Today’s the day you’re going to be examining final exam presentations in a university. You’re a little bit excited to see what the students have developed and to listen to the presentations.
The first candidate enters the room, takes a piece of paper out of her bag and proceeds to read from the paper to you and the other examiners. After five minutes, your attention begins to drift and at the end of the presentation, you feel that you have not understood the message of the presentation or indeed have any insight into the personality and capabilities of the student.
The day gets worse. Every candidate approaches the task in more or less the same way. Not a single candidate has communicated with you, motivated you or come near to inspiring you. At the end of the day, you are bored, frustrated and utterly exhausted.
One of the issues at university can be assigning a presentation as a test or exam when the students have very little understanding of how presentation works as a communication tool and have not received instruction on how they should approach the task. Students may or may not have experience of standing and speaking in front of a group of people, have inadequate or no training on how to give a presentation and/or have seen poor models of presentation. We cannot expect them to inspire us in their exams unless we teach presentation skills and give a full explanation of what is expected or desired.
If communication is designed as an exchange of encoded and decoded messages, feedback and responses between a sender and receiver, we can apply this to most business communication scenarios. It is just that the time lapses differ. A receiver gives an immediate response in a phone call or face to face meeting but might take several days to give a reply by email.
However, when we look at presentations, can we even say that there is a sender and receiver? We can but we should recognise that the relationship and communication between the sender and receiver are not the same and feedback is given in non-verbal signals or at given times.
The sender is the presenter and the receiver is a member of the listening audience. There may be one presenter or a team of two or three people. The listening audience is limitless, especially if we consider modern technology and online presentations. It could be 5, 50, 500, 5000 or 50,000 people. In presentation, the sender is expected to do all or most of the speaking and the receivers are expected to do most or all the listening.
So, presenters need to speak for a longer time. This means they need to know about speaking skills, techniques, rhetoric and encoding a message for a presentation so that the design works within a given timeframe. A presenter can feel s/he is delivering a monologue and this “unnatural” way of communicating is one of the factors that leads to nerves and even fear of giving presentations. The skill is to create the illusion of dialogue and conversation and students need to master the relevant techniques.
In this process though, the speaker must also be mindful of the receivers and encode the presentation message accordingly. The presenter should be aware of the receivers’ decoding tendencies and biases and should know how people listen to, process and remember information. Verbal feedback can be given by the receivers but this is normally in the form of questions which are asked at certain points of the presentation. On the whole, listening audience members give non-verbal feedback rather than verbal feedback. This is not usual in other communication scenarios and once again it can be unnerving. Practice and training can teach speakers to handle and read non-verbal feedback in a positive rather than in a negative way.
Presentation is a communication tool which involves speaking, connecting to listeners and building a relationship with those listeners. Some of its characteristics make it somewhat weird when compared to other business communication scenarios. We need to teach our students to embrace this weirdness and adapt their messages accordingly because giving presentations is an accepted and used method of conveying information in business and organisations.
Technology changes but your students will be required to do presentations in some form throughout their working lives. Good and great presenters get recognised in organisations. They persuade, motivate and inspire and our students deserve to be shown how they can do this. Rhetorical skills have been important to us as human beings for thousands of years. There are good reasons. Giving a presentation is weird but it’s wonderful. It’s a unique way of conveying a message that can be powerful, memorable and even life-changing.