Jacob Ahmadzai – Page 121 – STL

Make a great first impression

Good presentation skills are essential at work, improving the efficiency of communications and boosting productivity through stronger relationships.

And in every presentation, the opening few moments are always vital to success. Engage the audience, build rapport, make an impact. You’re nervous and so are they. Smile, break the ice. I read a book on customer service, which advised: ‘In the opening 20 minutes

Deliver better presentations with a great INTRO — Capture the attention of your audience – quickly

of any interaction between a customer and a member of staff, the customer forms an impression of not just you, but your organisation’. Twenty minutes! It was an old book. These days, try half a nanosecond.

And why do we present? Presentations are either informative or persuasive. You’re telling or you’re selling. But remember – you’re always selling. You’re selling YOU. And if the audience buy you, they’ll buy whatever you say.

So, how do we ensure our presentation gets off to a great start?

You just need a good INTRO!

Let’s kick off with a suitable salutation. Now it’s time to raise the Interest levels in the room. How? Perhaps a sizzling anecdote or fascinating fact? Or a dazzling picture on the big screen, which provokes many questions? Or, a short DVD? Make sure there’s a clear link to the main topic.

Next, we point out that they Need to know what we’re about to share. There’s the classic WIIFM approach (what’s in it for me?). Sell the benefits of your presentation message from their perspective: “what this means for you is….” Dangle the carrot! Alternatively, if you KYA (know your audience), then you might decide on a different strategy: abandon the carrot and go for the stick!

One such sticky approach is to use SIS (situation, implications, solution). Describe the current challenging situation, remind the audience of the terrible implications of not listening to your message and complying with it, and offer a solution: do what I’m proposing! Using SIS as a form of leverage is unlikely to put a smile on the faces in the audience. However, they may not be happy, but at least they understand why they are not!

Next up it’s T for Timings. Tell them when you start, when you finish and when the breaks are. Let the audience know how and when they can Respond to your presentation. State your question policy! This can save you a lot of frustration and interruptions during delivery. For a short presentation, let’s leave the Q&A until the end. Or, for a longer presentation, let them know they can ask as we go along. Either way, let them know at the beginning!

Let’s finish off our INTRO: Clarify the overall Objective of your presentation. “I’m here today to inform/advise/convince/etc”. Why are you presenting? You know why, so share it with the audience.

Remember INTRO… Interest-Need-Timings-Respond-Objective

Improve presentation skills — Hone your presentation skills with INTRO

Conclusion

What have we learnt? You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and when presenting the opening few moments are extremely important. You are at your most nervous, and things are most likely to go wrong. So, get the audience interested in your content, point out that they need to hear it – don’t just tell it, sell it! Let them know about the timings and how and when they can ask questions, and clarify your overall objective for being there – you can learn how to in one of our presentation training London courses. A good start really does work wonders – for them and you!

What’s the Difference?

The need to do more with less, to be more productive, is an all too familiar reality for many a business worker. And as a manager how can you strive to hit your organisational targets and raise efficiency by getting the most from your team? Here we look at how in particular coaching and mentoring skills (which can also be learnt and practised on one of our mentoring courses London) can be a real game changer, the differences and appropriate situations to deploy them.

The difference between mentoring and coaching — Mentor your team for top productivity

Your Team

As a manager, it’s useful to consider the following variables: “Have I given my team the skill and the will to do their jobs?” The will: their attitude towards the work – good? Excellent! They’re happy to do a good job.

What about the skills required? You may have team members with plenty of will, but their skill level is lagging behind. What do these people need? Some personal development… A variety of methods exist such as; attending a Mentoring training course, or attaining mentoring or coaching skills by other means. Any one of these could be the right method. Let’s talk about mentoring.

Hail Odysseus!

What do we mean by the term ‘mentor’? One definition is ‘an experienced and trusted adviser’. To understand its origins, it’s time for some Greek mythology: One day, the great hero Odysseus was visited by his friend Achilles: ‘Odysseus, grab your sword and shield. Helen of Troy has been kidnapped, and the king wants us to go and get her back. We need to be on a ship leaving in about 20 minutes.’

This gave Odysseus a dilemma – he had a son Telemachus, too young to go to war. Luckily, Odysseus had an old friend, whose name you’ll never guess: Mentor! So, Odysseus left his son Telemachus to be looked after by Mentor, while he went away to war.

How does mentoring work?

Who’s involved? A mentor and a mentee. We assume that one of the parties has knowledge and experience to share. In this case, it’s the mentor.

A mentor has been there and got the T-shirt. Structured or unstructured? Whatever it needs to be – this will be decided at the start. Regular meetings, or perhaps on an ad hoc basis. The duration of the relationship? As long as both parties are still happy and it’s productive, it could last for decades. Many companies have mentoring programmes, where the mentors are listed on the intranet, and the mentees choose their mentor.

And what about coaching?

Tips for improving mentoring skills at work — Use mentors to improve team performance

There are an awful lot of ‘coaches’ who aren’t coaching – they’re mentoring others, or even training them. In coaching, we need a coach and a coachee. It’s usually more structured than mentoring and runs over 5 or 6 weeks.

But here’s the problem for many ‘coaches’ – when coaching, which party has the knowledge to contribute? If you truly are coaching, then it’s the coachee. A coach’s role is simply to ask questions. The coachee has ideas or knowledge buried within them – they just don’t know it yet.

The coach’ job is to ask thought-provoking questions, designed to bring those ideas out. All modern coaching models are question based. So in a coaching conversation, who should be doing most of the talking? The coachee! Sadly, there many ‘coaches’ who, having asked the question, will also answer it! Goodbye coach, hello mentor!

Conclusion

At work, we need to help people to learn and develop. A great start is with a coaching approach, asking others what they would do. However, if the answers are ‘dunno, dunno, dunno, will you just tell me?’ perhaps it’s mentoring time? With these skills and the commitment to develop them you and your team can make a real impact to the productivity of your organisation.

Mentoring is one of our management courses in London which were designed to support those in managerial positions.

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