AXIOM Insights Podcast – Presentation Skills for Technical Staff

Scott Rutherford
Hello and welcome to the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development Podcast. I’m Scott Rutherford. This podcast series focuses on creating and supporting organizational performance through learning. 

Communication, of course, is a critical skill in every organization. At the same time, presentations and public speaking makes many people uncomfortable. And so my guest today is an author and consultant who’s an expert in supporting the need to advance presentation skills, particularly among technical staff.

Neil Thompson’s path starts as an engineer in the medical device industry. He says after one too many failed presentations, he knew he had to improve, and thus he started Teach the Geek, where he works with technical professionals to improve presentation skills. He created the Teach the Geek online public speaking course and hosts the Teach the Geek podcast where he speaks with technical professionals about their public speaking journeys. And his book, Teach the Geek to Speak is a guide and workbook for professionals in STEM fields.

And so with that, Neil, welcome and I’m glad you’re here.

Neil Thompson
I’m glad to be here too. Thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott Rutherford
So, Neil, maybe you could… I gave the very brief introduction, but tell the story from when you were working as an engineer. What sparked your awareness of the need to focus on communication skills? What did you experience and what did you see?

Neil Thompson
When I first started working, my first job was as a research associate. I did a lot of work in a lab. There was no speaking to that role at all. I did a lot of experiments and passed off whatever I discovered to my boss and he would present to his boss. And I really like that arrangement. It certainly wasn’t an arrangement that I was upset about.

It wasn’t until I started my second job as a product development engineer that I had to start giving presentations in front of management, Although I’ll say that I didn’t know that was going to be part of the job. When I took the job, I thought it was going to be very similar to the job that I had before as a resource associate.

But I was called into my boss’s office one day and he told me I was going to be a project lead. And I asked him, what does that mean? But essentially, a project lead was someone who had to take on the role of a project manager because the company was too cheap to hire project managers. So they pushed off a lot of that responsibility onto the product development engineers, one of which was giving presentations in front of management on a monthly basis on project status.

So we’re talking the CEO, the CMO, CTO, C fill-in-the-blank O, all the Cs sitting in front of sitting in a room listening to project leads give project status updates and I was one of those project leads and those first few presentations were rough at best. I didn’t know it was possible to sweat that profusely from one’s body, Scott. Yet there I was doing exactly that. It was as if I got out the shower. It was gross.

But I knew I wasn’t doing such a great job because after the presentation I would get a lot of questions, that I thought I had answered during the presentation. But looking back on it now, and this is over 15 years ago, I think the big issue I had is, having all this technical expertise, but just not being able to put it in such a way that non technical people could understand. And it wasn’t until my project got canceled actually, that I got that wake-up call that maybe this is something I need to get better at. You thought I would have gotten the message after maybe that first presentation, but I didn’t.

Oftentimes what I would do is I’d slap slides together and read them and try to get out of there as quickly as possible. But I never got out there as quickly as possible. So when my project got canceled, I had to really figure out, well, maybe this is something I need to get better at. And as I said, this is over 15 years ago and I still think maybe if I was just a little better at just explaining the importance of this project that I could have saved it. I suppose we’ll never know. But once I really decided that I wanted to get better at giving presentations, I joined Toastmasters. For those of you all that don’t know, it’s an international organization, chapters all over the world with people who value the importance of public speaking, and they are offered a forum to get better at it. So no matter where I was living, even after I left that particular company, I joined a Toastmasters club in my area.

And then I also looked for opportunities even outside of Toastmasters to give presentations to. It wasn’t something that I was avoiding like I did with that first job that I had as a research associate. Now I actually saw the benefit of giving presentations and public speaking generally. So I looked for opportunities to get better at it. And once I did get better at it, then I thought, well, it’s not just me that struggles with this as a technical person. In fact, even when I had that job as a project lead, I used to sit in on some of the other presentations given by the other project leads. And I noticed, well, they weren’t all that much better at this whole public speaking thing than I was. So I thought there was definitely something There. And that essentially was the genesis of at least the idea of where Teach The Geek came from. And essentially what it is is me as a technical person helping other technical people with their presentation skills. So maybe they don’t have to be that sweaty engineer standing in front of the CEO giving presentations.

Scott Rutherford
So in that moment, do you think the gap is practice? Because you mentioned Toastmasters and the value of doing public speaking and practicing the activity, which I think is valuable, of course. But the other facet, I imagine, is translating your domain knowledge as a technical expert to an audience who probably doesn’t share your perhaps love of the details, to put it that way.

