technique and a way to learn more about your audience.

You may, for example, start out by naming job specialties and asking that people raise their hand when you mention their specialty.  This could be followed with a question or two about levels of experience with the subject matter.

Immediately, you have your audience members engaged and you have done it in a way that provides you with valuable information about the group you are talking to.

When you do this, though, remember this simple rule: Raise your hand when you ask a polling question.  It helps if your audience members see you modeling how you want them to respond.

They say first impressions are easy to make and hard to break.

Few things make a stronger first impression, or do so with more people, than your public speaking.

If, on top of that, you speak regularly to the same people (example: monthly report to management), whatever impression you have made becomes the set story on you.

She has a hard time getting to the point no matter how much time you give her.  He’s dynamic, but his presentations lack substance.  She knows her stuff, but doesn’t project confidence in front of groups.

You can complain that you have been unfairly judged and labeled, but it does no good.

You can also set out to modify the behavior that led to your reputation, but the same negative comments just keep working their way back to you through second-hand sources.  It can be quite frustrating.

One solution is to change jobs, get in front of new people, and make a new first impression.  But, that’s a drastic, unnecessary, solution

Instead, in your next few presentations, try doing more than just modifying your behavior.  Consider overcorrecting.

If, for example, you have been labeled as too low-key and unenergetic, make a point of raising your delivery pace, volume and animation to a level that makes you a bit uncomfortable.  As long as you are still in your comfort zone, it’s unlikely you are correcting enough for it to be effective.  Without getting too carried away, you want to shake up the perception people have of you.

Don’t worry; you are not suddenly going to get a new reputation for being overly energetic.  More likely, you will get the modified reputation you were originally trying for.

Think of it this way: If you have a bent, metal rod, how far do you have to bend it in order to make it straight again?  Can you just bend (modify) it back to straight?  No.  You have to “over-bend” it in the opposite direction, beyond straight, so that it will spring back to straight when you let go.  In other words, you have to overcompensate.

Senior executives don’t want surprises and don’t want people using up their limited time.

These “don’ts” are understandable and reasonable.

What is not always reasonable is how these “don’ts” lead to inflexible rules that subordinates have to follow when presenting to senior managers.

Two common ones are: 1) you must turn in your completed presentation days before you are scheduled to deliver it, and 2) you have to say, up front, on the first slide, what you are proposing.

These rules might eliminate surprises, and force presenters to “get to the bottom line” right away, but they also lead—very often—to subordinates not being given an opportunity to present their full message.

They carefully plan their explanation of a complex proposal but, before they can go through it, managers jump straight into questioning and criticizing out-of-sequence points and the conclusions.  Subordinates are forced into a defense of their ideas without first being given an opportunity to develop them.  Then, to add insult to injury, they are criticized afterward for not having delivered a well-reasoned, persuasive argument.

Yes, executives should demand clear, concise presentations that don’t waste time.  And, yes, they should not be hit with anything they should have been warned about in advance.  But, no, they should not routinely deprive subordinates of an opportunity to go through the full message they have worked so hard to develop.

Give them a chance to make their case.

You’re part way through a presentation and you realize you don’t have enough time to cover everything you prepared.  If you continue at your current rate, providing the same amount of detail, time will run out before you finish.

What do you do?

Do you speed up and skim through the material, explaining things less thoroughly.  Or, do you completely skip some material?

In most cases, it is better to skip some material.  Then you can maintain a reasonable delivery rate and continue to fully explain whatever material you choose to still address.  Ideally, if possible, you don’t even let the audience know that you are skipping anything.

The alternative approach of speeding up and skimming tends to diminish the quality of the whole message.  Everything gets mentioned, but little, if anything, gets adequately covered.

Present as much as you have time to adequately cover.

The word pretentious refers to someone putting on an air of importance, usually undeserved.  If clothes are part of the image, it has traditionally meant that the person is overdressing, most likely without good taste.  The goal is to get attention and come off as special.

After observing a few speakers show up at relatively formal business occasions dressed in Saturday-afternoon casual, I have decided that a kind of reverse pretentiousness has come into vogue.

Under the guise of not dressing to impress, someone practicing the new reverse pretentiousness sets out to be impressively casual.  The unspoken message is that they are so cool, confident, and important, they can dismiss the dress code expectations of others.

I understand that casual attire has become much more accepted and, to some extent, the norm in many environments.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about casual attire in places, and on occasions, when it’s not the norm, not acceptable, and intended to make a statement.

Pretentiousness is off-putting in whatever form it takes.