Coaching for Presentation Skills

Of all the arenas at work in which we might apply our coaching skills, helping people present in public seems to be amongst the most common. Many of the managers I train as coaches ask me how best to go about coaching their people through this experience.





I guess much depends on whether we're going to be working with an individual over a period of time and develop them into an accomplished presenter or whether we're working with someone standing trembling in front of us like a gibbering wreck with 5 minutes to go before they're due on stage.





Let's deal with the latter situation first. Conventional wisdom on developing presentation skills is going to be no use to us here. We may well feel that our coachee's Powerpoint is overly busy, their notes a mess and their planned pyrotechnics to create a memorable ending doomed to failure, but it's too late to do much about that now.





If you've read some of my other articles on coaching you'll know that I reccomend the following acronym as a useful questioning framework:





A - Aims - What do you want


R - Reality - What's happening now?


R - Reflection - What do you want?


O - Options - What could you do?


W - Way Forward - What will you do?





This ARROW sequence will prove useful to guide to our nervous presenter although we would not have the time to coach to any depth.





My advice is to concentrate on aims or goals. Let's have our presenter utterly clear on what success in this presentation would be like. If it's winning business from a sales proposition let's help them focus on that, if it's creating a relationship with a group of people they're going to be working with again and again let's help them focus on that. If the aim is simply to survive and get through the experience without being scarred for life, then we can build an aim around that too! Two things become crucial in doing this. Firstly we need to make sure that any aim or goal is within our coachee's control. 'My aim is to have them sign the contract' is not but 'My aim is to present a compelling argument' is. Secondly any aim should be stated in the positive so 'My aim is to present a compelling argument' is better than 'I don't want to stammer and make a fool of myself'.





With just a few minutes to coach in advance of a presentation creating a specific aim increases the chances of success and gives our reluctant presenter something useful to focus upon. I would argue that this is much more useful than criticizing their material or sending them on their way with a glib 'I'm sure you'll be OK'.





When we're coaching over the longer term, we can make good use of the Reality stage by following each presentation attempt with a discussion around what had happened, what had gone well, what had gone less well and so on. We could also employ the Options stage to really think through what changes presenters could make to bring about a different result.