pocketspeak4e

Business and Professional Presentations

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In many business and professional positions, delivering presentations is part of the job. Whether the task is informing managers of a project’s progress or pitching a service to customers, the skilled speaker will get noticed and, often, promoted.

Rather than being a formal public speech, presentational speaking—reports delivered by individuals or teams addressing people in the workplace (or in the classroom; see p. 255)—has much in common with formal public speaking, yet important differences exist:¹

Degree of formality. Presentational speaking is less formal than public speaking; on a continuum, it would lie midway between public speaking at one end and conversational speaking at the other.
Audience factors. Public-speaking audiences tend to be self-selected or voluntary participants, and they regard the speech as a onetime event. Attendees of oral presentations are more likely to be part of a “captive” audience, as in the workplace or classroom, and may be required to attend frequent presentations. Due to the ongoing relationship among the participants, the attendees also share more information with one another than those who attend a public speech and thus can be considered more homogeneous.
Speaker expertise. Listeners generally assume that a public speaker has more expertise or firsthand knowledge than they do on a topic. Presentational speakers, by contrast, are more properly thought of as “first among equals.”

Apart from these differences, the rules of public speaking described in this Pocket Guide apply equally to both oral presentations and public speeches.

Five of the most common of these presentations in the workplace are the sales presentation, proposal, staff report, progress report, and crisis-response presentation. The case study, described at the end of this chapter, is unique to the classroom environment.

Speak Ethically at Work

As in public speeches, the ethical standards of trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, and fairness (see Chapter 4) must infuse any workplace presentation. Such presentations should also comply with legal standards and adhere to internal rules and regulations.²