9 Tips for Nailing the Classroom Group Project Presentation
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Marketing Yourself, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
Note from Art: this is a public service post for anyone in a classroom anywhere that is on the hook for a group project. MBA students and undergraduates, please pay particular attention. If you know someone that might benefit from the guidance, please pass this along. I want to hear about some seriously great group project presentations over the next few weeks! And hey, the rest of you professionals out there might just pick up a few pointers below as well.
Everyone’s Doing It and Many are Not Doing It Well:
On campuses and in classrooms, graduate and undergraduate students alike are all doing It and many are not doing It very effectively. The It of course, is preparing for the end of semester/quarter/year group project presentation, which in many cases will serve as a significant portion of the final grade.
After sitting through a fair number of these presentations over the past few years, I’ve identified some common mistakes that detract from the quality of the final presentation and depress grades, not to mention instructors. The mistakes and misfires are generally a result of two issues: the very personal and irrational fear of presenting and some horrendously poor planning and coordination between group members.
Sidebar on Group Projects:
The topic of group projects in school probably merits a book, and while there are many pros and some cons to this component of the education process, I am in the camp that a well-defined project assignment enhances the learning experience, challenges individuals to develop strong group socialization, communication and leadership skills and offers a learning opportunity for the entire class if the output is of good quality. I’ll save the cons and potential for abuse of this component of college and grad school life for another post.
Regardless of your opinion on the worth of group projects, they are a reality, and one which students should play to win. What follows is a short summary of the tips and suggestions that I provide to groups in my MBA and undergraduate classes. I welcome additional thoughts and I encourage you to use these tips in good health and in pursuit of an A.
9 Tips For Nailing the Class and Group Project Presentation:
1. Ensure that the group members share an integrated view of the project:
One of the biggest and painfully visible issues with group projects is that it becomes clear that the work was doled out to team members and while everyone knows their part, no one knows the whole picture. Take the time to discuss your respective work products, key findings/conclusions and ensure that there is a unified and complete view of the project.
2. Before preparing presentation materials, the group must think through the following:
- You need to interest your audience in the first 60 seconds or you’ve lost them. The group should develop an engaging opener..a reason for the audience to be interested.
- You need to plan your message…before you begin writing your presentation. Key points; necessary supporting points; examples; summary of key findings…and take-aways.
- The goal is not to show how much you know..it is to concisely and briefly deliver key points, insights and conclusions.
3. Building the presentation:
Remember, business plans seeking millions of dollars in funding can be pitched in a dozen or fewer slides. Keep your deck brief…make every slide count.
- Ideally, have one person build the presentation…it allows you to standardize on graphics, fonts and importantly, on a single voice. Nothing is worse than disjointed presentation materials that don’t flow and look like they were created in a blender.
- The best approach is always one-main point per slide. (Or, no slides at all.)
- Pictures are best…with brief captions or sidebars
- Plan on your narrative and speaking points filling in all of the words that are not on the slides.
4. Helping the group and individuals prepare to present:
Since your slides are crisp and clean, every speaker must plan out their presentation narrative. I like to print my slides, handwrite my major points (no more than 3 to 5) and then practice delivering these points until I don’t need notes. Other important planning issues:
- Create transitions between speakers
- Plan on the team leader conducting group introductions.
- CREATE AN ENDING. Too many groups end with “that’s all.” That works for a cartoon…not for a project presentation.
- Coordinate the slide advancement in advance…not during the presentation.
5. Getting yourself ready-prepare your attitude:
It’s time to tackle the irrational demons that bedevil so many classroom (and professional) speakers. Think through the following:
- Remind yourself that there is little to fear. The audience is on your side. They want you to succeed. Unless you disrespect the audience, they are there for you.
- Remember that your goal is to always inform, share and even entertain. Entertaining does not mean that you have to tell jokes…but having the mind of an entertainer…ensures that you focus on pleasing your audience.
- Sit down the night before the presentation and imagine that you were an audience member for your own presentation. Jot down a list of what you would like to learn. Review that list before the presentation.
6. Immediately before the presentation, remind yourself of the following:
- Smile while speaking. Your smile is infectious.
- Eye contact please. Or at least pick different spots in the room slightly above head level and move your eyes to each spot in a random fashion.
- Project your voice. Many students forget to project, and the audience has to struggle to hear. Be loud and proud…always with a smile.
- If you have an accent…or if you are a mumbler, you will need to focus on both projecting and enunciating!
- Modulate your voice. Raise volume for emphasis…lower volume for intensity. Avoid talking in a monotone.
7. During the presentation:
- Smile, project your voice, and make eye contact. Present with confidence, and be part of the group in the room, not a talking head.
