4 Most Common Presentation Abuses

If time is money, how much have you lost in the presence of a terrible presentation?

From keynote presentations delivered by a company CEO to internal overview presentations given by a department head, so many hours of business are spent parked in a swivel chair and waiting for lunch to arrive. Why do we endure two-hour presentations when we know that the message can be cut down to thirty powerful minutes? And even more importantly, why do we keep delivering presentations that go far beyond our scheduled speaking time?

A presentation can be guilty of four different abuses in any number of combinations. We’re sure you can probably think of a speech that was guilty of all four and then some. Learning these abuses can not only help your own work, but also help to make you a better critic of bad work. You will be able to identify what felt “bad” about a certain presentation, and take steps to either offer suggestions or avoid that same path in the future.

So, what are they?

4 Most Common Presentation Abuses

Abuse of Time

Exceeding five or ten minutes in a presentation says to your audience “my message matters more than what you have going on in your day.” Sometimes that may be the case. Sometimes the audience is willing to accept that the message is important and needs more clarification. But for the bulk of presentations, abusing the audience’s time is a significant way to show where your priorities lie, and that’s not a good thing. It’s is always better to end early with a concise message than over-explain and end late.

Abuse of Attention

Are you showing your audience respect by being a reactive speaker? Bad presentations start when the speaker enters the room, doesn’t acknowledge their audience with either glance or greeting, and then walks through each of their slides in a robot tone. Don’t ignore your audience. Greet them, make eye contact with them, and then engage them with content that is customized to their needs and concerns. Much like that old saying in service: the customer is always right, when it comes to a presentation: the audience is always first.

Abuse of Design

An ugly presentation is not a crime in and of itself. But a presentation that is unreadable, cluttered, confusing, and a poor representation of the company brand? That is truly an abuse. Bad design is a reflection of the speaker’s lack of effort, even their investment into the deck itself. You wouldn’t wear scrubs and a baseball cap to an interview, nor should you settle for the bad first impression of clip art and chart screenshots littered throughout your presentation.

Abuse of Clarity

A speaker who is not confident in what they have to say will not be able to get to the point while they’re saying it. Their message will wander, time will tick on, and their audience will feel lost and annoyed. The worst abuses happen when a speaker is unclear because of anxiousness, lack of preparation, or simply “checking off” the assignment rather than investing in it.

Are you guilty of any of these? How about the last presentation you sat through; what did it struggle most with? Assess, correct, and be mindful that an abuse of time, attention, design, and clarity indicates a lack of commitment.

Want to prevent the abuse before it happens? Check out these helpful and related articles!

The Shocking Secret To Awesome Presentations

How Not To Deliver a Historical Speech

The Importance of Non-Verbal Communication


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