How Good Are Your Presentation Skills?

Nearly a year ago a 12 year old boy from Kenya by the name of Richard Turere got the attention of the TED team who were scouting for stories near his home town. Richard grew up on a farm that raised cattle and protecting them from lions was a time consuming pastime. He told the TED team how lighting torches didn’t keep the lions away but if he walked the perimeter with a torch they stayed away. TED found his story so compelling that they invited him to talk about it at the noteworthy TED conference. There was only one problem – Richard had zero presentation skills or public speaking experience. With a little coaching from the folks at TED and a little practice, Richard took to the stage at Long Beach, California and gave his talk, being the shy yet charismatic boy that he was. When he finished, the crowd gave him a standing ovation!

What constitutes good presentation skills? If a 12 year old boy from a Kenyan village could give a TED worthy lecture, is it possible that we might be able to pull of a good one ourselves? There is often the misconception that presentations have to be full of flair, bravado and sophistication in order to keep the listeners’ attention. But this is far from the truth. Presentation skills are more than that; it is about speaking from the heart, being genuine, straddling the line of data and narrative with finesse and poise. Obviously in order to give a presentation one must first have something to present. But we must also keep in mind that human beings love stories. And a major part of giving a captivating presentation is to take the audience on a journey – a journey of experience mixed with information and emotion mixed with intellect. A successful presentation can be measured by how differently the audience might see the world when you are done. On short, a good presentation must begin with the subject, why you as the speaker care about it deeply and must end with why the audience must care about it just as much as you do.

 Presentation Skills Training is an important program that companies invest in heavily to equip their employees with the right tools and resources to be able to communicate ideas and agendas confidently and efficiently.

MMM Training Solutions conducts Soft Skills Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

Team Building Lessons From The Hare and The Tortoise

Let us take the age-old story of the story of the Hare and the Tortoise and look at what lessons it has to offer in the 21^st century mantra of ‘enhancing corporate team building’. I am a storyteller and I took some liberties to create situations other than the one that we are familiar with in this story to use analogy to remember some core team building principles.

After the Hare and the Tortoise had run the infamous race, the Hare did some introspection and realised that its overconfidence was the reason for its failure. It challenged the tortoise to another race. This time the Hare was very diligent and easily won the race.

The learning - while it is good to be slow and steady, in organisations it is the fast and steady who are successful.

The story does not end here….

The tortoise did some introspection and realised that it would never be able to win the race in the way it is now designed. So it challenged the hare to a different type of race. The hare agreed. In this race the Hare sped over the Tortoise on land but as the second part of the race it had to cross a river to reach the goal post. The Hare was not able to do so and the Tortoise ended up winning the race.

The learning - we all have our core competencies and we have to create opportunities that help us capitalise our core competencies.

The story does not end here…

The Hare and the Tortoise had become good friends by now and they introspected on ways to create a win-win situation. As per the new plan, the hare carried the tortoise over land and while crossing the river the tortoise carried the Hare on its back. Both the Hare and the Tortoise won the race!

The learning - they realised that though they may have their own competencies, it is the ability to leverage off of various competencies that create powerful teamwork.

"Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much." --Helen Keller

Team Building Training, which focuses on activities to download learning, has been shown to have great impact on the performance of teams. All leaders will uniformly agree that teambuilding gets the greatest attention in business today.

MMM Training Solutions conducts Soft Skills Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

Leadership Lessons From Hanuman

Hanuman is one of the central characters of the Ramayana. Hanuman was known as an ardent follower of Lord Rama. The qualities he displayed reveal that he was a great leader himself. Through the many vicissitudes of life he displayed his leadership qualities with great alacrity.

