Over the last few months I have been training groups of employees at a large Korean company. All the students are non-native English speakers, and all the employees have differing levels of English.

In each 4 week course ( we do four hours per week) the students do two presentations. One at the beginning and one at the end.

These students are continuing their everyday work, and have to prepare their presentations in their own time, and, if they can find the time, during their working hours.

A number of interesting observations have come up that I would like to share with you.

1. at the beginning of the course, almost all students believe they cannot present in English. By the end of the course all students have the realisation that actually they can present in English. This has nothing to do with the course, or my teaching method – sadly. This has everything to do with confidence. At the beginning of the course, most of the students simply have no confidence in their English ability. Once they have completed two, short presentations in font of their peers they begin the believe in themselves.

This problem in endemic in Korea. Most business people are tested on their English ability before entering a company, then they spend the next ten or twenty years only speaking in Korean, with the occasional English greeting and a “thank you”. If you do not use English regularly, then you are not going to be confident using English in your professional life.

If you want to feel better at using English, then find every opportunity you can to use English.

2. Many students over prepare their short presentation and end up either memorising their words, or reading a script. These students are always the worst presenters. They lose their place during their presentation, they hardly ever look at their audience and they spend too long looking down at their notes / script that the words they are speaking sound muffled and unclear.

Doing a short presentation in class is not the same as doing a keynote presentation in front of a hundred English speaking journalists at the launch of a new product, but all the same, if the presentation is important, the way you communicate with your audience is vital. Reading a script will prevent you from connecting with your audience in a personal way and you will fail. Not only will you fail, but your whole presentation will fail.

You need to know what you are talking about. If you do not know your subject well enough, then you should not be presenting. Reading a script is unforgivable, and simply tells your audience that they are not important enough for you to prepare properly.

Preparing for a presentation is about knowing your topic, knowing your stories and knowing what it is you want to tell your audience. It is not difficult. Any presenter, who is presenting in a foreign language should have the necessary language skills already. If they don’t, they should not be presenting.

3. It is hard to let go of practices learnt in the past. Yet, letting go of 1990s style presentations is something we must all do if we are going to be great communicators in the twenty-first century.

Maintaining a love affair with complex charts, text and bullet points is damaging your ability to communicate effectively. A twenty-first century presentation is about presenting your ideas in a clear and concise way. It is not about presenting slide after slide of technical data. That simply does not work today. If your grandmother would not understand your presentation, then it is not simple and concise enough.

If your presentation is all about technical data, then consider preparing a handout with the details. Then in your presentation itself focus on the key points that you have pulled out from the data. Explain to your audience that the detailed data is contained in a handout.

On a side note here – I am shocked and amazed when students turn round and tell me that preparing a handout means more work! Unbelievable! If your presentation is important enough for you to be presenting it to an audience, then a handout should never be considered “more work”. It should be considered an essential part of your presentation for your audience’s complete understanding.

These are just three things I have picked up over the last few months. There are more and I will write about these over the coming weeks.

The Joong Ang Sunday newspaper in Korea published an interview with the man credited with helping the Pyeongchang Olympic Bid Team to produce a truly fantastic presentation in Durban, South Africa, Terrence Burns

In that interview, when asked what was his number 1 tip for Korean people to improve their presentation skills Burns replied “speak slowly”. In a previous blog post I wrote about the reasons you need to speak slowly. When you are presenting you are not in a race to finish as quickly as you can, you are there to communicate your ideas, passions and or dreams. When you are speaking too fast your audience cannot keep up with you and they quite often cannot understand the English you are speaking. So consciously focussing on your speaking speed should be an essential part of your practice and rehearsal time.

Burns also said that the key components of any presentation is the “who” and the “why”. “Who” is your audience and “why” should they do what you are asking them to do. Many times on this blog we have written about the important of presenting for your audience and not your boss. What motivates your boss is not necessarily what motivates your audience. You must always put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask yourself what will make my presentation resonate with my audience? GEtting these parts of your presentation just right will help your presentations become much more effective.

Sadly, the article is written in Korean, so for those of you who do speak Korean, you can access the full interview here.

An English version of this interview can be read at the Sports Features website here

Yesterday, I did a presentation training course with a large company here in Korea. After dinner, I did an exercise inspired by Garr Reynolds’ Google presentation where he asks the audience to talk about the best and worst presentations they had attended.

The Results:

The most striking think about the results was that both the good things and the bad things about the presentations my students had attended in the past, were pretty much the same as any western audience would say.

