Team presentations – How to nail a brilliant team presentation
Good team presentations are greater than the sum of their parts. A bad one could be likened to a train crash. A complete disaster. It may be true that each team member can present impeccably when flying solo. But bring that group together and it really doesn’t work. There is after all no ‘I’ in team.
You can’t avoid the fact that team presentations can be very powerful. And it’s often the go-to format for pitching. Whether that’s to potential clients, board members or external investors. So taking the time to get the group presentation dynamic running smoothly is well worth the time invested.
Team presentations can pose challenges
But unlike presenting as an individual, presenting as a team raises some interesting questions. Who should start a team presentation? Who wraps it all up at the end? How do you ensure all the ‘parts’ fit together? And how can you get your handovers working cohesively? With potentially so many different ‘moving parts’ and a variety of different presentation skills and confidence levels, it makes sense to work together to plan, practice and present as successfully as a group as you can.
Here are some top tips that could help transform team presentations in your organisation.
Establish your roles within your team presentations
Before you even flip open a laptop, take time to really understand your individual team members strengths. Who is really good at explaining and boiling down difficult to understand ideas. Who can engage an audience and deliver supporting information through humour and video. Who has natural gravitas and charisma to open and engage the audience. Maybe they are the obvious choice for a closing speaker if they have the credibility and can sum up a call to action clearly.
Make sure your team presentations are cohesive
Team members may have differing views on the message they want to convey. This can be confusing to an audience. To make the team presentation come over as cohesive everyone needs to be working towards the same goal. Your team will be evaluated as a group and as a set of individuals so everything needs to fit together in a unified way into the whole presentation. From how and where you stand, how the slides look together, handovers etc. Discuss and agree together all elements in advance and make sure they are contributing to the main overall goal.
Always rehearse your team presentations
Practice makes perfect. Individual rehearsals are great but they won’t show how the presentation works when all the team comes together. Schedule a group dry run of your team presentation to ensure that once everything is combined it all goes well. Look at how the order of speakers works, who starts and ends the presentation. Work out any changes in the group rehearsal to avoid last-minute changes which could affect how together the group comes across.
Work together during Q & A in team presentations
The Q & A session can often be the most nerve-wracking part of the whole presentation. Think in advance and come up with a strategy to handle questions at the end. It can be confusing if too many people jump in to answer a question and again threatens to rock your image of a cohesive team. It’s often a good idea to have an overall leader who can direct questions to the most relevant team member.
Support each other and be united
If you want to inspire confidence in your audience remember that you are all in this together. Teamwork is not an option in this case! Be mindful of your other team members, help them out if you can, and be supportive. Little things like listening attentively during others part in the presentation, arriving on time, and not flicking through your notes or slides while others are speaking. Remember too non-verbal communication. Watch your body language while on stage – avoid eye-rolls, arm-crossing and looking bored for example.
Present as a unified team
Would any of your team benefit from some help with team presentations then our module ‘Present as a Unified Team’ could really help.
This module reveals the secrets of brilliant team presenting. Whether you are delivering formal or informal pitches or presentations, discover the practical techniques that enable teams to present themselves as a united, cohesive group.