In the epic, Hanuman was entrusted with the task of travelling to Lanka and finding Sita. The Gods and the Gandharvas who wanted to test his intelligence, courage and integrity put him through a lot of challenging situations. The Ramayana enlists numerous obstacles that Hanuman faced in this journey.One such situation occurred with the serpent Goddess Surasa when Hanuman was flying to Lanka. The Gods approached Surasa, the mother of the Snakes, and asked her to assume the form of a terrible demoness in order to test Hanuman. Surasa agreed and waylaid Hanuman in his journey and informed him that the only way he could reach Lanka was go through her mouth and be expelled on the other side. Hanuman knew that this was impossible as Surasa would close her mouth as soon as he entered and devour him. Hanuman pleaded to with her to let him go; however, she did not agree. Left with no other choice, Hanuman challenged her to open her mouth wide enough to devour him. She started expanding her jaws to the maximum extent possible. In the meantime Hanuman expanded his form too as he had decided to overwhelm her with his massive form. But he realized that his insecurity caused him to rely on his ego. He took a step back and re-examined the situation and changed course! He assumed a tiny form, the size of a thumb and zoomed out at the other end before Surasa had time to close her mouth. His ability to abandon ego and think of the higher good with his quick thinking earned Surasa’s blessing!

Many leadership lessons can be harvested from Indian Mythology. Different heroes had different styles of leadership; however, one thing that stood out is that they were all great personalities who displayed leadership qualities that others desired to emulate.  Leadership training that uses the learning from the lives of people, who have left an undeniable impact on generations, is an excellent way to learn desirable leadership skills.

MMM Training Solutions conducts Soft Skills Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

The Invaluable Significance Of Soft Skills To Company

Sometimes we can spend our whole lives studying, preparing and equipping ourselves for the rigors of a competitive work environment and the comforts of a good life. And the pursuit of hard work in academics certainly plays a significant role in accomplishing that. But time and time again, experience tends to show us that all the education and intellectual credentials in the world don’t quite prepare us for dealing with a specific type of situation or a specific individual at a given moment. The nuances of education, string of degrees and depot of knowledge don’t seem to help in navigating through the challenging waters of dealing with people who are as complex as the patterns we see through a kaleidoscope.  And this is where relational or behavioral skills, popularly called ‘soft skills’ come into play. There are several types of soft skills that not only enable better relationships at the workplace but also simply make you a better person overall.

While there are numerous soft skill topics, knowing the fundamentals of how to meet and greet people, engage in a polite discussion with them, follow certain codes of conduct and simply carry oneself in a given social situation, all go a long ways in demonstrating one’s ‘personalization’ abilities but also one’s professionalism at the work place. There are certain fundamental modes of etiquette that are just considered polite, courteous, respectful and professional that makes an employee more personable with his fellow workers. These people are not only easy to work with but are also fun to be around in that their mannerisms are constantly engaged in the harmony and well-being of people around them.

Soft skills can go a long ways in improving the quality of not only the work but also the working environment at any given place. It sets the appropriate tone for working in a professional manner but also cultivates and fosters good habits and behaviors from everyone involved in working together as one cohesive unit. It is no wonder than that companies these days invests so heavily on such professional development training.

Soft skills Training is a crucially important edge that every employee must have in order to function harmoniously alongside their colleagues, While hard skills might enable an employee to get the job it is ultimately their soft skills that equip them to thrive in that job and work alongside their peers.

MMM Training Solutions conducts Soft Skills Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

Leadership – The Ability to See Challenges as Opportunities

“Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated!” -Confucius

A brilliant quote, the efficacy of which I would like to demonstrate further by using two real-life business situations.

Situation 1: A famous cosmetics company in Japan received a complaint from one of its customers that the soapbox he purchased from there was an empty one. Immediately the authorities got together to discuss the origination of the issue. They realised that the problem was with the assembly line the work of which was to transport all the packaged soap boxes to the delivery department. The Management asked their highly qualified technical experts to solve the problem. They worked hard on it and came up with an expensive X ray machine with high resolution monitors. This machine was to be manned by 2 people who would watch all the soapboxes to ensure that none was empty.

At the same time, a small company faced a similar issue. The owner did not have the highly educated and paid engineers. Nor did he have the huge budgets. Faced with these constraints, he devised a simple solution. He bought a powerful industrial electric fan and showed it at the assembly line. All that the fan did was it simple blew the empty soap boxes out of the line.