- Enthusiasm and passion are a speaker’s best friends! Show and share yours.
- Modulate your voice.
- Notes: if you must have them in your hand, don’t read from them. An occasional glance is fine. Reading is never fine.
- DON’T READ YOUR NOTES!
- Posture…don’t stand defensively (no arms crossed)…don’t get in the fig-leaf pose (use your imagination) and don’t get in the T-Rex pose (again, use your imagination). No hands in pockets, either. Pick a base position…hands at the side with occasional, simple gestures. Vary it slightly so that you don’t become a mannequin. (Thanks, Tim Koegel for these posture suggestions!)
- Be conscious of your timing. If you’ve practiced and if you know your key points…make them and keep moving.
- Briefly recap your key points and then transition to your next speaker…introducing him/her by name…and perhaps topic.
8. After the presentation: Q/A:
Many a great group presentation crashes on the rocks of a mismanaged Question and Answer session. Consider the following:
- Pre-plan for someone to be the question moderator. The moderator should restate the question and then direct it to the appropriate person.
- If you don’t understand the question, ask the questioner for clarification.
- If you don’t know the answer, do not make it up. Develop the habit of saying, “I’m not certain, but that is an important question that I would love to look into for you.”
- Keep your answers brief. Resist the urge to share everything you know.
- The moderator should sense when the question is answered/over and move on.
- No need to get defensive with an audience member that disagrees. It’s OK to agree to disagree.
9. Wrapping Up:
The group moderator should close out the group’s presentation, thank the audience and transition for the next group. Do something to close out beyond the ever-present and really depressing, “that’s all we have.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Here’s to nailing some group project presentations, getting great grades and importantly, improving your personal and professional communication skills along the way. Use these in good health! -Art
Leadership Caffeine: Learning to Adjust Your Altitude
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Product Management, Professional Growth, Project Management
While the phrase is most commonly referenced as attitude adjustment, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that one of the abilities that leaders must develop to be effective is the ability to adjust their altitudes.
Good leaders learn to scale institutional and intellectual heights with ease and comfort, quickly adapting to the audience and situation.
Examples of Frequent and Successful Altitude Adjusters:
- There’s the CEO that’s built a career around being a brilliant strategist and an even better operator. Watch him work a factory floor and you’ll see him descend from the lofty level of the boardroom to the critical issues of people and process. He’s equally comfortable in the rarefied air of strategy and vision and market forces or as an observer and student on the shop floor where true value is being created.
- The small business owner that serves customers all day long and drives home with an emerging vision for how her business must change in order to grow.
- The college professor that translates the philosophical foundations and theories of her specialty into practical, relevant concepts and tools that clarify, stimulate interest and offer some form of sustaining value. This professor offers knowledge and insight designed for use.
- The Product Manager that is able to move seamlessly from detailed requirements discussions with engineers in the morning to a concise strategy discussion and competitive analysis with executives in the afternoon.
- The Project Manager that pivots on one foot to resolve a team dispute and then pivots back to the work of helping his team learn to make better decisions.
Regardless of the specifics, these effective formal and informal leaders move seamlessly from the detailed to the general, from the tactical to strategic and from the confusing and complex to the simple and straightforward as easily as you are reading this post. Whether this is an innate ability for some or a learned skill for others, those that practice adjusting their altitudes are significantly more effective than others stuck at one level.
Of course, those that are effectively stuck at one level are requiring everyone else to adapt, and that takes energy and breeds stress and strife. These less than effective leaders require both the proverbial attitude adjustment as well as some solid lessons in learning to adjust their altitude.
5 Suggestions for Learning to More Effectively Adjust Your Altitude:
1. Seek first to understand and then be understood. I love that saying for its wisdom. I observe many leaders that engage with their team members on issues for just a few moments and then cut them off mid-stream, with an opinion, a decision or an order. Teach yourself to clamp your jaw shut and listen and process on all of the verbal and non-verbal cues that are so generously placed in front of you. The time you invest in focusing and listening and then thinking about the issue being presented will give you time to adjust your altitude to the right level.
2. Plan your message. Knowledge workers and individual contributors should redouble their efforts to plan the messages for exchanges with executives. While you may be personally fascinated by the details of your project or product, it is critical to recognize that those in executive roles want you to give them the time…not to tell them how to build the watch. For unscheduled, hallway or elevator exchanges, condition yourself to move into time-teller mode, again resisting the urge to showcase your in-depth command of every detail. Your overall work and results will showcase whether you have command of the details.
