The 13apples Blog» “are you ready to lead?”

Stress in Leadership Roles – Identify It

Emily Mowry — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:00:47 +0000

Part 1 of 2

STRESS – You hear this word a lot lately; so much so that it seems to be an excuse for everything that goes wrong in life. Take this sample conversation:

“Hey there, how’s it going?”
“Oh, okay I guess. I had a pretty stressful week at work, and I’m just really tired.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I had several stressful things happen this week and it seems like my mind is always thinking about something. And even when I’m finally able to rest, I still worry that there is something I forgot to do!”
“Wow, I can relate to that completely! It’s so frustrating too, because I slept 10 hours last night and still feel tired this morning…”

Sound familiar? If you are a leader of an organization, whether at work, home, sports, volunteer activities, etc. you probably have learned to accept stress as a necessary evil in your daily routine. But does this have to be the case? A recent article published by the American Heart Association says that more research evidence suggests a relationship between the risk of cardiovascular disease and environmental/psychosocial factors. Factors contributing to stress may include job strain, social isolation and personality traits. While there is not conclusive evidence identifying stress as an “independent” risk factor for cardiovascular disease, it can contribute to high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, smoking, physical inactivity and overeating. Even with rapid advancements in medical care, cardiovascular disease still remains in the top three causes for death worldwide according to statistics from the World Health Organization.

Understanding the problems related to stress is pretty straightforward, but how do you find a simple solution for reducing stress in your life? Go to the self-help section of the bookstore and you will find a plethora of how-to-reduce-stress-in-your-life books. While most of these books present good tips based on quality research, you often end up adding more stress to your day just finding time to sit down and read the book! Unfortunately there are very few things in life under your complete control, mainly the actions of people and events that happen to you. You can however, control to an extent some of the people and events you allow to affect daily life.

Open up your PDA or personal calendar and take a look at all the people, places and times that you have willingly entered into your schedule for this week. Being a strong and effective leader requires careful time management. Since you have become so skilled at managing your schedule, why not take the same approach for managing stress?

To make it easy to remember, take the word S-T-R-E-S-S and develop an acronym:

S – Sleep, T – Turn-down, R – Relax, E – Exercise, S – Sleep, S – Sleep

SLEEP

Notice that the word “stress” has three S’s followed by the same word – sleep. Why? If you can learn to conquer this step, you are half-way toward winning the battle against stress. The hardest part about this step is that sleep and stress affect each other in a cyclic pattern. Worry from stress causes sleep loss, and lost sleep increases stress levels and the cycle continues. How do you break it? Try putting it into practical terms. You typically work five days a week for eight hours a day at the office, and you receive compensation for your time spent. If you must take off work for personal time, you compensate those hours in some other way, such as using sick/vacation hours or working overtime. Why not take the same approach with sleep? Most studies show that adults need about 8 hours of sleep per night, depending on age and gender. A daily work schedule might be 8am to 5pm with lunch break between 12 and 1pm. In the same way, develop a daily sleep schedule for eight hours (ex. 10pm to 6am on weekdays) and enforce it. Now let’s say you have a project deadline that requires more time outside of your normal 40-hour/week work schedule to complete. Your supervisor may ask you to stay overtime until the project is complete, and take off early that Friday. In the same way, tailor your sleep schedule accordingly to make room for unexpected activities (ex. 9pm to 5am or 11pm to 7am). Finally, one day you start feeling some stress-induced symptoms: headaches, fatigue, higher blood pressure, etc. Imagine that these symptoms are the body’s way of saying, “You have an important project that will require extra stress management. You need to sleep overtime this week.” Which part of your schedule will you cut to get those overtime hours in?

Part 2: Stress in Leadership Roles – Defeat It

Powerpoint Presentations: 3 simple rules

Raj Menon — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:24:06 +0000

Manual: Competent Communicator
Project/Assignment: Speech #3 “Get To The Point”

This was the plan. You schedule one hour to make that very important presentation. You send out the invites with the agenda for the meeting. Your objectives are clear. You want to walk them though the process and then show off with some pretty looking graphs and charts from the data you collected.

Now it’s time to deliver. You run through the slides one last time. Practice, Practice, Practice. You feel good about it. You let out a smirk. You know you are going to blow them away.

