The Benefits of Training from a Subject Matter Expert
Presentation Skills Training for Managers: What to Look For and What to Avoid
I've delivered a lot of presentation skills training to a lot of managers over the years. And I've noticed that the people who get the most from it are rarely the ones who arrived thinking they needed to work on their slides, or their structure, or their opening line.
The people who develop most are the ones who arrive with a specific problem. The board update that never seems to land the way they need it to. The team briefing that leaves people nodding but not changed. The one-to-one conversations where something important gets lost somewhere between intention and delivery.
Those problems are real, they're common, and they're not what most presentation skills training is designed to solve. Here's what I think managers actually need and (most importantly) why it's different to what they usually get.
Most training teaches presenting. Managers need to lead through communication.
Standard presentation skills training is built around a fairly consistent model. Structure your content clearly. Manage your nerves. Use eye contact. Vary your pace and tone. Control the slide deck. These are all genuinely useful things, and a manager who doesn't have them will benefit from developing them.
But a manager who has all of them and still can't motivate their team, still loses the room in difficult conversations, still fails to get buy-in for important changes? That manager has a different problem. They're technically competent presenters who haven't yet learned to communicate with authority and intent.
The difference between presenting and leading through communication is essentially the difference between delivering information and genuinely moving people. Managers need to do the second thing. Training that only teaches the first thing is leaving most of the job undone.
Confidence is a starting point, not a destination
A significant proportion of managers who come to training cite confidence as their main area of development. It’s a real issue; plenty of capable, intelligent people find presenting stressful in a way that affects their performance.
But confidence training, on its own, produces confident mediocrity as often as it produces confident excellence. The goal isn't to be comfortable presenting. The goal is to be really effective at it. Those two things can travel together, but only if the training is developing the right skills alongside the confidence to use them.
The managers I've seen develop most dramatically are the ones who stopped trying to manage their anxiety and started focusing entirely on the communication itself. Their focus was what they were trying to achieve, who they were trying to reach and what genuinely needed to change in that room. Confidence tends to follow when the focus shifts to the people being spoken to rather than the person doing the speaking.
Feedback is where the development actually happens
I'll be direct about this: a lot of training programmes don't give managers enough individual feedback. They give them a framework, get them on their feet, watch them present, and then comment in fairly general terms about what went well and what could be improved.
That kind of feedback is better than nothing. It is not, however, what produces lasting change.
Real development comes from specific, precise feedback that connects directly to the individual's particular habits and challenges. The slightly defensive posture that undercuts authority before a word is spoken. The tendency to front-load caveats that drains conviction from the message. The pace that's too fast when the material is complex and too slow when the room needs energy. These things are individual, they're specific, and they require a trainer who is genuinely paying attention and has the expertise to know what they're seeing.
This is why I contact every participant before a session to understand their goals and the situations they find hardest. It’s also why the feedback each person receives is built around their specific presentation rather than applied generically from the day's material.
The situations that matter most are the hardest ones
Most managers present most competently when conditions are ideal. Friendly audience, familiar material, no particular pressure. The presentations that matter most — the ones where the outcome is genuinely important — are rarely in ideal conditions.
Presenting a restructure to a worried team. Making the case for budget to a sceptical finance director. Handling the difficult question in front of the senior leadership group. These are the moments where communication either works or doesn't, and they're the situations that most training barely touches.
Good training for managers should be built around the high-stakes moments, not the comfortable ones. That means using real scenarios from the managers' actual working lives as the practice material and giving them the tools to handle the version of the situation where something real is at stake.
The best training changes how managers think about communication, not just how they do it
The most significant development I see in managers who train seriously is not a change in technique. It's a change in orientation. They stop thinking about presenting as a performance to get through and start thinking about it as a communication problem to solve — who needs to understand what, what needs to be different at the end of this conversation, what is getting in the way of that right now?
This change in focus changes how they prepare, how they respond to questions, how they handle the moments when a presentation goes off-script, how they recover when something doesn't land.
Training can create the conditions for that shift to happen, but only if it's designed with that goal in mind rather than as a delivery of presentation techniques. It's a higher bar, and it's the bar that development-focused organisations should be setting when they look for a provider.
If the brief is broader than presentation skills
For managers who need development across the full range of communication, then check out my wider communication skills business; Further Communications. it provides support on topics including difficult conversations, feedback, written communication, meeting facilitation, then presentation skills training is one part of a larger picture. It’s my mission to provide joined-up development for organisations that need both. It's worth a conversation if you're finding the brief extends beyond presenting.
Get in touch to find out how we approach presentation skills training for managers.
