Having sat on both sides of the decision-making table, I’ve stood in rooms where budgets, contracts, or careers hung in the balance, and later found myself among those making the decisions, watching others stand up and do the same. One thing I observed in those moments has stayed with me.
The best idea in the room did not always win. Very often, the best-presented idea did.
Not the loudest, not the slickest, and not the one with the cleverest slides; the clearest.
The one where the person at the front knew exactly what they were asking for, understood the people they were asking, and was calm enough to let the room see that the thinking had been done. You could feel the room settle when that happened, a quiet sense of “we can trust this”, long before anyone had properly looked at the numbers.
The stronger case sometimes arrived buried under thirty slides of careful detail, presented by someone who knew more about the subject than anyone in the building, its recommendation finally surfacing just as people were starting to glance at the clock.
Everyone in those rooms believed they had selected the stronger idea. They truly thought they had made the better choice, and that’s exactly why this is so important and why it can easily be overlooked.
WHERE THE BUSINESS REALLY DECIDES
Think for a moment about where the decisions that shape your organisation actually happen. Next year’s budget. The supplier you’ll depend on for the next three years. The strategy, the restructure, the client contract, the promotion. A great many of them are decided in a room or on a screen, where one person stands up and asks a group of others to believe in something.
For many of your most capable people, that moment matters most. Months of thinking, building, negotiating and quiet, careful work come down to twenty minutes in front of the people who decide.
A presentation is not the wrapping on the work. Very often, it is the moment the work either comes to life or disappears.
WE ARE LESS OBJECTIVE THAN WE THINK
I want to share two pieces of research with you, because they put evidence behind something I had felt in those rooms for years.
The first comes from Colin Clark, who asked 24 business angels at a UK investor forum to rate entrepreneurs’ pitches in detail. How the pitches were delivered had the greatest influence on how interested the investors were. But when those same investors explained their decisions, they talked almost entirely about substance: the market, the product, the finances. The presentation had shaped the decision, and they simply couldn’t see it.
The second, published in the Academy of Management Journal by Xiao-Ping Chen, Xin Yao and Suresh Kotha, tells us what kind of presentation makes the difference. Across a laboratory experiment and a field study, venture capitalists were swayed by how well prepared and thought-through an entrepreneur came across. How much passion they put on show made no difference.
Put the two together and something important comes into focus. Decision-makers are human beings. However rigorous they believe they are, how a case makes them feel matters far more than they realise, but what earns their trust isn’t enthusiasm or performance. It’s the quiet confidence of someone who has clearly done the thinking and cares enough to make it easy for them to see. In my world, that’s the difference between performing for a room and serving it.
Let’s be clear about the limitations here. These studies mainly looked at investors rather than boardrooms, and one was quite small. However, investors are accustomed to looking beyond the surface to understand what’s really important. If the way a case is presented can influence them, it’s easy to see how it might also influence a busy leadership team, with a lot on their plate, that needs to make quick decisions before lunch.
THE COST NOBODY SEES
Here is why this matters so much. When someone with a strong case presents it badly, the problem isn’t just a disappointing presentation. The people in the room can only decide on what they heard, and if they never heard how strong the case really was, they decide against it. The organisation ends up making a worse decision, and nobody realises.
You will probably recognise some of these. The procurement lead who has spent months finding the best supplier, then presents it as a wall of comparison tables, so the board goes with the familiar name instead. The finance director with a sound investment case who can’t make it simple enough to grasp in the time available, so it’s sent back for “more work” and loses a quarter. The engineer who spots a genuine risk and buries it on slide twenty-three, where it’s politely noted and forgotten until it becomes a problem. The manager who is more than ready for promotion and undersells themselves in front of the panel, so the job goes to someone who simply came across better on the day.
None of this ever shows up in a report. From the outside, it looks like a perfectly reasonable decision, and everyone simply moves on.
