This cast describes how to give a decision briefing to your manager.

We need a decision from our boss, and we can't get one. What do most of us do? Complain to our peers. This is not a recipe for success, nor changed behavior on your boss's part.

Usually, bosses don't make decisions because there's less pain associated with not making it than there is in making it. Once a boss makes a decision, she has the risk of being wrong. But until she makes the decision, very possibly the negative is that we get less time to take action because we're waiting on the decision. In other words, "no" pain for the boss.

How do we get our bosses to make a decision? How can we present a chance to take a decision in a way that maximizes our chances of getting one?

1. Use The Career Tools Decision Brief Model: SOCRR
2. Situation
3. Options
4. Comparison
5. Recommendation
6. Request
7. Always Consider Two Hidden Factors: Time and Risk
8. Use SOCRR Always – Longer or Shorter, Versus Important Enough or Not
9. Effective Decision Briefs Are Virtually ALWAYS Pre-Wired

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This cast provides guidance on giving feedback when coaching directs on their presentation skills, AND a detailed template managers can use when doing so.

We got pretty excited recently when we recorded a cast about delegating the running of your meetings to your directs, and then being able to provide them feedback about it. You get to delegate, coach, give feedback, all while developing your directs, AND you get more bandwidth to think about the content of your meeting, rather than the process of "running" it. It literally was one of those moments when virtually every aspect of professional management came into play. If the meeting were about budgets, it might be the most perfect managerial moment EVER! [Just kidding. Carried away here – H].

Relatedly, several folks have come up to us at recent conferences and asked about HOW to coach and/or give feedback to their directs when they're trying to help them improve their presentation skills. One manager said to Mark, "okay, I get it, but it's hard for me. I'm in the meeting, and I'm listening to the content of the presentation, and THAT takes up so much of my bandwidth I can't focus on my direct's presentation skills. I'm not sure what to look for, and how to judge it. I end up just mentioning 2-3-4 things that really feel off the cuff, and not as helpful as I'd like to be.

To us, this is the perfect spot for Manager Tools. Managers want to develop their folks, and they don't know how, and we can provide some simple guidance that is still noticeably better than everyone muddling through. It's not rocket science – but it's just hard enough that most of us managers don't have the time to sit down and come up with some sort of way forward or template to use. And we see this as potentially the first of many such templates, or sort of "basic tools" to make our jobs as managers easier.

So, what do you look for when you're evaluating your directs in their presentations?

1. Introducing the Manager Tools 5-By-5-By-5 Presentation Feedback Matrix
2. What to Look for In Their OPENING
3. What To Look For In Their BODY LANGUAGE
4. What to Look For Regarding Their Purpose
5. What To Look For In Their Slide Use
6. What To Look For in Their Question Handling
7. We Don't Evaluate Endings – Too Often They're Messy
8. There's NOTHING Wrong With Changing This Template
9. Done Multiple Times, You'll Have a Written Record of Improvement

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This cast concludes our conversation on how to choose the right chart for your data and message in a presentation.

1. Never Put Excel Cells Into a PowerPoint Presentation - NEVER
2. Understand The Difference Between Slide Topics and Slide MESSAGES
3. Choose A Pie Chart To Show Parts of a Whole
4. Choose a Bar Chart To Show Rankings
5. Choose a Column or Line Chart To Show Time Comparisons
6. The Acid Test: Can We Understand Without Your Explanation?

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This cast describes how to choose the right chart for your data and message in a presentation.

There are so many things wrong with presentations today, it’s almost impossible to decide where to begin. We frankly hope that some larger firms will figure out that it’s worth the time (and therefore budget) to teach all incoming professionals how to give a presentation. The reason one training/HR executive gave for NOT doing this was that all it would do is make their employees more marketable elsewhere. Mark was stunned when he heard it – boy is that a reason never to train anyone. What’s more, there was no acknowledgement of the pain and suffering – and COST – of hundreds if not thousands of presentations every day at any large firm being terribly inefficient, let alone ineffective.

This cast is about one narrow but it seems widely unknown skill involved in developing any presentation: which chart should I use for this slide? We’ve seen too many managers and executives and professionals use charts that prove they’re not aware of how to choose. The right chart makes getting our point across easier. The wrong chart makes getting our point across harder, and can damage the audience’s ability to hear our next point, and potentially undermine the entire presentation.

Here’s how to do it right, for the majority of messages most managers deliver routinely.

1. Never Put Excel Cells Into a PowerPoint Presentation - NEVER
2. Understand The Difference Between Slide Topics and Slide MESSAGES
3. Choose A Pie Chart To Show Parts of a Whole
4. Choose a Bar Chart To Show Rankings
5. Choose a Column or Line Chart To Show Time Comparisons
6. The Acid Test: Can We Understand Without Your Explanation?

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This cast concludes our conversation on how to dress when giving presentations.

The outline of this show and last is pretty simple:

1. WHY Presentations Matter
2. Dress Up
3. Keep it Simple
4. Get a Haircut/Get Styled
5. Empty Your Pockets
6. Minimize Jewelry
7. Highlight Your Arms

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This cast recommends how to dress when giving presentations.

We've said it before: effective presentations are an opportunity to enhance one's career. We've seen friends of ours careers go up and down based on how one or a series of talks or speeches or just staff meeting slide decks go.

Since they seem to be an unheralded part of career success, Career Tools will return to this topic many times. And, those of you in small companies, or entrepreneurs, or public sector workers, or not for profits: all of this still applies. If you're having to make a client pitch, or asking for funds, or even just briefing your 2 person staff, doing well in presentations impresses others, and impressions make a difference in one's career.

The Career Tools Rule of Presentations is simple: Presentations are the internal career equivalent of INTERVIEWS. They're THAT important. Those of us who spend time developing our skills for them will out perform those that don't.

1. WHY Presentations Matter
2. Dress Up
3. Keep it Simple
4. Get a Haircut/Get Styled
5. Empty Your Pockets
6. Minimize Jewelry
7. Highlight Your Arms

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This cast describes how to be effective when you are one of several speakers to a larger audience.

What do we do when we're one of a number of speakers, at, say, a daylong conference or a management offsite, and no ground rules have been set? Other speakers have come before, and there have been different approaches in terms of handling questions, timing, slides, introductions, handing off to the next speaker.

We've seen many professionals fall into the trap of accepting an audience that hasn't been appropriately prepared. This cast teaches the basics of how to deliver effectively when you inherit such an audience.

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The conclusion of our conversation on Audio Visual Equipment Use.

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Presentations are just like management – everybody has to know how to do them well ... but nobody is getting taught the right way. It's as if Kafka invented both of them, and we are left with only the dread. Even Toastmasters doesn't do a great job on slide use in presentations.

Because there is so much to cover about presentations, this is one in a series of many casts. In this one, we're simply going to describe how to use the two most common audio-visual tools: slides and flip charts.

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This cast describes the second part in our series how to think about being persuasive in a presentation.

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