The interesting thing here is that many people think that there is a difference between western and eastern audiences and what they want. Clearly, from this rather unscientific experiment, that thinking is not true. Audiences around the world appear to want the same thing. I found particularly interesting the fact that my students want humour, simple and short presentations with a presenter who is confident and not afraid of eye contact. My students do not want a presenter who is always looking at a script with too much content in their slides and using too much jargon.

Pretty much want any western audience would say.

Next time you are presenting to an international audience, keep in mind that had I done this experiment with almost any audience in almost any country, I would most likely to have got the same result.

Recently, I have been working with a large industrial group that has many different departments working on different parts of their overall business strategy.

In an effort to present their company’s future strategies and goals, they have developed a 20 slide, sixty minute presentation that brings together all the different work that department does and how each department works together to achieve their future plans.

Unfortunately, the presentation does not work. Why?

Firstly, the writer of the presentation went round each department individually and asked them to prepare slides and a script for the part they each have in the overall strategy. This immediately caused a dysfunctional and disjointed set of slides that had no natural flow or logic. While the writer of the presentation did his or her best to bring each part together in a logical fashion, it failed because there was not a team of people working together to get the presentation right or logical, there was just one person who did not understand any of the work that each department did.

If you are preparing a presentation that focuses on the overall strategies or direction your company is going and there are a number of different departments involved, then the presentation needs to be built with a team of people, ideally one person from each department meeting together to put the presentation together. This way, each department representative can ensure that each point made in the presentation fits logically and seamlessly in the ‘big picture’, and where one person in the team does not understand something, it can be explained properly so that what goes in to the presentation is clear and easy to understand.

Another problem that has occurred, is that the script and the slides are not compatible. What is written on the slide, is not what is being spoken by the presenter. This causes great confusion with the audience.

Finally, the person responsible for the translation of the presentation into English was never involved in the original build of the presentation. This means that the English translation is even further away from the original presentation ‘script’. This essentially renders the whole presentation in English useless.

As a result of this lack of ‘togetherness’ the whole presentation fails. It is full of technical mumbo jumbo, that not even a senior professor at a top university understands and there is no point to the presentation.

To avoid this, it is essential that a team of people are given the responsibility to build the presentation. A representative from each department should be on the team, and if the presentation is to be translated into English, then the translator needs to be in the team. This way, any difficult technical language can be tested by different people to ensure understanding and a clear and consistent message.

Remember, a presentation is not something you build to impress your boss. A presentation is something you build to communicate a message. It is therefore important to make sure that your message is the most important goal, and not the number of slides or the how technical your slides are.

Throughout this blog, and in most of the books written about presenting, there is a lot of advice about ‘following the rules’ of presenting. Recently, I have found myself asking “are there any rules for presenting?” The answer I have come up with is: no. There are no rules for presenting.

The purpose of doing a presentation is to communicate a message to a group of people. If we begin with this in mind, then how we communicate that message is irrelevant as long as we achieve the goal of communicating the message. Do we need to make a fifty slide PowerPoint presentation? No. Do we have to stand up in front of the audience wearing our best suit? No. Do we have to avoid using bullet points? No. None of these things matter – what really matters is that we communicate our message is the most effective way possible.

When we present to a small audience of six to ten people, do we really need to use PowerPoint of Keynote? Why not use a white board or a flip chart? Using a whiteboard or flip chart can give you a chance to get your audience involved, you can ask them to write ideas on the board, you can demonstrate your amazing artistic abilities (if you have them) and you can give your presentation a real live feeling.

Most presentations are done standing up, and while this is probably a good adea when you are presenting in front of hundreds of people, do you really need to stand up when you are presenting to say ten or twelve people? When you stand up to speak you create an air of formality, when you sit down you become ‘one of them’ – by becoming ‘one of them’ you become more approachable, more informal and relaxed.

If you take a look at Hollywood, the movies that are always remembered are the ones that did something different, the movies that were created in a different way, movies like Toy Story, The Blair Witch Project, Star Wars (the original ones) and Pulp Fiction – all these movies are memorable, not just because of the story lines, but because they were different from the ‘standard’ format.

Presentations are all about communication, sadly, we get taught in our universities and in our ‘top down’ managed companies that when we present we must use PowerPoint. This is simply not true, and the future for presenting is for us, the people, to create our own unique styles, to think carefully about how best to communicate our message and throw these old ideas about presenting away.

Below is a little slideshow I have created that gives a number of tips you can use next time you present internationally.