That’s why presentation skills are so easy to underestimate. We tend to judge a presentation by the presentation itself: was it clear, engaging, and did it finish on time? But that isn’t where its real value lies. Its real value lies in what happens next, in the decision the room makes because of it. When a strong case is presented well, the organisation makes a better decision. When it’s presented badly, the organisation loses something valuable, and never even knows it was there.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE PEOPLE YOU DEVELOP
If so much of your organisation’s future is decided in moments like these, I think three things follow.
The first is who you develop. Presentation training often goes to the people who present most visibly, or to the ones who put their hands up and ask for it. I believe the greater return lies with the people whose ideas carry the most weight, in big rooms and small: the specialists, engineers, finance leads and project owners whose recommendations involve real money and real risk, and who are so often judged on how they present things they understand better than anyone else in the room.
The second is what you develop. The aim isn’t to turn your people into polished performers. Nobody needs them to become actors. Decision-makers respond to a case that is crystal clear about what it’s asking for, built around the people who will decide rather than the person presenting it, and delivered with the kind of calm that tells the room the thinking is done.
The researchers call it preparedness, but I like to think of it as the difference between a presenter who’s just trying to impress and one who’s truly committed to helping. The good news is, you can develop it, and I spend most of my working life supporting people in discovering that very quality.
The third is how you judge it. Not by how the day felt, however warm the feedback, but by what happened next. Proposals approved, pitches won, decisions moved, and people trusted with bigger rooms than before. These are results your leadership team will instantly recognise, because they show up in the business, not just in the training room. When you can point to an approved proposal or a won pitch, you have a far stronger case for investing in your people than any end-of-course feedback score could ever give you.
A PLACE TO START
It’s tempting to think all of this only matters in the big moments: the board presentation, the major pitch, the strategy day. Those matter, of course, but in my experience, it’s the routine presentations that often need the most work, precisely because nobody thinks of them as presentations at all.
The weekly team update, the monthly reports, the project review, the handover to another department, and the first ten minutes of a client call all consume a significant portion of your people’s time. Many decisions are made during these moments, gradually and often without anyone recognising them as decisions.
Here is something simple to try. The next time you sit in one of those routine meetings, notice how the room feels when it ends. Are people clear about what they’ve just heard? Do they know what’s being asked of them? Did anything actually move forward? Or does everyone drift back to their desks with a vague sense of having been updated, and very little else?
If it’s the latter, you’ve found where developing your people will make a real difference. Not once a year in the boardroom, but every week, in the rooms where most of the real work gets done.
A FAIR HEARING
Every organisation is full of talented, intelligent, capable people with ideas that could make a real difference. Some of those ideas get heard. Others quietly disappear, not because they weren’t good enough, but because the person holding them never quite found a way to help the room see what they could see.
No organisation can control which ideas its people have, but it can make sure the best of them get a fair hearing. Because the best idea doesn’t always win; often, the best-presented one does. Your job, and mine, is to make sure that, more often than not, they are one and the same.
If you found this useful, I’d be grateful if you would share it with a colleague who cares about how your people develop, or with anyone whose ideas deserve a better hearing.
HOW I CAN HELP
If you would like help with this in your own organisation, there are three ways I work with people:
– Presentation skills training for teams: small groups working on the real presentations they give, from the weekly update to the board.
– One-to-one coaching: for individuals preparing for an important presentation, or stepping into bigger rooms.
– Public speaking courses: open one-day courses in London.
If you would like to talk about what might help your people, I would be glad to hear from you at [email protected].
Research referenced
Chen, X.-P., Yao, X., & Kotha, S. (2009). Entrepreneur passion and preparedness in business plan presentations: A persuasion analysis of venture capitalists’ funding decisions. Academy of Management Journal, 52(1), 199–214. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2009.36462018
Clark, C. (2008). The impact of entrepreneurs’ oral ‘pitch’ presentation skills on business angels’ initial screening investment decisions. Venture Capital, 10(3), 257–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691060802151945