Neil Thompson
Oh, 100%. I think with a lot of us technical people, we become enamored with the features and with the work that we’re doing, and we just assume that everyone else is going to find it as interesting as we do. And then we get up and start talking and realize that that’s not the case. But it’s so interesting that we may even think that way, because if we were, we were actually thought about it. We’ve been in situations where we’ve been in the audience and someone is delving really deep into details on something that perhaps we’re not interested in, and yet we expect that people are interested in what we have to talk [about], what we have to say. It’s pretty hypocritical if you think about it. But, yeah, I think a big issue that a lot of us have is having a whole lot of technical expertise and just assuming that other people are going to be interested in it and then realizing that perhaps their interests aren’t the same as ours and what they’re actually there for, why they’re sitting in the presentation in the first place, is to get something out of it that perhaps we’re not offering. But if we were to think about, well, what do these people who are sitting in this presentation actually want to get from us, from this presentation? Well, now we’re able to tailor our presentations better to meet their needs.

Scott Rutherford
So that’s an important, we can call it calibration, I guess, to understand your audience and tailor your approach. For the technical professional walking into the room for the first time, though, how do you make that leap? How do you advise people to understand where their audience is coming from, especially if it’s a new group or a new environment?

Neil Thompson
Well, certainly before you even get up in front of there, you could do some homework, ask around to the people who are, who even brought you in to give this presentation, who’s going to be in the audience and what kind of information do you think that they need to get from this presentation?

 If you actually know the people that are going to be in the audience, you can even ask them yourselves. I mean, I had to give presentations in front of management. These are people who are really busy, these C level executives, so I didn’t have the opportunity to ask them directly, but I’d go to their administrative assistants and ask them. But I’d go to the administrative assistant or the CEO and ask her, what kind of information do you think your boss is going to want to get from this type of presentation? And oftentimes they were very helpful in providing insights. So that by the time it was time to give that presentation, I wasn’t giving them a whole lot of technical detail that they had no need for. I was actually giving them what they wanted to hear.

Scott Rutherford
Right. It’s interesting that you mention the administrative assistant, as I’ve over the years kind of referred to the admin assistant or the Executive assistant to a senior role as almost the whisperer of that person, because so much of their role is understanding what that executive needs and how they like to consume and how they best consume information. So tapping into that and just asking them to perhaps coach you makes so much sense to me.

Neil Thompson
Oh yeah. I mean, that is certainly something that I eventually came to. As I mentioned, when I first started giving those presentations, I wasn’t asking anyone anything. I was putting a bunch of stuff on slides and I was getting up in front of these people and reading slides. I wasn’t even looking at people and looking back on it, I don’t even know why I thought that that would be a great idea and how that could be effective. But, you know, you learn as you grow.

Scott Rutherford
So how do you think the public speaking needs of a technical person are unique, or different from someone who may be in another field or another function within an organization? Is there something about the training that a technical person goes through, whether that’s in college or whatever, that focuses on the detail to the expense of the storytelling? How does that gap form, do you think?

Neil Thompson 
Storytelling? What are you talking about, Scott? We don’t know, we don’t know anything about storytelling. That comes after you leave engineering school.

And you start giving presentations and maybe people tell you add stories to your presentation, and even then you’re thinking, how does this even relate to a technical presentation? But yeah, I mean, it really starts with technical people wanting to be precise, wanting to present all the information so that people, so that they think that people can make more informed decisions but oftentimes what happens is people get information overload. They don’t really know what to do with all this data dump that you just put in front of them.

And then maybe nothing happens. Or then you get a whole lot of questions after the presentation that maybe if you had just included the most pertinent information, you wouldn’t be getting all these questions now because the person that’s asking the question wouldn’t be so, wouldn’t have been so inundated with all this information that you blasted at them.

So I think that’s a big issue that a lot of us have. And a great way to get, a great way to address it is when you’re preparing a presentation is to figure out what your call to action is. What do you want these people to do after the presentation? And once you figure that out, you can work backwards. What kind of points do you need to make that will naturally lead to that call to action? And what that does is it eliminates any extraneous information that you would have included.

You won’t do the data dumping anymore because you’ll have to think to yourself, If I add this, does this add to that call to action? Does this naturally lead to that call to action? And if the answer is no, leave it out.

Scott Rutherford
So how is that applied when we’re talking about, we’ve been sort of using the boardroom as a sort of de facto example here, I guess, as we’ve been chatting.

