Great Presenters Start Young

As a presentation coach, I love working with teams of great speakers who enable me to focus on my first love, developing strategic and winning content.  My clients have long suspected it, and I’ll go public saying, that my strength is in knowing what content it takes to win.  I’m happiest when I have good speakers to deliver that content.  Fortunately, I have talented presentation coaches on staff who love coaching delivery and who excel at working with problem speakers.  Kristina Corbitt, one of our associate consultants, can take an almost catatonic speaker and make him/her competent in a reasonably short amount of time.  While I’ve worked and won with some pretty poor speakers over the years – coaching them to excellence – I prefer working on developing great, hard-hitting content that keeps the selectors interested and engaged.

So, how does one create speakers who can deliver that content in a compelling and interesting manner?  First, we don’t start the training process during an interview coaching session.  Great speakers take years to develop and firms need to start early in the training and development process. Fortunately, communication is 100% learned behavior.  We learn how to communicate – for better or worse – from our parents, siblings, friends, and later, colleagues.  Humans are sponges; we’re constantly adapting our skills to fit the environment and we’re constantly learning new things.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that as we age, learning is tougher and takes longer. 

The youngest members of firms should take a basic presentation skills course as part of their first year’s training.  And, they should be put in front of an in-house audience frequently to showcase new skills and receive feedback on their communication skills.  Firms should have regular brownbag sessions to present about project successes and challenges.  And, presentation ability should be on every performance evaluation/review form at every level of A/E/C organization.  I also think the same could be said for writing and interpersonal skills.

Great speakers start young and they have speaking skills constantly reinforced through training, regular practice, and constructive feedback.  I truly believe that anyone can be a good speaker – for those of us who are more senior in our professions, it just takes longer to get there.  No one is born a great presenter – great speaking takes time and constant attention to the craft.  But, it’s worth the effort.  Winning work in this market requires good information, strong decision-making, great content, and compelling speakers.  We can’t short our teams on any of these.