Executive Presentation Skills Training and Coaching
Make the decision easy for the room.
Executive presentation training prepares a leader for the presentation that carries real weight: the board session, the investor update, the earnings call, the keynote. I coach senior leaders one-on-one on the whole presentation: the message and the delivery together.
The coaching is private, largely virtual and confidential, with live feedback. I have coached executives for 40+ years, including leaders from 61 Fortune 100 companies. You practice the real presentation out loud and hear what works while you can still change it. Book a free confidential 30-minute consultation and bring the date.
What Executive Presentation Training Covers
A lot of presentation advice starts with the slides. Executive presentation skills start one step earlier, with the decision you need from the room.
The work covers 4 things. The message: the one point the audience must remember and act on. The structure: the order that gets them there without a detour through every detail you know. The delivery: your voice, your pace and what the room sees while you speak. The questions: the hard ones you can predict and the ones you cannot.
These 4 parts are coached together, because in my experience an audience doesn’t judge them separately. A strong message delivered with hesitation can sound weak. A confident delivery of a muddled message can sound like a sales pitch.
What the Research Says About Slides
The evidence on slides comes from 2 very different places: learning experiments and an accident investigation.
Printed words can compete with your voice
The researchers Richard Mayer and Roxana Moreno reviewed experiments on how people learn from presentations that combine words and pictures. In 3 studies of narrated animations, students solved new problems better when the words were only spoken than when the same words were also printed on the screen. The median effect size was .69. They call this the redundancy effect. It has a limit: when there was no animation, students learned better from spoken words plus the same text on screen than from speech alone.
Those were students learning science, not directors reviewing a forecast, and the effect depended on animation. The careful reading for a presentation: when you talk over a visual that moves or builds, don’t also put your full sentences on the screen. When a slide is only words, letting the room read along can help.
Bullet points can bury the warning
After the space shuttle Columbia was lost in 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board studied how the analysis of the foam that struck the wing reached mission managers. Looking at one key chart, its report found that “the choice of headings, arrangement of information, and size of bullets on the key chart served to highlight what management already believed.” The Board also wrote that it “views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
Your board deck is not a shuttle briefing, but the lesson carries over. If the risk sits in a sub-bullet deep in the deck, the room can miss it. Say the warning out loud, and make it the headline.
Sources
- Mayer and Moreno (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.
- Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report Volume I (2003), pages 191 and 201, as quoted by Edward Tufte.
What We Work On, and How
These are methods I use with leaders preparing a high-stakes presentation. Each first appeared in my Fast Company columns, and each section links to one where you can read more.
Say the conclusion first, and build the talk so it can shrink
You planned 20 minutes, and on the day of the presentation someone asks you to keep it to 10. Talking faster won’t save you: nobody is effective at hyperspeed. What saves you is a conclusion stated at the start, so the room has it no matter what happens next.
Then design the talk so it can lose time without losing the point. In a layered talk, your key message sits at the center, the major supporting points around it and the details on the outside. When time runs short, you take off the outer layer. In a modular talk, you give the key message first and then present supporting points one at a time, dropping whole points if you must. It is better to make one supporting argument well than to rush through 3.
Read: How to Deliver Your Presentation in Half the Time →
Complex material for a mixed room
Dumbing down a complex idea makes it smaller and easier to dismiss. Organize it instead. I use what I call the Sandwich Approach. At the sandwich level, you give the big picture in terms anyone can follow. At the meat level, you add the larger elements for listeners with some expertise. At the condiment level, you give the technical detail your experts need. Then you cycle through the 3 levels for each new idea.
In the 1990s I worked with a Medtronic leader who had to present the pacemaker battery to an audience that included the battery’s inventor, scientists and physicians. At the sandwich level, he talked about reliability: the battery lasted 7 years, which reassured the physicians. At the condiment level, he covered the raw materials and chemical reactions, so the scientists had something too. The approach follows the same top-down logic as Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle, a standard text at the major consulting firms: start with the answer. Technical leaders who face this problem every week can see my technical executive coaching.
Read: How to Talk About Complex Topics Without Dumbing Them Down →
Numbers that land
When a TV meteorologist reports hail, they don’t give the average diameter of the hailstones. They say “golf-ball sized.” Turn your data into images the same way. One client was using the phrase “establish common platforms across the country.” We replaced the phrase with Legos: you start with foundational pieces, the common platforms, and add or remove blocks as needed. When numbers barely moved, add the context around them. Flat market share for a quarter is good news if a competitor launched a new product in that quarter.
Read: Do These Four Things to Make Your Boring Presentation Sound Interesting →
A story instead of 18 slides
A client preparing an investor relations presentation once built a deck of 18 slides, each with a chart and 3 bullet points. Plodding through those slides would put even the most dedicated analyst to sleep. I coached him to turn the metrics into a story. Keep a story to 2 minutes 30 seconds at most. When a story piles on detail, the room starts to wonder where you are going.
Read: Three Reasons Your Presentation Is Literally Putting People to Sleep →
Notes instead of a script
A CEO once asked me to go over his script for an off-site event. It was 1 minute of welcome remarks. You can speak from the heart for 60 seconds. When you speak without a script, prepare 3 kinds of notes instead: a mind map with your key message at the center, the “how,” “what” and “why” questions your talk answers, and a few words that trigger each story. You know the answers. The notes only help you find them.
Read: The Only Three Notes You Need to Write Before Speaking Off-Script →
One object can carry the message
During a major financial crisis, I worked with a top executive at Ford who was preparing for his first informal meeting with the board. He needed to say that one area of the business had a major problem and that the business as a whole was still in great shape. He was a fan of model cars, so I suggested he put a scratch on the door of one, set it on the table and say: “There’s a scratch on the door, but this is still a terrific car. Our business is the same way.” A few weeks later, he sent me a photo of himself holding the car. The caption read: “Just a scratch!”
Read: How to Use Props to Make Your Presentation More Powerful →
Presentation Skills Training for Executives, One Leader at a Time
Presentation skills training is often a group course: a method, a set schedule and practice on sample material. That has value early in a career. A senior leader usually needs something else: a presentation coach who works on the presentation they actually have to give.
In one-on-one presentation coaching you rehearse your own material, in your own words, around your own calendar. You speak, I watch, and we change what costs you the most authority first. Nothing is rehearsed in front of colleagues, so you can try, fail and fix things in private before the board or your team sees them.
Technical leaders often bring the hardest version of this problem: deep expertise and too much detail. My technical executive coaching is built for that situation.
How a Presentation Engagement Works
The method is the Core Satellite System. The Core is the one message the room must remember. The Satellites are the evidence, stories and delivery choices that make it land.
Find the Core
We start with the decision you need and say it in one sentence. If the Core is not clear to you, it will not be clear to the room.
Build and Rehearse
We choose the few Satellites that support the Core, then rehearse out loud with live feedback until the delivery matches the message.
Handle the Questions
We practice the hardest questions you can predict, and a way back to your Core for the ones you cannot.
If you are choosing a presentation skills coach, look for one who works on your own presentation, not on sample material. Many leaders start with one high-stakes event, such as a first board meeting, and keep the habits for the rooms after it. For an example of this preparation, read how to personalize a board presentation, and see the coaching programs for the full range of options. For role-specific preparation, see CEO communication coaching, CFO communication coaching and investor speaking.
Executive Presentation Training FAQ
Your Next Presentation Is Where We Start
A board session. An investor update. A keynote. Tell me what is on your calendar, and we start there.
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Actionable insights on executive communication, boardroom presence, and leadership storytelling, from 40+ years of coaching CEOs.
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