How is it different when you’re doing a large room, when you have say 50 plus people in the audience versus a small team presentation, versus frankly one… I mean, we do a lot of communication now in a hybrid mode where we’re communicating, sometimes just in Slack, sometimes email, face to face, zoom, virtual. Are there more similarities or differences to the way that you need to communicate based on the channel or the mode of the communication?

Neil Thompson
I think ultimately it all is about the same. I mean, ultimately what we’re talking about is communicating something that is useful to the person you’re communicating to. You have two people, you have the person doing the communicating and then you have the people that are receiving the information.

And you want to make sure that the intent of what that person that’s communicating is actually saying is reaching the people that are in the audience, receiving the information and making sure that matches up as easily as possible.

So I’m not sure that the, the format of the communication matters as much as just really being mindful of, as the communicator to make sure that you do as good a Job as you can to communicate what people actually want to consume and what they need to consume, which is the upfront you’re trying to tailor so you’re not giving distracting information, you’re giving them information which is cohesive.

Scott Rutherford
As you’re delivering, say, a report, how do you advise people to, or do you advise people to change based on audience feedback? I know it’s hard to probably say a blanket rule because responding to the audience again in a seminar room versus a boardroom where you have a smaller number of people versus one on a small group is going to be very different. The level of interpersonal feedback is going to be very different.

But I guess sort of a two part question, how do you advise folks you work with about how to incorporate audience feedback in their presentations? And then the second part is how do you adjust what you’re doing and how you’re presenting the information based on audience feedback and not get thrown off by that?

Neil Thompson
Well, when it comes to feedback, I think you really need to pass it through your own filters to see if it makes sense. I mentioned that I was a Toastmasters member for a number of years and it wasn’t uncommon to get conflicting feedback. I remember once I was told that I need to improve my eye contact. But I was told by someone else, I really liked your eye contact. So now what do you do with that information? What’s really helpful is recording yourself and then you looking at your video of you giving the presentation and then you’re able to have a better sense as do I need to improve my eye contact? Do I think I do a good enough job of improving eye contact? Because ultimately you can’t really please everybody. I mean, if that’s the goal, then you’ll fail every time because as I said, people will have conflicting information. And then also when it comes to feedback, I’m a big fan of listening, but taking it with a grain of salt because as I said earlier, you can’t really. It’s difficult to incorporate everything that everyone else wants you to do.

Although I will say that if a decision maker, someone that you really need on your side, says to do something, well, maybe that counts more than someone that’s not a decision maker. I think when it comes to giving presentations, you should try to be the best version of yourself as opposed to a carbon copy of someone else, because the carbon copy is never as good as the original anyway.

So I’m a big fan of telling people, well, you’re starting off with a baseline and with every presentation that you give, look for Opportunities to get better. Practice makes progress. I know oftentimes people say practice makes perfect, but there’s no such thing as perfection. There is such a thing as progress though. So go for that instead.

I mean, I used to work with a past client. He sent me a video of him giving a presentation and he asked me for my feedback on it. And I counted the number of filler words he used in his presentation. In a 40 minute presentation he said “um” about 100 times.

And I was able to mark every minute and second he used that word. If I had just told him that you use a lot of fillers, he might not have believed me. But because I was able to pinpoint every time he used it, it was more difficult for him to deny whether he was using those words or not. And now he has this baseline, okay.

In the 40 minutes I said 100 times, let me try to minimize that. And he sent me another video, I think maybe a couple of weeks later of him doing a similar presentation in 40 minutes he used 90 times. So he cut down his “Ums” by 10.

So that there’s the, there’s the progress. That I was talking about.

Scott Rutherford
At the same time, I imagine the advice is, don’t get hung up on perfection either, right? Because I certainly use “ums” here and there. And those of you who listen to this series have, um, certainly noticed that over time. There I go. But at the same time, it is a natural part of speech, at least for an American English speaker like me. So what’s the balance of trying to improve versus going? I guess you say you don’t go for perfection, but it’s really about getting comfortable, right? Comfortable with yourself and comfortable with the way that you like to speak to some degree, right?

Neil Thompson
Oh, sure. I mean, when I you mentioned in the intro, the teach the geek to speak course, and in that course you will get a six step process to practice and deliver any presentation. And one of the steps is personal inventory. What is personal inventory? It’s you taking your own feedback.

