As a leader, your reputation reflects not only your own skills and behaviours but your team’s skills and behaviours—including their interactions with clients or prospects. But it can be challenging to find opportunities to improve team members’ presentation skills, especially for more junior colleagues and those who aren’t (yet) client-facing.
The good news is, there are a few simple ways to help your team build their skills. The key is to smooth out the learning curve, allowing colleagues to practice in no-risk situations before graduating to low-risk and medium-risk ones.
No-risk situations
Many people are afraid of freezing up in front of their audience. This is exacerbated by having to speak in a professional environment. “What if I screw up the pitch? Will the team hate me? Will I get fired?” All too often, we find our team members’ confidence dented by every tough question, awkward pause, nervous giggle, or fluffy answer, deterring them from doing the real practice that’s necessary to improve.
The trick is to give your team opportunities to practice their speaking skills outside of the office, in a no-risk situation. Toastmasters meetings and improv classes are great no-risk situations that offer the chance to regularly speak in front of people who genuinely want to help you get better. Help your more junior colleagues find these outlets.
Low-risk situations
Next, why not give a team member the opportunity to give a small presentation to a group of their colleagues? This is a good way to ease them into higher-stakes situations. After all, it’s still pretty low-risk – these are the people they work with day-to-day, and they likely already know each other’s foibles and weak spots!
I like asking team members to present a short case study on a recent project – it’s something they will be very familiar with, and everyone will learn something.
Medium-risk situations
Finally, it’s time to help your team get visibility beyond their immediate colleagues. This will help them get more comfortable in a position of vulnerability, while still keeping things relatively low-risk – we’re not yet in front of a client, partner, or prospect.
I like organising a learning event during lunch. Depending on the size of your company this could be for a larger department, a learning network, or even the whole company. Have the team member start with the case study they presented to your team, but ask them to turn it into a training presentation suitable for a wider array of colleagues. They are still presenting something they are familiar with, but now they are building a knowledge framework around it.
By increasing your team’s exposure to and experience with presenting, they’ll be better prepared when a higher-risk opportunity comes up.