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Thank you for the guidance on Presentation Mastery. Your focus on understanding the subject matter is very appropriate and surprising.
I am the person on the team who volunteers to make a presentation. Sometimes, we will be at delivery #5 (of 7) and a team member asks for help or a substitute. I feel that I can step through a presentation and deliver the salient points. Your guidance forced me to rethink, and here is how I changed.
At my location we have some fundamental corporate culture training that we need to deliver. As I am in Mexico, we need to engage our local training team to teach in local language and storytelling. I first considered it a presentation problem -- "I need to help people understand how to deliver the standard training package."
With some buy-in from my Staff HR, I changed the Train-the-Trainer session away from presenting the content to understanding the content. On Day 1, we delivered training and stories to the upper level of the organization and the training team -- actually a subset of "middle management" team. We focused on those who can connect with some of the embedded U.S. cultural metaphors. For Day 2, we worked only with the 10 people on the training team who will become local "experts". We had each team member present one slide that they thought was important. Then we discussed WHY and HOW to deliver it to the next level. There was much disagreement and discussion. I believe this strengthened our knowledge of the topic.
For Day 3, we focused on adding 3-4 more slides to each person's topic. We built around the key messages the supporting content such as videos, stories, personal examples. We used the standard content as inspiration. Sometimes, the games and examples fit. Sometimes, the team decided to use something different. AND, sometimes, the something different did not work. At the end of Day 3, we had a core presentation with the key topics focused at the "middle management" and "tactical" levels of the organization.
We have a continued commitment to review the content and our presentation skills by doing the following:
1. Review of the combined presentation -- common language, connected examples, speak to the audience.
2. Dress Rehearsal -- present back to the teaching team, participate and ask questions, make adjustments to the audience.
3. First Session -- Include team members we trust, seek feedback.