Beware: Presentation Self Appraisal
Last week I gave a presentation to an ISMM (Institute of Sales and Marketing Management) group in Leeds, UK. I haven’t done any of these for a while so was pretty critical of my performance afterwards. I debriefed with a colleague on the way home, too long, too slow, too many jokes. Lots of engagement afterwards but that’s to be expected when you’ve just removed somebodies crutch they need to understand how to walk again and want help.
Today I got the feedback from the audience:
Excellent | Good | Fair | Poor | Total | |
| Nick Oulton | 11 | 1 |
|
| 12 |
Most valuable key learning point or take away action:
- Less is better
- A reinforcement of how I use PowerPoint
- Gave a good push towards the bin to lengthy PP presentations
- No bullet points – diagrams are king
- Relevance and engagement
- Memorable aspect of presentations
- Word Interpretations
- All of it – but probably dissonance
- A totally new approach to how I do my presenting
- No bullet points
And so the lesson is one I know, but had forgotten, you can’t judge your own performance! Only the audiences’ opinion counts. It’s actually a fundamental tenant of our Killer Presentations course: you don’t learn by performing but by watching and listening to other people performing the same material. As ultimately the people who count in a presentation are the audience then only the audience’s perspective on the performance is important.
We, the presenters, are always either too critical or too positive rarely do we give ourselves a balanced appraisal.
The feedback is like a school report and this one has room from improvement – 11/12 isn’t 100% and there were, I’m sure, more than 12 people in the room!
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