253: Getting The Timing Right For Your Presentation

THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

When I am running half day or full day training sessions there is no rehearsal. There is a lot of participant interaction in our sessions, so you need to have the participants for that bit, if you were going to do a rehearsal. Instead, I plan the training down to the last second. I have a roadmap of the training, which nominates precisely what will need to be happening at every minute during the training and I follow that religiously. If the timing speeds up or slows down I know where I am relative to the plan, so I can make the necessary adjustments. I need to do that because we must not go over the time allotted for the training. It is the same with speaking and presenting. The organisers have a programme to get through and they absolutely don’t want the speaker to go beyond their allotted time. Are you planning your talks down to the last minute?

What do we see? Speakers who go too long on their subject or who go crazy and try to cram fifteen minutes of content into two minutes. They start whipping through their slide deck like deranged people. Sitting in the audience, your head starts spinning because you cannot keep up. Their point of departure is always, “I will need to move through this next section quickly”. Why is that? They knew from the start how much time they had and they knew that when they started the talk.

The “I will need to move through this next section quickly” statement is notification that this person is not professional. Consequently, their personal and organisation brands suffer. If they cannot figure out how to give a forty minute talk in forty minutes, do you really want them in charge of some work for you? We also extrapolate their lack of professionalism to the rest of the people who work down there. Without really thinking about it, we tar them all with the same brush, so this is a major unforced error we have here.

The quality of your presentation also suffers because often you had some really killer content, but you cannot really utilise it fully, because you are moving so fast. All of this self-inflicted reputational damage could easily be avoided if you spent time to rehearse the content. When you allocate the time for the first rehearsal, you quickly realise that you have too much material for the length of time to present it or the other way around. In my experience though, it is usually too much information and not a lack of information, which is the problem. We have this great slide we want to use and oh, yeah, there is that other great slide too. Before you know it, you have a perfect presentation for an hour, the problem is they have only given you forty minutes.

So instead of embarrassing yourself in front of others, you can make the adjustments beforehand. The subsequent rehearsals can now focus on the delivery component. There is always plenty to work on in this regard and it requires dedicated time. What do busy leaders lack? Time. The tendency is to short change the preparation for the talk and spend that time on something else. This is a mixing up of priorities. Most of that other stuff won’t be you in public exposing yourself to the world as a professional. It will be internal projects, meetings and reporting, which are hidden to judgmental outsiders.

We need to get the content right, the timing within the limit and then we need to really impress the audience with our delivery. Senior company representatives having to read their talks is unthinkable, but you still see it. How shameful that you don’t know your business well enough to talk to key points and instead you read the whole thing to us. Just send us an email with the text, and we can all stay at home and read it for ourselves. You need to practice before you get in front of any audience. What they should see is the polished you, the confident you, the persuasive you, not the frantic, disorganised you.

When rehearsing, video review yourself and have others give you “good/better” feedback. Polish the performance, because that is what it is, a performance. When you understand that then your approach changes. We remain business like though and don’t attempt to transform ourselves into amateur thespians. We present as professionals, in our particular field of expertise. If you can organise it, video yourself presenting live to the audience and then study that later for areas where you can improve. Professionals rehearse, review, improve and above all else keep to the time allotted. Are you a professional?