Put the Red Pen Down: How to Coach Your Team's Presentations

Someone on your team sends you their deck for a big presentation. It's not good. There's too much detail, there's no clear point, and you can already picture the audience switching off.

The quickest fix is to open it up and rewrite it yourself.

I did exactly that a number of times at Microsoft. The problem is it just doesn't scale. If you keep rewriting decks for people, they never go through the process of getting better at it themselves, and you end up rewriting the next one too.

To help people grow, it's always better to coach them through the process. And the best coaching tool I know is a good question.

The all-hands update that wouldn't have landed

I was coaching someone who'd been asked to present at an all-hands. He had 5 to 10 minutes to give an update on an important customer project, to everybody in the company, from every role.

He brought me his first draft. It was a really dry, very detailed update on the different phases of the project and where they'd got to. It was overwhelming, and it wouldn't have landed.

So I asked him a load of questions.

"Does the audience know much about this project?"

"No, they don't."

"Do they know much about your department?"

"No, they don't."

Then we talked about the audience. What did they want from listening to him? And what did he want to achieve with them?

It became clear that he needed a much higher-level overview. What the project is. Why it's important to the company. Why it's important to the customer. Then just a tiny bit about where they'd got to.

He went away and completely rewrote it himself, as a higher-level, much more engaging update for an all-hands. I didn't touch a single slide. It all came from asking who the audience were, what they wanted, and what he wanted to achieve with them.

The questions I ask

My questions come from AOREN, the framework I use to plan every presentation. You don't need all five every time. With the all-hands update, the first two did the heavy lifting.

1. Who is the audience, and what do they already know? Their role, what they care about and how much context they have. This is the one that changed everything in the all-hands update.
2. What do they want from this, and what do you want? Every presentation has two objectives: the audience's and yours.
3. What do you want them to remember? If they forget everything else, what’s the one thing that sticks?
4. How do you want them to feel? Reassured, excited, confident in your team? Emotion is what makes a message land.
5. What do you want them to do next? A decision, an approval, a follow-up meeting.

Ask the question, then let them answer. The point is that they find it, not you.

When it's your deck on the table

If you're the one who built the deck, this can be hard. You've spent ages working on something, and now someone's telling you it could be better.

I think of feedback as rocket fuel for performance. But you have two reactions to it: a rational one and an emotional one. The rational part of you wants that rocket fuel. The emotional part needs to deal with it and get over it.

And if nobody's coaching you right now, coach yourself: ask the same questions before you open PowerPoint.

Go deeper on coaching your team

On Tuesday 24 November at 12:30 UK I'm running a free 45-minute online masterclass on Teams for leaders of technical teams: Coaching Your Team's Technical Storytelling. We'll cover AOREN, how to connect through story, and a coaching process with the questions that help your team improve without you rewriting their slides.

If you lead a technical team, you can register here. If you're investing in yourself, find the right program for you here.

Ben.