Presentation Skills for Staff and Team Meetings
A practical checklist for fitness, sport, and health professionals
The most popular series on this blog is my How Great Coaches Speak series. Since the start of 2022, I’ve published 18 articles in the series. While writing them, I had the opportunity to watch many coaches lead staff and team meetings.
Throughout that process, I noticed what coaches did well and what they could do better.
Today, I want to give you a practical checklist to follow when you speak or present to your staff or team.
This checklist is meant to help you elevate your coaching presence, improve the clarity of your message, and increase staff/player engagement.
I’ve organized the checklist into three categories for easy reading.
1/ Environment:
✅ Don’t stand behind a lectern. It covers up ~70% of your body and often becomes a physical crutch. It limits the physical connection you need to make with your group. Either move away from the lectern or move the lectern out of the way.
✅ If you’re seated around a table and delivering content from a screen at the front of the room (as shown in the picture below), sit in the front left seat closest to the screen. This does two things: (1) it limits the head movement your attendees have to do when looking between you and the screen, and (2) it makes it easier for you to read your content which typically moves left to right.
✅ If you’re leading the meeting or presenting in a large auditorium-style room, manage listener proximity. Unless all the seats are full, encourage people to sit toward the front of the room and close to one another. There are several benefits to doing this: (1) you won’t have to strain your voice to reach the back of the room, (2) when your listeners are closer to the front, they’re more compelled to pay attention, and (3) when people sit closer together, they feed off of one another’s energy.
2/ Body Language and Paralanguage (Voice):
✅ When speaking, look at and speak to the individuals in front of you — one at a time. The only way to engage a group is to engage the individuals that make up that group.
✅ Face the people you’re speaking to so your voice travels toward them. If you need to physically turn away from them (to walk somewhere, look over at your slides, look down at your notes, etc.), stop talking until you get to where you’re going.
✅ Keep your hands free (out of your pockets, apart, down by your sides, etc.) so you can use them to gesture when naturally inclined. Read more about the value of gesturing HERE.
✅ Stand still. Constant movement is distracting. It forces your listeners to visually track you while listening to and processing your words — how exhausting! If you’re moving, you should have a legitimate reason.
✅ Look at and speak to the person farthest away from you first. Doing this will ensure your volume is appropriate for the space. If you want to read an outstanding article on the importance of your coaching voice, check out the one Dave Cripps wrote for Sportsmith.
3/ Supporting Visuals (presentation slides, video, flipchart, whiteboard):
✅ Seth Godin once said, “slides are free.” I say, better to have more presentation slides with less content on each than a couple of slides jam-packed with content. An added benefit of using more slides with less content: you’ll change slides more often, making your listeners feel like progress is being made. No one likes to sit on the same slide for several minutes.
✅ Your presentation slides should have visual consistency (same color scheme, typeface, and visual hierarchy). Why? Because it gives your listeners less to adjust to each time you change slides. If your slides look different from one another, your listeners have to reorient themselves to the slide's design before engaging with the content.
✅ When creating presentation slides, abide by a minimum font size (mine’s 24 point in PowerPoint). That means I don’t allow myself to use text smaller than size 24 point when I create a presentation. Why? Two reasons: (1) if I’m presenting in person, anything less than 24 points gets too small for people sitting farther from the screen (2) if I’m using less than 24 points, it’s probably because I’m trying to put too much information on that slide.
✅ As soon as you show people a presentation slide, they’ll read everything they see. If you don’t want them to read ahead of you, don’t show them all the information from the get-go. Instead, set up each piece of content as a build to add to the slide only when you’re ready to discuss it.
✅ If you’re going to show a video, you need to bookend it. Before hitting ‘play’, tell your listeners: (1) what you’re going to show them (2) why you’re showing it to them (3) what specifically you want them to notice. After playing the video, remind your listeners what they saw and why it matters.
✅ If you’re going to draw on a flipchart during your meeting: (1) write big and legibly (2) consider stenciling what you want to write/draw with a pencil before your meeting, then trace over it with a marker during your meeting (3) try not to talk while you’re writing on the flipchart because your back is probably turned toward your listeners.
✅ If you’re going to use a whiteboard to share information: (1) write legibly (2) try starting on the left and progressing right (3) offer people the chance to take a picture of the whiteboard before you erase it.
Now, the fun part. Let’s discuss this live!
I’m hosting a live Q&A session on Zoom specific to the information covered in this article (for free).
If you have questions on anything you’ve read or want to work through specific scenarios or hypotheticals on how you’d apply what’s here, join me on Friday March 10th at 10am PST / 1pm EST.
👉 To join: Email me at FitToSpeak@gmail.com and let me know you’re interested in participating.
*Or contact me at FitToSpeak@gmail.com to set up a private training session for your coaching staff.
If you haven’t heard, I just launched the e-learning version of my Speak Without Filler Words workshop.
Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Jenny