I Inherited Dire Slides. Now What?
Business presenters often inherit slides from another. While some slides feel fantastic and a joy to receive, others can induce dread and concerns with engaging vs. boring our audience and diluting or seeming disingenuous to our personal brand.
The biggest stressor often comes when the slides belong to a boss, manager, or someone else with power over us. How do we proceed with the presentation without offending anyone or falling back? That’s the communication conundrum we’re tackling this week, and I promise with these tools, you can and will prevail. You can hear me reading these musings in this week’s Sage Sayer’s podcast.
Determine What Flexibility Exists
Check as you receive the slides how much the slide creator wants you to follow. Some small but curious questions can reveal a lot for your strategy:
- How much of these slides do you want me to follow?
- What’s the logic and hope/intent for this section of the slides?
- How do I speak to the parts I don’t understand?
- How do you feel if I modify areas to align more with my expertise or to help me feel more close to the content, and therefore more compelling?
Understand the Logic
As you’re gauging the response, determine what’s really going on. If the owner of the slides insist you follow their slides, the push (in my experience and based on what my clients tell me) comes from:
- Conviction theirs is the best way
- Want to showcase certain things and for them to stand out
- Fear or worry that we won’t showcase the right things in this very important moment with this very important audience
- Control (either through fear or perfectionism)
Negotiate. Change or Modify What You Can
When inheriting truly ineffective slides, I do recommend modifying bits and bobs where able and do so through a lens of:
- Brevity. Trust: Less = more
- Clarity. Know: Clear messages go more smoothly
- Tone. Believe: Any message that sounds like you will have more impact
- Narrative. Know: Effective storytelling requires integrity and authenticity with the subject matter
- Audience centeredness. Question: Can your audience endure the status quo?
Appeal to the slide creator’s logic as you negotiate more of you vs. them in your presentation. E.G. If you’re really wanting to emphasize X, how about a short story instead of five slides on data?
Accept. Pivot. Incorporate
With your understanding clear of the boss’s intent and hopes and how much flexibility exists, now modify what you can. Perhaps you can make small tweaks, like:
- A compelling opening slide with a visual vs. words
- A photo to which you tell a story
- Visuals or tables to compress swathes of details
- A focus to drown out too many numbers. Drill deep into the ones your boss says stay most important
Wing and Riff It
On presentation day, here lie a few tactics my clients have incorporated to make the presentation their own, interesting and timely, while not offending their boss:
- Tell a story personalizing otherwise dry information. One scientist tasked with presenting to a new CEO felt lumbered with her boss’s dry slides. She found adding her own unique insights with the studies and the subjects, who touched her life, brought things to life.
- Introduce yourself and how you relate to the topic in sincere and heartfelt ways. A product manager at a giant finance house introduced herself to a C-suite audience and expressed her enthusiasm and love for her team, their work, and the honor she felt for being there. [None of this language existed in the slides she’d inherited — but who could dispute or feel offended by her heartfelt words?]
- Share insights on why you care about this information. This same manager added the timely elements and the purpose and importance of their work, especially in this time. Setting up the introduction in impactful ways helps the audience listen and for you to stand out.
You can also:
- Speak to the slides without reading them and paraphrase
- Loop in your boss throughout the presentation to indicate you hear them and respect them. You may ask: What did I miss, X? Anything to expand on here?
- Ask them to take over the parts you really don’t understand. If you find a cryptic image with no caption nor words, fair game (in my view) for you to ask the creator of that image for their thoughts behind it
Here lie my closing thoughts on inheriting presentations that don’t mesh well with us nor our personal brand. I don’t subscribe to the idea that those at the top speak or write the best. It really does depend on the individual, their confidence, and their talents. So if it’s authority that drives you to blindly accept a presentation not setting you up to succeed, counter that idea gently and ask: What would my audience really want me to do here?
I hope today’s musings on making a pretty dire presentation more interesting and more authentic to you provides some good tactics to play with.
Debbi Gardiner McCullough coaches and trains immigrant leaders to become more confident, concise, and mentally fit communicators. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and coaches worldwide with BetterUp.