Situation 2: There is another curious case that happened when NASA started launching astronauts into space. They found that the pens used by them wouldn't work at zero gravity because ink would not move down to the writing surface. To solve this problem, it took them almost a decade and an exorbitant amount. Ultimately they developed a pen that could work at zero gravity and that would write on any surface. However the Russians came up with a simple solution to this complicated problem -they used a pencil instead of a pen.

A key leadership quality of the 21^st century is to be able to see challenges as opportunities and not as constraints. The leadership skill of being able to think ‘out of a box’ is second to none in this fast-paced, competitive world in which the word ‘stagnancy’ is obsolete. 

Leadership Training programs that focus on developing these leadership competencies are greatly sought after by corporates. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts  Leadership Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

Communication Skills Of A Good Leader

Every employee has a story of working with someone who was just a poor communicator. I have my own story too. The person I worked under was, by all polite standards, a mystery. He wasn’t clear about his expectations, his feedback (whether positive or negative) was always vague and his instructions were very arbitrary to say the least. Simply put, he had terrible communication skills. This caused problems in many areas of his job – poor relationships with his subordinates, lack of camaraderie with his peers and animosity with his superiors. Surprisingly his job with the company somehow lasted longer than it should have. Truth eventually won the battle and he was terminated. But his departure left such a huge ‘crater’ of confusion that the entire company revamped its method, mode and policy for communication across the board. In the aftermath, the new communication policy was much clearer than before!

So what type of communication skills should a good leader have? What makes a good communicator? Leaders carry a great deal of responsibility on their shoulders with respect to their job responsibilities, manage production output and quality service, marshalling his or her personnel and resources and all the while keeping the whole process within the satisfactory limits of the company’s watchful gaze. 

Lets look at a few aspects of good communication that a leader should keep in mind: 

1. Leaders with good communication skills must make sure to be very clear about their goals, expectations and vision. 
2. They must give clear and consistent feedback through the whole process of execution so that the required demands of performance or quality are adhered to with minimum margin of error.
3. They communicate any progress or deficiency clearly to higher levels of authority so appropriate decisions can be made accordance with the needs.
4. Lastly, regardless of how the job plays out, they make sure to give ample motivation and inspiration to the team on a job done with excellence, inspiring a spirit of perfection for the next project.

Communication Skills Training is a vital component of enhancing correspondence within the organization regardless of their size or business. Such training programs equip the people that matter with the skills that matter even more. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts communication skills training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. 

The Team Building Traits of Outbound Training

Throughout history, great men and sages will tell you that it was at the their darkest and deepest moments in life that they learnt some of their greatest lessons. Sometimes a lifetime worth of lessons can only be learnt through the twists, turns, challenges, and obstacles of life. While certain skills like planning, organizing and scheduling can be taught in a formal or controlled environment, other intangible and more valuable qualities like leadership, character, perseverance and courage can only be learnt through the storms of life that one goes through over a period of time. It is precisely these qualities that outbound training seeks to train people in by simulating experiences in controlled environments albeit natural and slightly unpredictable ones. They can immensely help foster the following:

·         Situational leadership skills rise to the surface. The old adage, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’ is proven true. outbound training environments create the necessity of having to step up and take charge to cohesively lead the rest.

·         Teamwork and partnering is crucial, as certain situations will bring about challenging situations for anyone to overcome by himself or herself. This helps develop social skills and teamwork.

·         Working cohesively as a unit in such an environment also helps with communication, efficient management of resources and trouble-shooting skills. This of course requires every member of the team to be on the ‘same page’ with a binding vision that unites instead of trying to accomplish things as an individual.

Outbound Training is a valuable program that companies use everyday to help cultivate such intangible traits in their employees that can never be learnt in the safe and cosy environment of a corporate office.

MMM Training Solutions are experts in the filed of outbound training, corporate training, leadership training, leadership skills training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and many more for corporates in India and abroad.

For more information visit us at http://www.mmmts.com/