Learning Leader

Helpful Resources for Presenters and Speakers

Is there a high-performing leader who has not bothered to hone and develop their presentation skills? I can't think of one.

So how do we do that? How do we develop our presentation skills? I believe there are three priorities:

1. Practice it. Actively seek opportunities to speak in public, to give presentations. My early presentations were definitely not good; in fact, I cringe when I remember them, but they were experiences to learn from.
2. Study it. Watch good communicators, live and in the flesh is better. I find watching people give messages week after week in my local church is a great way of reflecting on presentation techniques.
3. Practice it some more. Experiment. We never stop learning to improve.

I've compiled a number of resources:

Power Presenting Squidoo Lens
I created this lens as my own aggregated collection of sources and resources, which you might find helpful.

Power Presenting Book List
Compiled with the help of Amazon, this is my list of top references for influencing others through presentations.

Power Presentation Skills
John Edmonds and I coach corporate clients with this two-day programme providing the best coaching we know to help people to improve their influence through presentations.

Alltop Speaking
This is a branch of Guy Kawasaki's most useful aggregator site, Alltop, listing some the best blogs by top practitioners in the subject.

"Leaders need to present well."

Is there a high-performing leader who hasn't honed and developed their presentation skills? No. To be effective, leaders need to present well, if not powerfully.

Presenting, stakeholder engagement

Change or Die

Yesterday I wrote about the World Cafe I was preparing for today. We did this conversational process this morning with about seventeen people altogether, exploring some issues of change within the Church of England. The photograph shows how we trapped some of the findings in graphic created by the table hosts.

Some reflected that even with a group of seventeen, some of the more vocal members could drown out the quieter ones, but with this process everyone was given a voice and was heard. The general feeling was that it worked very well.

Last night I gave a presentation to the group on the findings of a conference first reported in this article in FastCompany. in May 2005. I remember the article created quite a buzz at the time, and I'm pleased to see that the author of the article, Alan Deutschman, has gone on since to publish a book on the finding from science on how people make enduring behaviour changes.

How people can and can't make the breakthrough to sustained changes of behaviour should be of keen interest to all leaders. I've found that whenever I've talked on this subject people are both surprised and encouraged.

See my Shaping Change Lens.

Links to pearcemayfield Squidoo Resources

In a recent post I announced a new resource site for those clients who had attended out EYPS (Engaging Your Project Stakeholders) 1-day workshop. If you are interested in additional resources like this, I have published a number of other lens as well:

• This page will give you access to all of them.
• Power Presenting is a lens created to support our new Power Presentation Skills  2-day course. Our aim is to equip you to make your project presentations compelling and engaging, getting the result you want.
• MSP - Managing Successful Programmes is where we will be pulling together sites, resources and links that have a contribution to helping our MSP Practitioner graduates. Programme management draws on a broad canvas, overlapping into several other areas of business thinking.
• Creativity and Problem Solving, like Power Presenting, supports another new course of ours, that we are very excited about, addressing an area where most people find they can improve their skills significantly. We provide some simple guidelines and techniques that can stimulate those breakthrough ideas.
• Shaping Change is a lens to support people new to the field of Change Management, such our delegates on Shaping Change in the Organisation and the Principles of Change Management. Again, like programme management - and both subjects stray into each other - this is a wide field.
• Finally, feeding the geeky side of my nature, I've published a lens on the Outcome Relationship Model, again with links to related resources. This is the first stab at something that I intend to take further.

All of these lens have a Guest Book at the end. Do take a look and leave your comments there, particularly if you know of a link or resource that you feel we should include.

Thanks.

[This is the fifth (!) attempt at publishing this post, where I have found a glitch that hangs some browsers. Sorry if this has affected you.]