3. Recognize that context is key to motivating action. Assume that no one else has thought through the issue in as much depth as you have. Management teams that vigorously debate strategy for weeks and then become satisfied on a direction and choices must recognize that no one else in the organization has any context for either the direction or the choices. This common communication gap is actually more like a grand canyon of misunderstanding, both in expanse and in height and depth.
4. Learn to see patterns in problems. In your daily work life, develop the habit of identifying recurring problems and patterns and then suggesting and implementing ideas that eliminate these problems and improve organizational practices.
5. View your role and tasks in the context of a long value chain. Instead of thinking about what you do as discrete and separate from people in other groups, recognize that your work impacts the performance of others along the chain. Seek to understand how and why others depend upon you and better yet, develop an approach that emphasizes constantly measuring your own performance against how well you are meeting the needs of others that come after you in the organizational value chain.
The Bottom Line for Now:
For your own professional development, challenge yourself to understand issues from all levels. The best leaders and the best employees connect their work to creating value for customers or solving vexing internal issues. These effective professionals learn to scale heights from idea to implementation, from problem to improvement and from understanding to new direction. They strive to become effective communicators at all levels and they constantly focus on understanding what is reality to individuals at all layers of the organization.
While the vertical metaphor of altitude may grossly simplify what is really going on here, it’s simple and comprehensible enough to grasp and apply. For today and everyday, make certain that you are challenging yourself to adjust your altitude. You might just find a lot more enjoyment and success in your work, in the process of scaling the issues.
Leadership Caffeine for the New Week: Your Message and the Chicken Salad Sandwich Test
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth
Much of what passes for leadership conversation in the workplace is filled with unnecessary and meaningless jargon that gets in the way of the true message. It’s time to de-clutter our conversations and choose words that are meaningful and actionable to our team members.
Dan and Chip Heath in the book, Made to Stick-Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, do a wonderful job of providing a framework for clearing up our core messages and they offer some great examples along the way.
Consider the oft-mentioned phrase, “We must strive to maximize shareholder value.” The Heaths compare this phrase to the mantra uttered constantly by Southwest founder and Chairman Herb Kelleher during his tenure, “We will be the low cost carrier.”
Both statements are positive in intent, but one is infinitely more actionable than the other.
The CEO and other top executives seeking to maximize shareholder value might very well understand that this goal will be accomplished through diligent pursuit of core strategies, selective, accretive acquisitions and managing core projects like a portfolio of investments.
However, if you are a front-line employee, it’s darned hard to know what maximizes shareholder value on a decision-by-decision basis or whether your action will be accretive, much less whether it is good to be accretive or whether that means that you need to see a doctor!
Alternatively, it’s relatively simple to process an issue through the framework of “Will this action support our goal of being the low-cost carrier?”
Do Chicken Salad Sandwiches Support the Strategy?
The example cited in Made to Stick of Kelleher’s “We will be the low cost carrier” message in action is a well-intended Southwest employee suggesting that based on customer feedback, the addition of Chicken Salad sandwiches on one of the longer routes would improve the customer experience.
Kelleher reportedly asked: “Will serving chicken salad sandwiches on that route contribute to our goal to be the low cost carrier? If the answer is no, “We don’t need no damn chicken salad sandwiches.”
The Bottom-line for Now:
The next time you are required to provide direction or are involved in setting or communicating strategy, ask yourself whether your messaging and your word choices will help people determine whether Chicken Salad Sandwiches are appropriate or not? If the answer is: “It’s not clear,” keep working to improve your message.
Planning Ahead for the Week: Three Items for Your Management Excellence “To Do” List
Throughout my career, Sunday evening has been my “boot up” time for the week. I like to go to bed on Sunday night knowing my goals for the week and I like waking up feeling energized, organized and ready to conquer the world. Additionally, I’m a firm believer that I do some of my best thinking while I’m sleeping. It’s amazing how often I wake up with a solution to a vexing problem that eluded me the night before. (Yeah, I know that I’m odd. My wonderful wife reminds me regularly.)
Every week represents an opportunity to improve your performance as a manager and leader. In spite of the setbacks of the prior week, the fire drills that caught you by surprise and your own lack of follow-through on your goals, every Monday offers a clean slate for you to fill. My very positive intent here is to offer you a few suggestions each week that will inspire your pursuit of continuous improvement. Enjoy and Prosper!
1. How current are your Individual Development Plans? Most people in my workshops indicate that they do not have an Individual Development Plan, so the odds are pretty good that you can improve in this area.
Regardless of your performance evaluation cycle, if you have not created (or updated within 12 months) an Individual Development Plan for each of your direct reports, it’s time to get this activity started. This is a great opportunity to conduct quality discussions with your associates about their interests and aspirations on your team or within the organization. Of course, the most important part of the discussion is the joint action plan and plan for follow-up.
