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Archives for May 2017

5 Tips to Nail Your First Presentation

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Depending on who you are, giving presentations can either be a complete joy or absolute pain. If you are a new faculty member, your first presentation can be especially daunting – it’s your chance to make a good first impression.Even if you teach in front of students every day, or you were the star pupil in drama club in high school, giving a presentation to your professional colleagues can be frightening.

The stakes often feel much higher when your dean, provost, and rock stars of your field are listening!

Here some useful tips to help you get through your first professional presentation, whether it’s for a department meeting or national conference. If you follow this process, no one will ever know your knees are shaking uncontrollably behind the podium – they’ll be too enthralled with what you’re saying!

Tip #1: Know your audience!

Before you create a single PowerPoint slide, think about who will be listening to your presentation. Your audience will shape how you give the presentation, the material you choose to cover, and the overall tone. Giving a presentation to a small group of people in your field will look and feel very different from a presentation you give to a large, general audience.

Once you figure out whom your audience will consist of, answer these two basic questions: What does my audience already know? What do they need to know? Focusing on those two things will ensure your audience doesn’t feel overwhelmed, bored, or talked down to. It will also help determine the main idea or goal of your presentation.

Tip #2: Know your main idea/goal!

This is the “What’s the point?” aspect of your presentation. When crafting your presentation, you must have some overarching goal in mind for both yourself and your audience. Are you informing your audience about a new topic, technology, or theory? Are you trying to persuade them to think or act differently? Are you proposing major changes for your department, college, or professional field?

Determining a goal for yourself will keep your presentation cohesive, and keeping a goal in mind for your audience will keep them interested. It sounds strange to say, but people want you to tell them what to do – so spell it out for them clearly. By the end of your stellar presentation, your audience should walk out motivated to take action, whether it’s to spread the word or make concrete changes!

Tip #3: Know your venue!

Once you know whom you’re speaking to and what you want to talk about, now is the time to consider where you’ll be speaking and what is available to you. Here are some important questions to consider about your venue:

Is this a large or small room? Will it easily accommodate your audience, or will they be packed in like sardines?
What kind of audio-visual equipment will be available? Will the venue be able to support PowerPoint, video, overhead projection, microphones, or whatever else you may need? Will you have to request/rent the equipment ahead of time?
Will you get the opportunity to rehearse your presentation in the room ahead of time?
Are you responsible for setting up or tearing down chairs/table/podium/equipment?

Knowing the answers to these questions is vital to giving a solid presentation. For example, you don’t want to spend weeks on the perfect PowerPoint, only to find they won’t have a computer or projector for you to use. Trust me – that has happened to me before, and it’s terrifying!

Tip #4: Know your supplemental materials (but don’t lean on them)!

Once you know your audience, main goal, and venue, you can focus on creating supplemental materials to go with your presentation. Your venue will largely determine what format these take: a PowerPoint presentation, video, handout, etc.

The most common supplement people use is PowerPoint – and most people absolutely destroy their presentations by using it! Keep your slides as simple as possible, and use high-contrast colors (white background, dark text is always a good choice). Avoid using those annoying transitions, goofy fonts, or clipart. They come off as unprofessional and will distract your audience from what you’re saying. This advice also works for videos, handouts, and other materials you provide for your audience as well.

Regardless of what kind of supplemental material you provide, keep this piece of advice in mind: they are called supplemental materials. Your presentation should be engaging and make perfect sense without them! If everything else breaks down, copies don’t get made, or the power goes out, your presentation can still go on. I once had to give a presentation on the front lawn of my department building during a fire drill. I can say confidently that I couldn’t have done that if my presentation hinged 100% on my PowerPoint presentation!

Tip #5: Know your style!

Now that you have everything prepared, you can start rehearsing your presentation! How you do this will depend a lot on your experience and comfort level with public speaking. Some people simply use an outline and can easily “wing it” during the presentation, while others will rehearse dozens of times. Be honest with yourself about how comfortable you are in front of a crowd, and what you need to do to prepare for it! Try not to memorize your presentation like learning lines for a Shakespeare play – give yourself the freedom to speak naturally. Reading from a script will come off as cold and dull, no matter how well-written it is.

