What do you do if your peers aren't providing valuable feedback on your presentation?

If your peers aren't providing feedback on your presentation, take proactive steps to gather constructive insights. Firstly, directly ask for their thoughts on your performance, specifying areas you're concerned about. Secondly, request specific feedback on elements like slide clarity or speaking pace. Thirdly, create feedback forms for anonymous responses or approach a mentor for guidance. Lastly, foster a feedback culture by offering constructive criticism to peers, encouraging them to reciprocate. These actions can help you improve your presentation skills effectively, even when immediate peer feedback is lacking:))

Presentation/ communication is incomplete without clear feedback obtained from your audience, peers and team members. You need to frame specific questions to obtain specific and valuable responses. And, the feedback so obtained would enable you gauge your success in terms of value additions through the presentation. Feedback also throws light on your areas for improvement. Ask your audience without any hesitation about what they liked most about your presentation, what particularly caught their attention, what would they want to know more and if there is anything from the presentation they would remember and apply. Further, you may observe the body language/ facial expressions of your audience and consider those as a part of feedback.

Asking for feedback is a key component to progress. Therefore, I will ask person by person any deeper feedback. It might be that people are afraid in front of others to speak out. So maybe during a one to one feedback session, the free speech would come naturally

Using examples and linking those with questions enable visualization in terms of questions asked and therefore makes answering easier.The same would apply to seeking clear feedback on your presentation. Seeking to know about how relevant they found your presentation, you may use examples involving your content and the context. You may also direct their attention to / or help them think about a particular slide and give their feedback on it. To know about consistency, examples of colour scheme, headlines etc. For visual effectiveness, use examples of images and texts. Examples such as interpretation of data may be used to know about how easy they found it to understand. What made them curious can be used for knowing about engagement.

If your peers aren't giving valuable feedback on your presentation, try seeking feedback from other sources such as mentors, professors, or online communities. You can also ask specific questions to prompt more insightful feedback from your peers.

Absolutely!! Be specific. Call on individuals by name or ask people to raise their hands if they have a good example or could share more about the topic. Ask if anyone has ever experienced XYZ - listen, comment and give positive feedback. Let the audience feel safe in sharing.

If the feedback you are getting is vague, don't hesitate to dig deeper. Ask specific questions about areas you need clarification on. Remember, questions are your key to learning and improvement. By taking initiative and seeking clear feedback, you demonstrate your drive to impress senior colleagues.

A right mix of objective and subjective elements in the feedback is what you should aim at. Questions that you will ask should, therefore be a function of what objective and subjective elements, you want to know about.The ' what' part of your questions would elicit responses with mostly objective elements. And, the ' how' part of your questions can get you answers with mostly ' subjective' elements. Therefore, you should orient your audience/ peers to a particular slide/ particular sub topic/ particular attribute of the presentation or content through your well thought out questions. On top of everything, your sincerity and honesty would get reflected on how you approach your peers with the questions in order to obtain honest feedback.

In addition to obtaining feedback from others, reflecting internally would help you get a broader picture on your presentation.You are the best and the most wonderful person to talk to regarding your own presentation and you can do that by diving deep within. You ask yourself questions as you would ask your audience and remain assured that you will get honest answers. One best way to do that is to visualize the entire presentation in the sequences it had happened and also trying to recall the non verbal gestures/ facial expressions/ body language of the audience you may have observed during the presentation.Feelings such as what went fine, what did not, what you could have done better so generated then would serve as your own feedback.

Self-reflection always plays a key role in the development and strengthening of oneself. Ask yourself, what else would have made this more appealing ?. One's own honest insights would do wonders when combined with peer feedback ultimately resulting in the best show.