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What’s more important in a leader’s presentation?

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Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 170,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: What’s more important in a leader’s presentation?

  • Consistency: The leader’s actions following the presentation must match what he/she said: 65.18%
  • Confidence: The way the leader carries himself/herself and delivers the message is critical: 23.08%
  • Content: The information the leader presents is the most important thing: 11.74%

It’s not the presentation. Your PowerPoint presentation and your pretty charts matter much less than the actions you take after you deliver your pitch. Your teams want to see your actions more than they want to hear your words. So instead of spending your time obsessing over what numbers or charts to include, spend your energy on figuring out and executing the required actions that you say you’ll do after the presentation. That’s what your team is really interested in.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”