Coaching the reluctant presenter

Many of the managers I train as coaches tell me they have a 'friend' who finds speaking in public and making presentations difficult. 'How would I best go about coaching them through the experience?' they ask.

I guess much depends on whether we're going to be working with an individual over a period of time and develop them into an accomplished presenter or whether we're working with someone standing trembling in front of us like a gibbering wreck with 5 minutes to go before they're due on stage.

Let's deal with the latter situation first. Conventional wisdom on developing presentation skills is going to be no use to us here. We may well feel that our coachee's Powerpoint is overly busy, their notes a mess and their planned pyrotechnics to create a memorable ending doomed to failure, but it's too late to do much about that now.

Followers of my articles on coaching will know I use the following acronym to give coaches a useful questioning framework:

A - Aims - What do you want R - Reality - What's happening now? R - Reflection - What do you want? O - Options - What could you do? W - Way Forward - What will you do?

This ARROW sequence will prove useful to guide to our nervous presenter although we would not have the time to coach to any depth.

My advice is to concentrate on aims or goals. Let's have our presenter utterly clear on what success in this presentation would be like. If it's winning business from a sales proposition let's help them focus on that, if it's creating a relationship with a group of people they're going to be working with again and again let's help them focus on that. Of course, if the aim is pure survival then we can build an aim around that too! Two things become crucial in doing this. Firstly we need to make sure that any aim or goal is within our coachee's control. 'My aim is to have them sign the contract' is not but 'My aim is to present a compelling argument' is. Secondly any aim should be stated in the positive so 'My aim is to present a compelling argument' is better than 'I don't want to stammer and make a fool of myself'.

Where is only a short space of time in advance of a presentation, creating a well-defined aim increases the chances of success and gives our reluctant presenter something useful on which to focus. It's certainly more useful than criticizing their material or batting them away with a glib 'I'm sure you'll be fine'.

When we're coaching over the longer term, we can make good use of the Reality stage by following each presentation attempt with a discussion around what had happened, what had gone well, what had gone less well and so on. We could also employ the Options stage to really think through what changes presenters could make to bring about a different result.