SITUATION

Last year during my role as Team Leader with ABC Ltd, I researched, prepared and delivered an outstanding presentation to the management team gaining excellent feedback and securing engagement. It was also a great learning experience for me.

TASK

The objective of the presentation was to inform and update the team about recent trends in social mobility and equality and the effect on financial and accounting regulations and provide a summary including my recommendations.

ACTIONS

• I researched using a wide range of sources both online and offline and identified 40 articles from which I could extract useful data.
• I created a database using an Excel spreadsheet and categorised the articles, tagging them to show what they included, the industries they related to, the date referred to and the level they covered. For example, many were about gender pay-gaps, others dealt with poverty rates both urban and rural and age.
• I analysed this data and identified the core messages by subject matter and I then worked on producing a commentary. I was very aware that some of the audience were not familiar with this subject matter while others were experts. I tailored the messages so that they would be informative to both groups.
• I knew from my conversations with my manager that the team liked lots of visuals and so I created a PowerPoint presentation. I included graphs showing changes over the past 10 years and I also used pie charts to show ratios with the gender pay data for example.
• I used colour to emphasise the most important points such as main conclusions, areas where I felt more research would be good or where the institute could focus in future.
• I used straight forward language and avoided acronyms so that it was easy for the whole team to understand irrespective of their prior knowledge and of course I checked understanding as I went along. I made sure that there was at least one area that related to everyone in the team so that they all felt included and I showed the cross-connections between areas such as poverty and gender.
• The presentation went very well, although I was a little nervous at first. When done I took a series of questions; I had distributed the data digitally via our shared drive in advance and so the questions were challenging but I answered very well.

RESULT

I had very positive feedback from my manager and other members of the team in terms of the content and my presentation skills. I really enjoyed the experience, I found it challenging but I also realised that my own enthusiasm carried it through and I was pleased to learn that they were going to implement some of the next steps that I recommended.