5 Tips for New Supervisors to Ace Their Presentations Like a Pro

Congratulations on being promoted to manager! As you move on to greater heights in your career, you must be geared up to assume new roles and responsibilities. As a manager, you broadly have to perform 5 functions – planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. And to perform these functions well, you need excellent communication and presentation skills. Now, you would say that preparing and delivering presentations are not a new task for you as you have already done it many times before getting promoted. Here it is important to understand that presenting as a supervisor requires a different skillset and communication style compared to run-of-the-mill speaking presentations. In a nutshell, as a manager, you have to do some additional preparations and make a few adjustments to your usual delivery style.

In this blog post, we are sharing a few tips that will help new supervisors present effectively and gain the trust and respect of the team members.

1. Know Your Team Well

When you stand on a podium in the conference hall or turn on your webcam on a laptop to deliver a virtual presentation, you are up for sharing your thoughts and ideas with a group of people who come from diversified cultures and hold different perspectives on the same subject. So, you will have to tweak your presentation style accordingly. 

For instance, you might be good at storytelling, but if your audience better understands through data-oriented presentations, you will fail to communicate your message if you embrace the storytelling approach.

To sum up, the more you will know and understand your team members, i.e., their educational background, skills, what problems and challenges they are facing, etc., the better you will be able to provide solutions to them through your presentations.

2. Pay Heed to Visuals

Your audience can easily recall images more than text. Several research studies have also established the fact that if you include only text in your presentations, the audience will retain only 10% of it, but if you combine text with images, they will retain 65% of the content.

While choosing visuals for your presentations, make sure you pick images, graphics, charts, and other graphics that support your message without being bewildering. Whether you are presenting to make your team members understand the need to change a process or motivate them to grow as an individual and team, the visuals must contribute to the overall points and connect back to the objective of the communication.

Pro Tip – As a supervisor, you shoulder many responsibilities, and amidst this, you might not get enough time to prepare a presentation from scratch. In such a scenario, you can count on professionally designed and ready-made templates that serve your purpose well.

3. Create “Wow” Moments for the Audience

The audience will forget which font style and size you have used on the slides, but they will keep talking for longer about the moments that made them feel delighted and emotionally connected with you and exceeded their expectations. Wondering how to create such moments? Well, it’s not rocket science! Just by incorporating thoughtfulness, added touches (humor, quotes, personal stories, real-life examples), or little surprises, you can elevate the overall experience of your viewers. 

●      Surprise the audience by representing unexpected facts or news.

●      Show acknowledgement and appreciation for the mission-critical milestones that your team members have achieved.

●      As human beings tend to think emotionally and justify logically, you can engage your audience by including something relevant that triggers their subconscious mind and compels them to contemplate.

4. Make Your Presentations Meaningful

Instead of making your presentations detailed, make them meaningful. If you are including high-level data, numbers, or statistics, explain them in an easy-to-understand manner using charts or graphs and highlight the logical connections. Don’t leave the interpretation up to the audience. To ensure that your audience is getting your points in the same way you want to make them understand, convert your presentation into interactive sessions and encourage your audience to participate. 

5. Represent Your Authentic Self

All your efforts to connect with your audience fall flat the moment you attempt to be spurious. Keep in mind, no matter if you present as an employee, team leader, or CEO, the audience wants the real you. But at the same time, you must understand that authenticity can’t be rehearsed.

●      Don’t be over-enthusiastic to look legitimate.

●      Speak with purpose.

●      Show your passion for the subject on which you are talking.

●      Instead of just focusing on the words, pay heed to the key message that you want to deliver and the emotions that you want to trigger.

●      Use the right gestures and body language to complement your speech.

The Bottom Line

When you take on a new job role with increased responsibilities, it will never be a cinch. No matter if you have been promoted or joined a new company at a higher position, either way, you have a fresh start with a new set of challenges. As a supervisor, you can convert your team members into strong advocates of your ideas by creating a winning presentation. So, before presenting, make sure that your slides are not missing anything that your audience is likely to expect.

Do you have ideas or suggestions that you think can add value to readers? Share with us in the “Comment” section below. And if you find this blog post insightful, do share it on your social media channels.