Presentation Skills & Being A Slave To Your Slides

Some speakers or presenters can just be plain lazy. Their idea of giving a presentation is to simply ‘throw up’ the jumbled mess of ideas in their head onto a bunch of slides and expect the listening audience to decipher it at their own trauma. It completely negates the point of giving a presentation – efficiently communicating one’s thoughts and agenda in an easy to understand manner. In this article we will look at some simple tips on how NOT to make your slides gives your presentation instead of you

·      If you’re going to use slides at all, at least make them easy to look at. Some slides can be so crammed with information that it gives the viewer a headache just looking at it and trying to make head or tail of the content. Cleaning up the home page is what made Google so popular in the early days of their entry into the Internet business. Hint: There is a lesson there!

·      The trick to a good presentation is leaving the audience with something that they can take home with them and ponder over. Long complicated sentences with technical jargon can be hard to remember. Focus on keywords or short concise statements that epitomize the concept or agenda of the presentation. At the iPhone launch, Steve Jobs’ slide simply said, “Today Apple Reinvents The Phone”. The short phrase stuck in everybody’s heads and the media droned out the same tagline over the next many weeks.

·      Sometimes illustrations or graphics can communicate a lot better than words or text. This zeroes on the notion that humans are visual beings and we respond more intuitively to what we can simply see and not what we have to see and compute in our head. So instead of stating this year’s output was 52,300 units compared to last year’s 49,800 units, a simple coloured graph chart showing the incredible hike in production instantly communicates the progress without having to mention the actual numbers.

Presentation Skills Training is an important aspect of giving employees the rudimentary skills necessary to communicate effectively with their audience in an efficient and persuasive manner. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills training, executive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.

How Communication Defines Human Progress

From time immemorial what has set humans apart from other life forms has always been our cognitive abilities and our depth of communication skill. Like the beasts we too have the rudimentary senses but we have something extra – self-consciousness that enables us to communicate.

TV commercials exploit this ability and play to its strengths. All one has to do is watch a commercial of Versace or Armani or Apple. In the Versace/Armani commercials you will immediately notice that the product itself is rarely shown. Instead the commercial emphasizes a ‘mood’ or ‘attitude’. Both these brand giants understand intuitively that what a product makes you feel is more magnetic than the image of the product itself. Similarly Apple commercials rarely bore the audience with technical specs of their products. Instead they show you a series of video clips of how diversely their products impact people’s lives. From a twenty year old on a college campus to a sixty-year-old retiree, from the aeronautic labs of NASA to a village in rural Vietnam, Apple commercials show how their products bring joy to people all over the world. They’re not selling you a product; they’re offering you a ‘life-style’. This is the epitome of business communication skill!

Even in the business world, programs that work on how to improve communication skills are the life-blood of a company. From casting the vision, to drawing out an execution plan, to orchestrating a methodology, it is communication that drives the entire corporate engine. Efficient communication intuitively takes into account the following:

Practical Effect

Often in an official presentation, it is assumed that mere presentation of the data will give a clear snapshot of the product/service status. But actually depicting how those graphs and charts depict real-time scenarios of the company and an employee will have a more personal and powerful effect on the audience.

Game Plan

With the introduction of media-oriented presentations, decision effects can be shown in a more graphically appealing manner that enhances business communication. For example showing a graph chart or table of how the net profit can surge past the previous year by implementing the current methodology can be more persuasive than just showing the adjusted numbers.

 Communication Skills Training is an important aspect of corporate business and management. Even Fortune 500 companies constantly work on improving this facet

MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills training, executive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.

Improving Relational Soft Skills

Soft Skills training is currently the fastest growing industry for corporate training in India. As India develops and makes a more global footprint and presence in the world today, Indian companies are quickly realizing the need to train their workforce to be relevant to the changing landscape of corporate globalization. Consequently, soft skill training in India has developed in leaps and bounds. But what are soft skills? And how does that actually affect the way we perform effectively at our work place and interact with our colleagues? After all, isn’t all that matters simply our academic credentials or work experience? Well, here is why the answer to that is not so simple:

Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication

Of all the soft skill topics, this is probably the one skill set that no one can afford not to have. Making eye contact, an attentive expression and non-verbal gestures (affirming nods) go a long ways in communicating that you are paying attention to what is being said. It also communicates a sense of undivided attention that makes for an affirming conversation.

People Skills

Developing relationship equity with a fellow worker also goes a long way in sharpening one’s soft skills. Emphasizing quality time with one’s peers goes a long ways in developing common ground and vital trust that can be crucial to a healthy business working relationship. Having relational equity is also tremendously required when a conflict arises and a situation is created that requires finesse and tactical skills for a healthy solution and reconciliation.

Personal Initiative

Soft Skills also require taking the lead on an issue and spearheading a project or task, or at least being willing to. This displays initiative and personal responsibility but also fosters a reputation of dependability that is crucial to the company and peers included. It shows a deep passion for the greater good and a principled approach to taking the initiative on a situation.

With the growing need in this field, there are numerous programs that offer training on how to develop soft skills. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills training, executive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.

Inspiring Qualities of Great Leaders

What is Leadership? There seems to be something about great leadership that motivates us, persuades us and inspires us. Sometimes it is mere personality but more often it is something that is not shallow but barely perceptible and yet so externally obvious. Since the beginning of time, the world has seen the rise and fall of leaders. Even notorious leaders like Mussolini and Hitler had leadership qualities that they chose to abuse and tyrannically use to their advantage instead of for the greater good of their people. This of course doesn’t make the leadership qualities in themselves inherently evil but was rather used toward an evil purpose. Leadership traits like ‘determination’ and ‘ambition’ are neutral because they can be exercised toward morally good endeavours but also be abused in the pursuit of morally wrong endeavours. Traits like ‘integrity and ‘honesty’ are intrinsically good qualities that many leaders do possess.

Most leadership training, provided they are practiced within a legitimate framework, render positive results and are obvious to those surrounding these leaders. Leaders naturally recognize the responsibility they bear upon themselves while feeling a sense of duty toward those they are obligated to lead or serve. It may seem contradictory to speak of servitude in the context of leadership but companies today are beginning to understand the indispensable value of those leaders who make it their main objective to serve those under them. This is leadership by example.

The most common avenue for leaders to thrive is in social areas. This would seem rather apparent to some but it can easily be bypassed in an age when relational barriers are erected through media and technology in the name of getting connected. Leaders show people vision, ambition, values, integrity and conviction through their actions and words. That it must be authentic would be a no-brainer I would suppose. And yet in the most natural way, people sense these leadership skills and are inspired by them.

Companies today understand the power of these incredible traits and constantly try to incorporate them into their leaders. MMM in turn ensures that we address these traits in our Leadership Training Programs. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills training, executive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. We are experts in the field of leadership training. Our training programs are customised based on the objectives, experience of the target audience and the type of industry. We have been in business since 2005 and some of our clients include Daimler, Standard Chartered Bank, Microsoft, Novartis, Cipla, Deloitte, Caterpillar and many more. Pramila Mathew, Owner and Founder of MMM, has a dual background in Business and Psychology and has significant work experience in both India and USA. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.