Executive Presentation Skills
Effective presentation skills are crucial for all executives. If you can’t effectively present, it gets decidedly more difficult to “pay the rent.”
That can mean selling a product, communicating an idea or a vision, or promoting a concept directly to the marketplace, to your team, to those who determine your career trajectory, to the competition, and the list continues ad infinitum.
If you are a startup, a public company, or any other company depending on outside sources of funding (venture capital, public markets, private equity) the ability to “pay the rent” can get called into question at any time.
There are focused sets of eyeballs tracking your every comment, namely the “OP” in the term “OPM” – the other people from whom you are seeking money, or whose capital you are currently using.
From venture capital pioneer William Draper, in Inc Magazine:
When evaluating companies, do you pay more attention to the idea or the leader?
“The leader. Even if the product is wrong, a great, visionary leader will come up with another idea. During a presentation, I keep my eye on the top person, looking at how he interacts with his team, if he understands his audience, if he is the least bit unsure, or if he lacks information he should have had.”
The ability to communicate effectively does not just mean having the right text. It doesn’t mean having a perfect slide deck. It means preparing and practicing until you feel extremely comfortable, and then preparing and practicing even more.
I regularly meet brilliant, capable leaders ever who literally spend ten times longer preparing a presentation than practicing it; Executive teams that spend hundreds of hours preparing earning reports, and less than one hour preparing for the call to report them; Corporate team leaders with a vision for the organization, but lacking the ability to communicate that vision.
The ability to communicate is not a soft skill. In fact the inability to communicate effectively teaches many “hard” lessons every day.
* I picked up Inc Magazine this month to see a story about my dear friend Marc Cinque – not on line yet, but as soon as it is, I will post it.
