Presentation Skills Training for Managers: What to Look For

What Managers Actually Need from Presentation Skills Training

Managers present constantly. To their teams, to senior leadership, to clients and stakeholders, at all-hands meetings and in one-to-ones. The quality of those communications has a direct bearing on how effectively they lead, how well their ideas land, and how their teams feel about following them.

Despite this, presentation skills training for managers is one of those development investments that organisations make badly surprisingly often. Either it doesn't happen at all (because managers are expected to pick it up somehow), or it happens in the form of a generic course that wasn't really designed with managers in mind.

If you're thinking about presentation skills development for your managers, here's what to look for, and also what to be wary of.

female writing notes in a presentation audience

Managers have specific presentation challenges that generic training doesn't address

A manager presenting to their team is doing something meaningfully different to a salesperson pitching to a client or a graduate presenting at a conference. They're trying to motivate, align and build trust. This is often while delivering messages that are complex, sometimes unwelcome, and always watched more closely than they realise.

The best presentation skills training for managers is built around those role-specific situations. Presenting a strategic change to a sceptical team. Representing their department at a board review. Running a one-to-one that actually gets through to someone. If the training doesn't address those real scenarios, it's unlikely to be a learning experience that sticks.

Confidence and authority are different things, and training should develop both

Lots of presentation training focuses on confidence, which is a reasonable starting point. But managers also need to develop authority. That is, the ability to communicate with credibility and clarity, to hold a room's attention without forcing it, to deliver difficult messages without either softening them to the point of uselessness or hardening them to the point of damage.

These are more nuanced skills than the standard presentation training repertoire tends to cover. They require a trainer who understands what good managerial communication actually looks like in practice, and who can give specific, useful feedback rather than general encouragement.

Individual feedback matters more than group instruction

In a group training setting, there is always a temptation to focus the day on input (frameworks, techniques, principles) and to use the individual presentations as illustrations of those frameworks rather than as genuine development opportunities in their own right.

For managers specifically, individual feedback is where the real development happens. Each person in the room presents differently, has different strengths, different habits and different situations they need to improve in. A trainer who gives the same feedback to everyone, or who structures feedback primarily around the theory taught earlier in the day, is leaving most of the development potential on the table.

At Rich Public Speaking, individual feedback is the centre of gravity for every session. We contact participants beforehand, understand their specific goals, and make sure that the feedback each person receives is genuinely tailored to where they are and where they need to get to.

The best training is built on genuine expertise, not facilitation skills

There is a category of trainer who is excellent at running rooms. They are energetic, engaging, good at managing group dynamics. But they often don’t have deep subject matter expertise in presentation and communication. For some training topics, that's fine. For presentation skills, it can be a real problem.

The difference shows most clearly in the feedback. A subject matter expert can identify exactly why a particular piece of communication isn't working and give precise guidance on how to fix it. A skilled facilitator can make the session feel productive without necessarily producing lasting change.

When you're evaluating a provider for your managers, ask about the trainer's own background in presenting and public speaking. At Rich Public Speaking, every session is delivered by Rich Watts, a former UK Business Speaker of the Year and double national public speaking champion.

Support beyond the training day is not optional

The most common failure for presentation skills training is not a training day that goes badly. It's that the day goes well and nothing much changes afterwards, because the learning isn't reinforced and the habits don't have time to bed in before other priorities take over.

Look for providers who build follow-up into the programme. Every manager who trains with Rich Public Speaking is entitled to a follow-up 1:1 public speaking coaching session after training, along with ongoing access to resources and recordings from their session. The goal is to make the development stick, not just to deliver a good day out of the office!

A person recording a speaker rehearsing using a phone camera and tripod

What if your managers need development beyond presentation skills?

Presentation skills are one component of a broader communication skill set. If your managers also need development in areas like difficult conversations, feedback skills, meeting facilitation or written communication, a focused presentation training intervention is likely to be only part of what's needed.

For organisations looking at broader communication development across their management layer, the team at Further Communications design and deliver bespoke in-house programmes covering the full range of communication skills. Rich Public Speaking and Further work closely together and can help you think through the right combination of development for your people.

Get in touch to discuss presentation skills training for your managers.

Other questions you might have...

1How many managers can attend a training session?

We work with groups of up to around 12 people per session. This is a deliberate cap. Beyond that number it becomes very difficult to give everyone meaningful practice time and genuinely individual feedback, which are the two things that make the training work. For larger management cohorts we run multiple sessions, which also has the advantage of allowing us to adapt between groups based on what we learn.

2Should managers and their direct reports attend the same session?

This is a question we get asked fairly often, and the honest answer is that it depends on the culture of the organisation and what you're trying to achieve. Mixed sessions can work very well as they create a shared language and reduce the hierarchy around presenting, which some organisations actively want. In other cultures, managers benefit from a separate space where they can be honest about their own challenges without an audience of their team. We're happy to talk through what would work best for you.

3Can you design a programme specifically for senior managers or directors?

Yes. We work regularly with senior leaders and board-level communicators who need development that operates at the level of authority, gravitas and strategic communication rather than the fundamentals. That work tends to sit somewhere between group training and one-to-one coaching, and we design it specifically around the people involved and the situations they face. Get in touch and we can talk through what that might look like.

4How quickly can you deliver training for a management team?

A focused single-day session can typically be designed and delivered within a few weeks of initial contact. We don't cut corners on the pre-session discovery work, because that's what makes the training relevant, but we also don't make the process slower than it needs to be. If you have a specific timeline in mind, tell us when you get in touch and we'll let you know what's achievable.

5What outcomes should we expect from manager presentation skills training?

The honest answer is that it depends on where your managers are starting from and how much they engage with the follow-up. What you should reasonably expect is that every participant leaves with a much clearer understanding of how they present now, specific and actionable feedback on what to change, and practical techniques they can use immediately. Managers who engage seriously with the follow-up work typically see significant improvement in how their communication lands within a few months. We also measure this wherever possible by getting meaningful feedback from participants' colleagues before and after training to give you a clear picture of what's shifted.

Contact us today, to begin crafting your speaking solution.

Rich Watts

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Presentation Skills Training for Managers: What to Look For and What to Avoid