One of the one. I mean, I also talk about accepting or listening to other people’s feedback, but your own feedback matters as well. So it’s being able to balance the both of them. And I take your point. Trying to minimize your filler words to the point where you don’t have any, that’s not all that realistic.

But trying to minimize them as much as possible can really help in other people being willing to listen to your presentation. What you have to say. This actually makes me think of an example of when I was giving. Well, I was actually doing one of my podcast episodes, and my mother called me after one of them, and she said that she had to stop listening to it after five minutes because the guest that I had said “um” so many times and she found it so distracting.

Made me think maybe I should do more editing on the podcast. But it also made me. It also made me think, well, it’s obvious that there must be other people out there, like my mother, who are bothered by filler words. And if the people that you really need to be listening to your presentation. Are those people, well, now it’s in your best interest to minimize those words.

Scott Rutherford
Right? It can be distracting, of course.

Neil Thompson
Yeah. 100%.

Scott Rutherford
Yeah. But the balance is, and I say this even from my own experience, is when you’re trying to minimize the distractions that you’re inserting into your own speech. You don’t want to let that get in your own head because you’re trying to balance, normally, as a public speaker, a number of different… You’re juggling a bunch of balls at the same time. You want to keep the content flowing and tell the story you’re trying to tell. You’re looking for audience feedback. You’re trying not to stumble over your words. You’re trying to remove the ums from your speech, perhaps, and if you focus too much on any one of those, probably, you’ll drop them all.

Neil Thompson
Yeah, your ums aren’t bothering me. Hopefully my ums aren’t bothering you. I think we’re good so far.

Scott Rutherford
But if we do, we can always take it out in the edit, right?

Neil Thompson
For sure.

Scott Rutherford
So one of the things I wanted to get into with you is the notion of communication skills for an organization as a quantifiable sort of performance metric. So obviously, communication is critical for having an organization that function well, not only internally, but externally to clients and so forth. But it also is a difficult skill to measure. So how do you recommend approaching that, to say, okay, well, if we’re going to try to take a team of, whether it’s a technical team or not, and improve communication skills, what’s a metric you can use to show improvement in aptitude or ability?

Neil Thompson
I think survey data can really be helpful. So if you have survey questions, perhaps on a rating of 1 to 5, is this presentation understandable? Is this presentation actionable? Is this presentation relevant? Those are just three that come to mind.

And if after subsequent presentations, the numbers increase, well, now you’re at least able to show that this person is improving in their ability to communicate with other people. So I think that’s one aspect and then also you need to provide that opportunity for those people to give those presentations in the first place. It makes no sense to offer any kind of training to technical staff and then they have no opportunity to use it.

Or perhaps they have to go find their own opportunities to use it. If you offer those presentation opportunities, for instance a lunch and learn, that can be really helpful. And then having people that come and listen to these technical people explain about what they do at the company, especially at these more tech enabled or tech focused companies, I see them, the tech people as the hub. Because if there is no product, well, there is no company. So it’s really beneficial to everyone else within the organization to learn what is this company about? Well, it’s about the product that we’re selling and if they know the product better, then they could probably do their jobs even better.

And if the technical people are better at explaining what they do better, well then that also improves the other people that work within the company. In fact, one aspect of that that I was just thinking about not too long ago, maybe about a week or so ago, is when a company is interviewing people, typically HR is the first line of defense. I suppose they’re the ones who screen to make sure that these people are qualified.

Well, perhaps it makes sense for HR people to be sitting in these types of lunch and learns that these technical people are giving. They’ll get a better sense of what these technical people do on a day to day basis so that when they’re screening potential candidates for these jobs they’ll be able to better screen.

So I mean it just, it seems like there’s, there’s no downside to it. But, but to answer your question, I think survey data with that’s more quantitative on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 scale where people are asking questions that are useful, for instance, as I mentioned, whether the presentations are actionable or relevant or understandable and seeing that increase over time, I think that could be helpful in improving or showing return on investment in such a program.

Scott Rutherford
You mentioned the lunch and learn, which is a really interesting dynamic too because I think for someone who’s a technical lead to be able to talk about the work that they’re doing, that’s obviously important. But the flip side of that is, well, it’s probably the listening part of the communication skill becomes very valuable too because if the technical team is not the one that’s writing the requirements, if that comes from another, typically another group, well, the conveyance or the communication of those requirements to the technical team and the understanding of that and the ability to probably query and clarify is business critical. Right? Because if you get the requirements wrong and build the wrong… the wrong product. But you know what I mean, if that communication fails in some way, then you’re shooting at the wrong target.

