Emotional vs analytical slides

When making a presentation, leaders must balance appeals to logic and emotion — the head and the heart. The first step in reaching this balance is understanding your audience members. Are they data-driven decision makers who thrive on statistics and factual evidence? Or are they more likely to be swayed by personal stories and emotional connections? If you don’t take time to understand your audience, you risk creating an imbalance. What’s more, when you show up with emotional or analytical energy that doesn’t match the audience’s, it hurts your credibility. When presenting to analytical audiences, you want to pull back on how much you apply an emotional appeal. For more emotionally driven audiences or emotionally charged content, you want to pull back on the analytical appeal. They want to know that data has been carefully considered, but they likely won’t want to see 20 slides with charts.

(Adapted from “Are Your Presentations Too Emotional — Or Too Analytical?” by Nancy Duarte, published on August 13, 2024, by MIT Sloan Management Review)

Staying visible while WFH

If you plan to work remotely full-time or most of the time, how can you stay visible — especially when colleagues who are in the office likely have far more exposure to the boss? Here’s a tip: Make yourself physically visible. Even if your office culture permits online meetings with the video camera turned off, make a point of keeping yours on and ensuring your face is well-lit, with a professional backdrop. This may seem like a minor thing to do, and an overkill if other colleagues are keeping their cameras off. But if those colleagues are putting in more face time at the office, the people around them have far more data to use (in the form of interpersonal interactions) to form opinions about them and their work. If you’re working from home full-time, on the other hand, this is the only way you’re connecting with colleagues, so you need to be vigilant about how you’re presenting yourself.

(Adapted from “Staying Visible When Your Team Is In The Office… But You’re WFH,” by Dorie Clark, published by HBR Early Career)

The ROI of small influencers

Nano spokespeople typically charge about $50 for a promotional post or simply trade a post for vouchers and products in the US. We found that despite their modest audience sizes, these influencers yield, on average, a remarkable return of over $1,000 for a post — 20 times the investment. Macro influencers, in contrast, often command fees of well over $1,000 for one post but deliver only $6,000 in return, on average — a return on investment of six. For posts from nano influencers, a remarkable 7pc of engagements (likes, comments, or shares), on average, convert to a sale. This is more than double the effectiveness of posts from macro influencers, where only 3pc of engagements convert to a sale.

(Adapted from “The Surprising ROI Of Small Online Influencers” by Maximilian Beichert, Andreas Bayerl, Jacob Goldenberg, Xian Gu, Andreas Lanz, published on August 22, 2024, by MIT Sloan Management Review)

Identifying strengths

There are many reasons we tend to think more about our weaknesses than our strengths: 1) We live in a “fixing” society where many of us are conditioned to focus on our development areas over our achievements. 2) We experience negativity bias, with people giving more weight to negative data than to positive data. 3) We devalue what comes most naturally to us. The next time someone doesn’t perform according to your expectations, pause and take a moment to reflect. Ask yourself: What’s driving my expectations around this other person’s performance? Do I feel they lack a certain skill or strength because it is one that comes more easily to me? If somebody takes longer to complete a project than you think they should, for example, is that because they’re not good at managing their time — or is it because you’re innately strong at the work they’re doing? Reflecting in this way can help you see personal strengths that you may be overlooking.

(Adapted from “Identify — And Develop — Your Natural Strengths,” by Sanyin Siang, published by HBR Early Career)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, September 2nd, 2024