What Is Your Presentation Style?

The pandemic is changing our professional life in many ways, especially in terms of how we interact with our colleagues on everything from day-to-day mundane to strategic conversations. Remote working has taken away the leverage of lobbying using tactics like targeted “informal/unplanned” chatting with your critics in office corridors, around coffee machines, in coffee shops, bars, or at the restaurant. Additionally, the opportunity to convince people with positive gestures and body language is not available. Has the virtual presentation option not left us vulnerable?

Presentations over Zoom, Webex, Microsoft teams, and other video conferencing systems come with new challenges and benefits. The audio/video streaming puts you close to the media personnel you see every day on TV without the luxury of retakes, cuts, and audience control. The folks who interrupt your presentations by repeating your idea or asking obvious questions to show their importance and presence are not going anywhere and will continue to be a challenge. However, the audience can turn-off their camera, mute the microphone and speaker at their will. Your non-verbal cues like gestures, facial expressions, and posture can still punctuate and strengthen your message or do the opposite.

Nevertheless, your internet connection, camera, background noise, presentation sharing capabilities now play a more significant role in your presentation success. Your voice is still a powerful communication tool, and how you use it can make or break your presentation. Drawing some parallels from the media world, let’s explore the timely questions: What are the different presentation styles? 

There are four styles – Newscaster, News Analysis, Late-night talk show host, Public Speeches.

Newscaster Style

If you are so preoccupied with your fear of the audience that you bury your head in the podium while reading a boring list of facts that your audience could have read themselves, most likely, you will lose them. If you are not interested, they’re not interested. This style works only if you give a piece of breaking news in your presentation like a company merger, layoff, management change, and big bonus announcement.

News Anchors Style

This is a successful style of the nineties and early twenties. In the entire presentation, you are confidently using references outside the discussion topic.

Such presenters are so fascinating to show their presence in every form, even try to hijack other people’s presentation to give their opinion, present back points with their references and ask questions with a pre-conceived answer that they are just waiting to share if you do not. Like a news analyst, this style emphasizes individual “political” biases.

Late-night Talk Show Host Style

The audience has to remind the presenter that it was fascinating and funny to learn about your cooking experience in college freshman days, but we are here for a presentation. The presenter’s sense of humor is on full display and continues during the entire presentation. However, the presenters know very well how to manage the audience, keep the conversation rolling, and convey their plan and agenda through stories and jokes. 

Stage Speaker Style

This style is very similar to presidential speech, usually after a hurricane or other national disasters. The presentation conveys the message through a range of emotions without any room for discussion and argument.

Who are you? What is your presentation style? Are you a new caster or a late-night show host? What style should you adopt and master? Like the media, there is no right or wrong style.

A good presenter adjusts his presentation style based on the audience. A good presenter should have a deep understanding of not only themselves, their motivation, values, perception, and other elements, but also, most importantly, of their audience and environment. Taking some time to know more about your audience via LinkedIn, Facebook, and other information readily available on the internet, helps you make profiles on your audience. Now, I know I may be coming off as more of a detective than a corporate presenter, though the core of both jobs doesn’t deviate much. It’s a game of strategy. Picking up different clues, hints, profiles, and then putting the puzzle piece together to either solve the case or, in your case, most likely, deliver one hell of a message. Knowing your audience, let’s strategize accordingly; while a group of complainers may need a newscaster, your team needs a stage speaker. Draw your cards right.