Neil Thompson
Oh, 100%. I mean, in the example that I gave with the HR person, you could very well be screening out great candidates. Because as you mentioned, those requirements weren’t the best because there was a miscommunication between the technical people and the HR people as to what this job actually is.

So I firmly take that point that if technical people became better at communicating what they do for a company, just become better at communicating generally, there’s no downside to it. Everyone can benefit.

Scott Rutherford
So you mentioned one piece of the Teach the Geek course that you have. Could you talk me through what’s in the course and what that experience is like?

Neil Thompson
Sure. When I first put the course together, there was no process. It was me sitting down at my kitchen table in dim lighting speaking to my camera phone on aspects of giving presentations that I thought would be useful. And when I sent this to a friend, she said, you can’t put this out. This is terrible. We can barely even see you in the video. 

Scott Rutherford
That’s honest feedback.

Neil Thompson
Get some ring lights or something. I definitely got some ring lights which I’m using now.

Scott Rutherford
And you look great now. Well taken feedback.

Neil Thompson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. See that’s feedback I took.

I ran through my filter and I thought, yeah, this is good feedback for sure.

And you know what’s so interesting, Scott, is when I first mentioned I worked in medical devices and in medical devices you have to follow an FDA regulated process to develop a medical device.

So the fact that I didn’t even use a process for my own course was rather embarrassing. And it was a non medical device person who told me to use or suggested that I use a process which was even more embarrassing.

But I got the point. I definitely, I developed the process afterwards and essentially what it starts off with is audience analysis is making sure that whatever you’re developing suits or is tailored to the people that you’re actually speaking to.

I mean, I mentioned earlier that I first started giving presentations that wasn’t even something that I contemplated and I would just get up there and see what I was going to say and try to get out of there. But you know, that didn’t work out so well, I think. Well, another part of the process is timing and that’s really, it’s so important.

I think it’s something that a lot of us don’t think about when we give presentations. It just, it takes as long as it takes and we’re not really thinking about it. But if you’re speaking to people, it’s disrespectful in my mind to go over time because you didn’t bother to practice what we were going to say. And when it comes to practicing presentations.

I’m a firm fan of practicing that you finished slightly under time. So, for instance, if you have 15 minutes, practice will let you finish within 13, because now you have two minutes to play with on the day of the actual presentation. You may say something that you hadn’t planned on saying, perhaps someone asked a question during your presentation that obviously you couldn’t have practiced because that person wasn’t around when you were practicing your presentation.

So you can still finish your presentation within that 15 minutes. The next part is speech structure and that has to do with what I mentioned earlier on developing your call to action and then figuring out what your points are going to be that naturally lead to your call to action. Then the next part has to do with filler words, and I mentioned that earlier as well, trying to minimize those as much as possible to make sure as many people as possible are willing to listen to what you have to say.

And then another part is, another part of the process is the questionnaire and that’s getting feedback from people and also taking that feedback with a grain of salt and really running it through your filter to figure out which feedback to accept and which one [to] not accept.

Then there’s the last step is the personal inventory I mentioned earlier, thinking about what you want to get better at when it comes to giving presentations. So that’s the six step process in a nutshell, right?

Scott Rutherford
So follow the process. Don’t be afraid to try and don’t be afraid to fail, I guess.

Neil Thompson
Oh, 100%. You don’t get better at anything unless you actually get out there and do it. You could read all the books, take all the courses, watch all the YouTube videos, but if you don’t actually get out there and try to get better at giving presentations, then you’ll just stay where you are.

Scott Rutherford
Well, Neil, I appreciate your time being here. I really appreciate your content and your advice. In the episode page for this episode we’ll have a link to your website, teachthegeek.com and that episode page is https://axiomlearningsolutions.com/podcast.

Neil Thompson, great to talk to you and thanks for coming on the podcast.

Neil Thompson
Thanks again for having me, Scott.

Scott Rutherford
This has been the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development podcast. This podcast is a production of AXIOM Learning Solutions. AXIOM is a learning and development services firm with a network of learning professionals in the US and worldwide, supporting L&D teams with learning staff augmentation and project support for instructional design, content management, content creation, and more, including training, delivery and facilitation, both in person and virtually. To learn more about how AXIOM can help you and your team achieve your learning goals, visit axiomlearningsolutions.com and thanks again for listening to the AXIOM Insights podcast.