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Heather Patton is a writer, editor, and adjunct English instructor with 10 years of experience in helping her students become the best writers they can be. She has taught at Wright State University and Clark State Community College in Dayton, OH, and Seattle Central College in Seattle, WA. Her students often refer to her as “nice but expects a lot,” which she feels is a pretty accurate assessment of her teaching philosophy. She has an M.A. in English Composition and Rhetoric from Wright State University. When she isn’t grading papers or editing company websites, she is an avid hiker, voracious reader, and makes a mean banana bread.

5 Things Failing Leaders Don’t Do…

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1. Appreciate others’ emotions and perspective

Failing leaders just don’t pick up on or value other people’s signals. Or, if they do, they don’t care, all demonstrating a fundamental lack of empathy. This emotional intelligence skill relates directly to social awareness. One cannot be a good leader without empathy, period. If the leader cannot walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, he or she will have big blinders on and miss important information, ideas, and perspective. People led by such a person generally leave as soon as they can because they do not feel trusted, heard, understood, or respected. This type of leader will have limited influence over time, and they will not inspire others. They are ego driven, often arrogant, and will surely fail while scratching their heads and wondering why.

2. Utilize key organizational clues, norms, decision networks and politics

These types of “leaders” are mostly clueless and leading in name only. They somehow landed a leadership title, most likely by accident, circumstance, timing, or favoritism. They have very little emotional intelligence in terms of self-awareness and organizational awareness. They could be fearful or they might be in denial. More likely, however, they have, what could be called, “organizational blindness.” They just don’t pick up the clues when their boss is displeased with them, when the tide is changing, or when people are talking about them behind their backs. They make decisions that are not theirs to make and don’t make decisions that are theirs to make. They don’t develop a wide network; they just show up and act more like an individual contributor than a leader, even with their peers. They are the sort who tell inappropriate jokes, and dance to a drummer no one else is dancing to. They don’t get it, don’t buy it, or don’t know how to play the game in their particular “sandbox.”

3. Take responsibility for outcomes

Author Jim Collins is right in asserting that great leaders look “in the mirror” when things go wrong and “out the window” applauding others when things go right. In fact, when things go wrong, it is about the leader since he/she is responsible for the culture and the success of their team. Holding people accountable for their performance is important; blaming them for mistakes or failures is a non-starter. The difference between accountability and blame is the way the issue or problem is dealt with. Asking questions to understand how or where things went wrong allows the leader to “own” the problem for the team, and then have a candid discussion about the situation and the solutions—without fear. Failing leaders don’t ask; they tell. They need to make someone wrong to be right. You’ll rarely if ever hear this leader say, “Let’s see what we and I can learn/grow/understand from this.” You will, however, hear this leader say, “I don’t want to EVER hear about this kind of screw up again…or else.”

4. Deal proactively with conflicts

Failing leaders avoid dealing with conflicts, fail to provide constructive feedback, and duck key relationship issues. They often think, “If I ignore it, it will go away.” Sometimes it does, but rarely. More commonly the conflict grows exponentially until it’s a toxic, smelly mess. No team can be functional without the ability to resolve their inevitable and necessary conflicts. Dysfunctional co-worker relationships and teams of any kind simply cannot get the work done well, so their results suffer and the leader will eventually fail. Even the “nicest” leader will lose the respect of colleagues, direct reports, and the boss if they cannot or will not clean up their own messes and effectively sort out problematic issues. The system will start adjusting to this roadblock by doing “workarounds.” In short order, this leader will lose credibility and the respect of co-workers and, eventually, the leadership role.

5. Integrate one’s self and team with others within the organization

These are the lone wolves who think they—or they and their team—can do the job better than everyone else. These failing leaders may have a tight “in-crowd” of direct reports who believe in them, hear a lot of “yes” from their direct reports, and see themselves in an “us vs. them” proverbial shoot out at the OK Corral. They work best in “silos,” rarely sharing resources or knowledge across the organization. They believe they are in it alone, that no one understands them and that, if anyone interferes with them, it will dilute their agenda, work, or image. Failing leaders divide and try to conquer. Winning leaders don’t undermine their counterparts as failing leaders do. Instead, they collaborate and synergize, leveraging the brains, talent, and time of other leaders in the organization for the good of the whole. There are two paths out of this scenario: 1) the failing leader becomes motivated, often by distress, to dramatically change their isolationist attitudes, or 2) they return to the non-leadership role where they shine and can truly contribute.

