I’m often asked about how to make a presentation at short notice. In particular, clients ask me about how to deliver a presentation their boss wrote but now isn’t going to deliver. The scenario often goes that the slides are emailed as an attachment with the message “I can’t go to this any more: I need you to deliver this presentation for me. It’s at two o’clock tomorrow”. And it hits your desk at 4:30 in the afternoon. With a full set of meetings already booked for tomorrow morning and no time to rehearse…
My advice is always the same. If you can possibly get out of it, get out of it. Even with ten years experience as a professional speaker and trainer I can’t (always!) do a good job of delivering someone else’s presentation. My clients response is always the same, too: “I can’t not do it. Simple as that”.
Well then… first things first… relax, it’s not your fault. Remember, if your boss doesn’t give you the time to get to grips with the presentation it’s his or her responsibility and not yours. Okay, so you might be in the firing line and you might look bad when you do a mediocre presentation but at least in your heart you’ll know it’s not your fault. Your boss’s job is give you the tools (time) to do your job: you can’t be expected to work on a spreadsheet without a computer and the time to do it, so why would you be expected to work on a presentation without the resources?!
So set your mind at rest. Do your best but don’t kill yourself over it. Take that load off your mind.
What’s more, in a situation like that it seems pretty obvious something else has come up which is more important to him/her than this presentation, so it’s not such a pressured situation after all. So with your mind lightened by those thoughts, what can you do on a practical level to make the best of a bad job.
Do what you can
Even going over the presentation once is better than not at all. If you possibly can, go over it out loud, because that way you’ll learn it better and get a much more valid feel for what it’s actually like to stand and deliver. Ideally you’d go over it in the same room as you’re delivering in, but anything you can do helps – don’t give in to the evil voice of panic which says “It’s hopeless, I can’t do a good job, I might as well just accept it“.
Use the technology
I’m always slightly surprised when people don’t set up their laptops for PresenterView. It’s a setting that allows you to see, on your laptop, something different from what the audience sees. Typically you’d set it to show the current slide, notes for that slide, your running time and – crucially – the next slide. Simply glancing down allows you to know what’s coming up next. It’s a great, great confidence booster and makes it much easier to look like you know what you’re talking about because you can start talking about things before or as they arrive on the screen – instead of waiting a slide to show, looking at it, and then responding.
Don’t apologise
Your position isn’t good, because you’re not the person your audience was expecting, but don’t weaken yourself further by apologising for not being up to speed on the topic. By all means make a very brief apology on your boss’s behalf to say he or she would really like to have been there but couldn’t make it because of an emergency, but don’t undermine your own position.
Don’t be afraid to bat to the long grass
It’s never good to answer a question with “I don’t know” but it’s better than waffling and bullshitting. The best way I’ve found of handling this is to simply say “I don’t know, but if you give me your email address after we’ve finished I’ll find out and email you. I’ll have an answer by Thursday at two o’clock at the latest”. You have to live up to your promise, of course. It’s important to give the time/date promise, so it sounds credible. (To test that, just try saying that sentence with the last bit missing!). Then when you get back you can either get those questions answered yourself or present them – and the email addresses – to your boss. Depending on your circumstances you might even want to let people know you’ve done that and let them know the problem isn’t yours any more… but think about that one carefully, you need a good relationship with your boss first! ;)
Feed back
Tell your boss how it went. Tell them what you did. If you have a good enough relationship, ask them how their event went. If you don’t tell them, how are they to know it’s not a reasonable thing to do to you – and they’ll probably do it again. Most people don’t know how hard it is to make a good presentation and therefore won’t know you’ve pulled of a miracle. Consider telling your boss you’d like to do a better job next time and therefore could you: (a) have training in presenting from this fabulous company you’ve found; (b) would like to be included in designing the presentation next time so that you can give the presentations on your boss’s behalf (nice career move, you smoothy!); or (c) swap assessments of how much the two different activities were worth (the presentation and whatever your boss did instead), so that your boss might consider being where they said they would be next time. They’ll only do this if it makes more financial sense! ;)
Pray for bad slides
Okay, I’m slightly tongue-in-cheek here!
A lot of bad presenters use bullet points as a crutch and almost write themselves a script to project. It’s inefficient and hugely boring for the audience, but it does, at least, mean you have everything you need to say right there in front of you.
More sensibly, you should respond to your boss’s “request” to deliver the presentation for them with the phrase “Happy to. When’s a good time to meet and go over the slides with you?”. Even if they say they don’t have any time, at least you’ve flagged up that time was needed and if things go wrong you’ve covered your back! ;) Bad slides might make great speaker-notes, or even handouts, so consider your options. It might be better simply to print the slides, cut the projection, and just talk to people, when compared to using your boss’s awful bullet-point-fest. Then, with the bullet points on a sheet of paper in front of you you’re set to go.
A sneaky trick, which is a variation of this theme, might be to use the slides on a slideshow on your laptop, to give you your script, but not to project them to the screen. That way, you use the bad slides as a driver for what you’re going to say, but no one else has to suffer them. If you find yourself having to show some of the slides – because there’s a key diagram for example – you can either take five minutes to hide the other slides, or in desperation, make judicious use of the B key, to black out the offending slide so that only you can see it: your audience just sees a blank screen.
Make it a workshop
This is a bit of a high-skill suggestion, as you need to be able to run workshops properly (which isn’t as easy as it looks) but if you can, it’s a perfectly viable alternative to some presentations. You provide the audience with some basic facts, give them exercises to develop those facts, and then collect the results of those exercises. Finally, you feed those results back to the group. You might even find that bad slides work as handouts or prompts for discussion. The final act here, of course, would be to feed the workshop’s results back to your audience.
Have a drink
Not before the presentation, obviously – but take some time to put your feed up and reflect: you can always learn from a presentation. You should do this anyway, of course, but it’s particularly important here. Then talk to your boss!
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