Four Presenting Styles: Which One Are You?

You have a presenting style whether you ever set out to choose one or not. It assembled itself from your personality, the people you learned from, and whatever has worked for you before, and now it runs on its own in every presentation room you walk into.

It is simply what experience looks like from the inside, and the difficulty is that you have almost no way to see it, because you have full access to your intention, whereas everyone else in that room has access only to the effect.

Here is what it costs you.

Why The Feedback Never Agrees

Your style suits some people enormously and barely reaches others, and the people it suits are the ones who already think the way you do.

Which explains something that has probably puzzled you for years. You give a presentation, and the feedback comes back contradictory. Too much detail. Not enough detail. Got to the point too quickly. Took forever to get to the point. That is not an unreasonable audience contradicting itself. Different people are telling you, quite accurately, what each of them needed and didn’t get.

Every room you stand in front of holds a mixture, and your natural style is doing most of the work for a fraction of it.

A Word About Boxes

There are as many presenting styles as there are people who present, and no set of categories will ever do justice to that. I have never been keen on personality types. They flatten people, they hand out a permanent label on the strength of a quarter of an hour, and sooner or later they turn into an excuse: I’m just not a details person, storytelling isn’t really my thing.

So, these are not four kinds of people. They are four patterns I meet more often than any others in the rooms I work in, and a pattern is only a set of habits repeated until they stop needing your attention. You are not a Commander. You have got into the habit of taking charge of a room, and habits are much easier to change than people are. Not that you should want to change this one. It has served you well, or you would have given it up years ago.

Read them and look for the one that feels familiar, not the one you would pick.

The Commander

Ask a Commander what they think, and you will usually be told what is going to happen. They are assertive, get to the point, know exactly what they need you to know, and move fast enough to occasionally tip into impatience. Things get decided.

That directness is the most valuable thing in the room when a decision is needed, and the other Commanders present will appreciate it.

It stops reaching when it doesn’t connect with everyone else.

The Commander is usually the person who knows most about the subject, and that knowledge creates a pull that is hard to resist: the audience knows less, so the job becomes educating them. The presentation turns into a transmission. The room ends up with a conclusion it was handed rather than one it reached, and nobody argues for a conclusion they were handed.

The opportunity is not less conviction, and not necessarily a softer manner. It is noticing that the room is not full of Commanders. The Analyst will not accept your conclusion until they have seen how you reached it. The Facilitator cannot care about it until they know who it lands on. The Motivator will not carry it anywhere until they have felt something about it. None of that asks you to stop being direct. It asks you to give part of your twenty minutes to the people who do not think the way you do.

The Analyst

The Analyst has done the work and then done some more. Precise, structured, and disciplined about time, and if they are enjoying themselves, it can be genuinely hard to tell because they are entirely absorbed in the material.

It is the hardest of the four to argue with. Whatever an Analyst tells you has been checked and sourced and can be relied on, and in a world full of confident people who have not done the work, somebody who has is a considerable relief.

Where it stops reaching is the room that wanted an answer. Slides fill with graphs, charts and bullet points, and while the stated purpose is rigour, the honest purpose is often to show how much they know. The audience is bombarded rather than guided, and they leave impressed and entirely unmoved, because nothing in the last half hour asked them to feel anything at all.

The opportunity is not less rigour. It is remembering who else is in the room. The Commander wants your conclusion in the first minute and will decide whether to keep listening on the strength of it. The Facilitator needs to know who this affects before any of the numbers mean anything. The Motivator will not act until they have felt why it matters. Your evidence is not wasted on any of them. It simply arrives too early, or without the one thing that would have made them care.

The Facilitator

The Facilitator listens. Warm, steady and patient, they go out of their way to support people, and they can feel exactly how a room is responding and adjust as they go. Their aim in any room is to bring everybody along.

People trust them, so they tell them the truth, which means they almost never present to a room they have misread.

Where it costs them is anything difficult. There is a hard thing to say, and they come intending to say it, but first they add a little context, so nobody feels ambushed. Then an acknowledgement of how hard everybody has worked, which is true and deserved. Then the thing itself, phrased gently. Then a softening, because somebody looked uncomfortable. By the fourth rephrasing, it has lost its impact, and everybody leaves comfortable while nothing changes.

The opportunity is not to become blunt. It is to see that your instinct to keep everybody comfortable serves the people who are like you and costs you the rest. The Commander is waiting for the point and stopped listening somewhere in the second preamble. The Analyst wants the substance rather than the framing. Say the difficult thing in the first two minutes, as you have more trust in that room than anybody else on this list, and trust that is never spent is not kindness. It is an unused balance.

The Motivator

Something happens to a room when a Motivator begins. They present with passion, energy and enthusiasm; they are persuasive, and they are natural storytellers who know how to reach people emotionally. The time discipline is not always everything it might be.

They can do something genuinely rare: send people out of a room believing they are capable of something they did not believe an hour earlier. They are often remembered, which isn’t the case for all presenters.

Where it costs them is what the energy is quietly in service of. The Motivator thrives on acknowledgement, recognition and applause, and will go a long way to make sure the room enjoys itself and likes them by the end. That bends a presentation towards being enjoyed rather than being used, and by Tuesday morning the warmth has survived, and the substance has not.

The opportunity is not to tone the energy down, which would waste the best thing you have. It is to notice who needs something other than energy. The Analyst wants to see the working before they will believe the conclusion. The Commander wants to know what is being decided and by when. Both enjoyed the last twenty minutes as much as anyone else did, and neither can act on it, which is the whole difference between being liked and being useful.

One Move, Not A Transformation

None of this asks you to become somebody else, and you would not manage it if it did. A Commander presenting like a Facilitator is a Commander doing an impression, and everybody in the room will feel the difference without being able to name it.

It asks for one move in a direction you would never naturally go. One story, for the Commander. One sentence about how you feel, for the Analyst. One unpopular thing, said early, for the Facilitator. One slide that proves it, for the Motivator.

That is most of the work, and it’s why presenting is a skill rather than a personality.

Find Out In Two Minutes

You can film yourself, and you should, but a recording only ever shows you what you did. It cannot tell you what it was like to be in the room while you were doing it, whether the point landed, or what the person in the second row had decided about you inside the first minute.

Our free Style Review is a short set of questions that tells you which of the four you lean towards, what it is giving you, and what it has quietly been costing you.

Whichever one you turn out to be, the things that make a presentation land are the same for all four, and they are here.

If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody you work with is one of these four and has never been told which, and it is almost certainly why their presentations go the way they do.

If you would like some help with your presentation skills:

• Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.
• Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
• Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.

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