2. How effectively are you communicating during these tough times? Chances are, your employees would like more from you. Quite a bit more! During times of change or times of strife and stress, a good rule of thumb is to keep the communication flowing.
Create opportunities to update your team on key performance indicators and to discuss the impact of the economy on the organization’s performance. Also, create new forums where you and your employees focus on identifying opportunities to increase the value you provide customers or identify opportunities to eliminate waste from your business systems. If you already use a quality discipline like Six Sigma, these are natural discussions. If not, emphasize focusing on improving customer value by making things easier/faster/better for your customers by streamlining service and product processes.
3. It’s time to build new bridges and repair old ones across your organization. It’s easy to get caught up in our own functional pursuits and lose track of what’s going in departments that are dependent upon you or that serve your department.
Take time this week to reach out to one or more of your peers and find out what’s on their mind and how you and your team might help. There’s no substitute for great relationships across the organization, and building and maintaining those relationships takes time and energy. And remember that the cardinal rule of networking is always to give more than you take.
Have a great week! -Art
Is it Time to Panic?
I suspect that anyone not concerned about the state of “things” going on in our world and specifically in our economy would reasonably be labeled as naïve. We have big problems, they could get bigger in a hurry or maybe they won’t. The loss of some long-standing financial icons is annoying, the potential for the choking off of access to working capital for otherwise healthy companies is downright disconcerting. The issues being debated in Washington have long-since ceased being about Wall Street and are most squarely about mitigating catastrophic risk on Main Street.
You don’t have to look far for some pundit somewhere offering up the end of life as we know it, usually with comments about a worldwide depression the likes of which we’ve never experienced. Hey, they may be right or they may not. I’ve long since given up trying to peer into the crystal ball and prognosticate beyond the late George Carlin’s famous weatherman bit that called for a forecast of “dark, followed by widely scattered light in the morning.” The sun will rise and it will still be in the east.
In spite of my inability to foretell the future, I do know one thing for certain, it is never good to panic. For you science fiction buffs out there, Frank Herbert had it right when he wrote that, “Fear is the Mind Killer.” Panic creates a fight or flight response, where rational thinking is replaced by instinctual flailing. Individuals panic, participants in markets can panic, and organizations can panic. More often than not, the panic results in dramatic or even fatal mistakes.
Unfortunately, we have recent experience with horrific scenarios. What happened on 9/11 was unthinkable on 9/10. There were no road maps for dealing with the grief and the anger, and for awhile no one understood what was next. It was a time when the best that many could hope for was to process on taking the next breath. In all likelihood, we are still dealing with the ripples of this unthinkable day, and those ripples will likely shape the lives for generations to come in some form and fashion.
In addition to the pundits and talking heads, some really smart people that I know are beginning to let fear creep into panic. Discussions of how to grow, how to compete better and even discussions about the pursuit of excellence are being replaced with focus on retrenching, battening down the hatches and/or boarding up the windows for the storm on the way. Again, we would be naïve to ignore the signs and we would be naïve to think that anyone actually understands the impact of this horrific financial mess unfolding in front of us in real time, albeit drawn out over the past few weeks. It’s time to focus on taking one breath at a time.
While there is some probability that the worst cases will play out, I will place my bet on widely scattered light towards morning. There are many reasons why the world’s global capital markets cannot stop and why the earth’s burgeoning population and the world’s rapidly growing economies will not stop consuming, investing and yes, even growing.
As you look at your own firm and your own situation, it is not a time to take foolish risks. Frankly, it’s never a time to do that, so nothing has changed. It is a time to adopt a philosophy that seeks to find opportunity in chaos. It is a time to carefully evaluate your strategies and check your assumptions. It is also a time to consider making some hard calls on your future. Working for a firm in the post 9/11 world where the board and leadership had the courage to invest in reinventing the firm’s core offerings at a time when our competitors were scaling back R+D efforts, was a brilliant learning lesson.
It’s always time to improve your talent…either by investing in growing their knowledge and capabilities and by culling the herd. It’s a great time to evaluate spending, to hold marketing accountable to genuine measures of value creation and to deploy the best-trained, solutions focused sales force to serve your customers. It’s also a remarkable time to scale up your communications with your stakeholders and with your employees and provide them opportunities to share their many great ideas.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
At the end of the day, people must eat, people must clothe themselves and frankly smart people will figure out how to use the opportunity to challenge themselves and their organizations to improve. The rest will start boarding up the windows to hunker down for a long, agonizing wait. I know which team that I want to be a part of.
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