Leveraging the Presentation During Your Meeting

Presentations can bring energy to your meeting

This post goes into how to leverage a presentation during your meeting. You can use this for broadcasts, working sessions, and even weekly team meetings.

Select the right person

They should know the topic. They should want to do the presentation. 

Get the presenter ready

Clearly explain the topic you want them to cover. Explain the outcome you would like. For example, “My team needs to understand how AWS S3 blob store can help them save word documents.” or “My team is really struggling with prioritization, I’d like them to have a framework on how to prioritize.”

Explain who is in the audience. Are they high school seniors or seniors in a nursing home? Are they women vice presidents or Vice TV fans?

Make sure they know how long the presentation should be and if there will be time for questions. If there will be questions decide how to gather, vet and prioritize the questions. I also highly recommend holding questions till the end in case the information is covered later in the presentation. 

During the meeting

Introduce the presenter, the topic, and the reason why this topic is relevant at this time. Inform the audience about how questions will be managed.

Team meeting usages of the presentation

I personally like using it in a weekly or bi-weekly team meeting. Have the internal team members do the presentations as it allows them to practice their presentation skills and everyone else learns something from their own team member. For these types of meetings, expand your mind on what topics are valuable. I’ve seen teams have a “personal presentation” segment at their bi-weekly ( twice monthly) meetings. In this presentation, the presenter shares about their hobbies, youth, or family. 

I hope these tips on how to use a presentation during a meeting helps. If you want to learn how to improve your presentation skills, go to toastmasters.org to find a club near you where you can learn by doing.