After you have sat through a few hundred PowerPoint presentations, you start to see patterns in the presenters that you encounter. Hopefully, you have come across some truly inspired presenters that delivered memorable, meaningful presentations. Unfortunately, for every one great presenter you stumble upon, you may run into 15-20 bad presenters along the way (not including 30-50 average presenters).

Bad presenters struggle in different ways, but many of their problems can be traced back to nervousness, insufficient preparation, self-ignorance, and a lack of audience awareness. I’ve identified 10 types of bad presenters that can result from these four root causes:

1. The Speed Demon
2. The Ummmer
3. The Reader
4. The Eye Avoider
5. The Lifeless Drone
6. The Firehose
   
7. The Time Mismanager
8. The Apologist
9. The Wanderer
10. The One-Way Ticket

In this article, I profile the first five types of bad presenters. Before your next presentation, conduct a little self-evaluation and survey of your peers to ensure you don’t fall into one of the following “bad presenter” types.

Zero to 60 words in 5.6 seconds

The Speed Demon

It’s normal to get nervous when you take the center stage as a presenter. For this individual, nervousness translates into speed. The good intentions of a well-timed presentation go out the window as this person accelerates through their presentation material at a blistering pace. Whether or not his audience can keep up with him will determine if anyone can get anything out of his PowerPoint presentation.

The Ummmer

Another nervous tendency that some people struggle with is the curse of the “um”. Their content can be sensational, but the annoying frequency of “ums” can completely ruin the entire experience. You end up counting “ums” rather than listening to their message. Beware of Ummmer’s cousin, “The Uhhher”. Counting “uhs” can be equally maddening.

Reading books: good. Reading slides: bad.

The Reader

This presenter doesn’t know her slides. She hasn’t prepared adequately and as a result you wind up becoming more familiar with the side or back of her head than her face as she reads her slides. You quickly become bored and annoyed as you can read the PowerPoint slides faster than the presenter can read them aloud. Consequently, she isn’t adding any value. Nap time.

The Eye Avoider

Whether it’s a lack of preparation or nervousness, this presenter is unable or unwilling to establish eye contact with his audience. As a result, you begin to question how confident, sincere, or credible he really is. Additionally, you’re not feeling a connection with this presenter, and your mind begins to wander. At least if you want to slip out of his presentation, he won’t notice until the end when the empty seats outnumber those still filled by dozing audience members.

Monotone, motionless, and merciless

The Lifeless Drone

You’re excited about the presentation topic. However, your excitement quickly dissipates when the presentation begins with an inanimate object at the front of the room launching into a monotonous discourse. This presenter’s lack of enthusiasm for the presentation material is only surpassed by your newfound lack of interest in hearing the rest of what he has to say. The hands of the wall clock cannot move fast enough to end this boring presentation.

You might have recognized a few of these bad presenter types. Maybe one of these presenter types sounds a little too familiar. I know I am susceptible to becoming a speed demon if I’m not careful. In my next article, I’ll cover five more types of bad presenters that you will want to avoid — either as a presenter or as an audience member.

Tags: death by PowerPoint, Presentation Delivery, presenters