In brief, most leaders and others can learn, develop, and increase their own emotional intelligence. It takes assessment, self-motivation, learning, awareness, practice and feedback. Improving one’s emotional intelligence is a life-long journey—one that great leaders relish!

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Roxi Bahar Hewertson is a leadership expert with over three decades of practical experience in the worlds of higher education, business, and non-profits. She is an organizational consultant, executive coach, motivational speaker, and author of the acclaimed book, “Lead Like it Matters…Because it Does” leaders with a step-by-step roadmap and practical tools to achieve great results and the creator of the award winning course, “Leading with Impact: Your Ripple Effect. She is the President and CEO of Highland Consulting Group, Inc. and AskRoxi.com. She can be reached at roxi@HighlandConsultingGroupInc.com

Finding Balance After Organizational Change

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Individuals undergoing reorganizations may experience an array of emotion, similar to Kuebler-Rosse’s five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It is difficult not to take the position change or elimination personally, even if you have been a top performer. Allow yourself time to grieve any perceived negative changes – loss of professional colleagues; loss of status and title; loss of office space; changes in benefits; and the loss of work that engaged and nourished you. Meaningful work is an essential component of well-being, so it may feel like a vital part of you has gone. Resources such as the Change Management Cycle can help navigate the complexity of your emotion (https://changecycle.com/change-cycle/).

The Grief

Mending
To mend, engage in daily practices that make you feel good – exercise, extra time with family and friends, a new hobby. Update your resume or CV and reinvigorate your professional network. Find ways to maintain your interests and skills – volunteer, blog posts, mentoring young professionals, continued education and training. Add new hobbies or recreation. Engaging in these activities will affirm that you are bright, competent, and valuable, and they may lead to new career opportunities.

Moving Forward

The re-configuration of your work obligations – both physical and emotional – allow you opportunities to spend your time differently. Give yourself plenty of time to adjust and forge a path into the future. Everyone is different. One person I know still wrestles with sadness over his job restructuring a year ago; another person, who quickly found new employment close to her home after a position elimination, wondered why she had tolerated a 90-minute one-way commute for 10 years! One former colleague seeks therapeutic counseling because the job changes were emotionally and economically devastating; another co-worker at mid-career is undergoing a year-long deep assessment of work and life priorities; and another, whose recently downsized position requires less emotional energy, focuses more on home life during her daughter’s senior year of high school.

Building New Foundations

Your chances of experiencing organizational changes are increasing. Today, Americans who reach the age of 65 can expect on average to live another 19.3 years to age 84.3, compared to age 82.8 in 2000 and 81.5 in 1980. Out of financial necessity or desire for meaningful engagement, we are working longer, with 19% of Americans ages 65 now employed, compared to 13% in 2000. But we are NOT staying at the same job, with the average American worker holding 10 different jobs before age 40. Yet, changes do not get easier, depending on your unique circumstances. Building new foundations for work-life balance should include resources for building resilience (https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx).

Each time you face a change, keep in mind that every job change is a journey. Each step along the way builds the foundation for your new place in the world. Allow time for adjustments to new colleagues and office rituals; different activities and responsibilities; discovery of your purpose and meaning, and new configuration of your work-life balance. Giving yourself plenty of time to reset your path for work will strengthen your resilience in life and deepen your empathy for others.

Thinking about your next career move?

Check out our latest job postings or create a free account to save job searches, upload your resume, and get daily job alerts.

Robynn M. Pease, Ph.D. has over 20 years of related experience in the field of work-life and is the former director of the Greater Oregon Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (GO HERC). Prior to her current position as Faculty Ombudsman at Oregon State University (OSU), Robynn served as the Coordinator of Work-Life at OSU and the Director of Work-Life at the University of Kentucky. She holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Kentucky, with an emphasis in gerontology.

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