Ah! But there is a twist. You are asked to delay the meeting by half hour. An attendee is running late. You can’t make this presentation without your full audience. Now you’ve got half hour less than you had planned for. You know that it’s going to be tight but you tell yourself that you will do it.

It’s time to deliver again. You start off with slide 1 of 10. 20 mins later, you are in slide 4 of 10. You have 10 minutes left and you feel pressurized. Somehow, you manage to finish you presentation. But you are not happy. You don’t feel good about it. Did you blow them away with all the pretty graphs and charts? You are not sure.

So, what went wrong? To start with, you packed too much information in your presentation. Then, you spoke too slow as if you had all the time in the world. You also did not re-prioritize the slides for your revised time slot.

Here are my 3 rules for you to use in your next presentation:

Remember the 5-point rule for powerpoint slides. There should be no more than 5 bullet points in a slide, with no more than 5 words in each bullet point. Now, if you think you would prefer a 6, 7, 8 or 9-point rule, sure. This rule is flexible as long as you don’t go beyond the 9-point rule. Please!? See, when you pack too much into those bullet points, you are merely reading them out. You need to grab your audience attention with smart, consise, effective bullet points. The bullet points are the take aways from the meeting. You need your audience to remember them.

You’ve to control the pace of the meeting using the 5-point-plus rule. After you apply the above rule, the next step is to make sure you don’t talk away like there is no end in sight. You don’t want your audience to get bored. Stay focused on the bullet points and remember to use no more than 5 sentences to explain each bullet point. Keep your sentences as short as possible.

Prioritize you content. Do not give equal importance to all your powerpoint slides. You may have spent an equal amount of time and effort to create them all but your presentation is not about you. It’s about your audience and what is important to them. Use more time on the important stuff and speed through the rest or if you are running out of time, simply cut out the fluff. Prioritize to make the best use of your time.

These are just some of the tips and tricks to give a effective presentation. Tell me if this works for you like it did for me. If not, what did work for you?

Your comments, please.

Effective Presentation Techniques

Raj Menon — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:00:38 +0000

Every once in a while, we are entrusted with the task of presentation. It maybe to demo a new product, to present a plan or to explain a new process that you’ve helped create. Whatever it maybe or how many ever times you have done it, it is not something that everyone is comfortable doing.

Here are some of the presentation techniques that I’ve learnt in my experience that you would find useful and help you conduct an effective presentation.

Setting the stage

Always start with an intro. Take half a minute to introduce yourself to all the attendees. If the demo is between 2 teams, your team has to be introduced as well, in which case it is better to let everyone introduce themselves. I say a half a minute for each person attending. Same goes for the other team in the room or on the phone or on the screen (video conferencing). This way you set the stage for a collaborative interactive meeting. I will talk more about this later in this post.

Do a brief intro on the subject of the demo. If you are doing a demo of a new product or an updated version of the product, take a few minutes to talk about the product, its purpose, the business need, etc. Take 3 minutes tops.

Reserve a minute to explain the structure of your presentation. Obviously, you have thought through the topics you will cover, the depth to which you will go to, etc. So, don’t keep it a secret; provide a “roadmap”. You don’t want anyone getting lost. It is a good habit to give handouts of this “roadmap” to everyone – a one pager.

Setting the stage should take you around 5 to 10 mins, depending on the number of people attending. I say keep the audience to a around 10 people to have an effective presentation, unless of course you are Martin Luther King or Obama.

Force a pause

When you dive into the meat of your presentation, do not talk away as if there is no end. It may sound like you are rambling. You do this maybe because you are fast talker by nature or maybe you’re just plain nervous. In any case, a presentation needs “forced pauses”. To be effective, you have to cultivate this habit. You want to give an opportunity for the audience to digest all the information and think through it for a minute or two. A good practice is to plan your “forced pauses” out such that you can invite questions from your audience.

In the beginning, I know it will be tough to implement this but trust me you will get used to it.

Don’t do all the talking

Make it interactive. Pass the ball around whenever you can. Let everyone participate. Remember when you attended a demo meeting and hoped no one will notice you dozing off. Well, you did that because you were bored. It is not (always) your fault. I say the presenter made it boring. He or She did not invoke your thoughts and make it interesting enough for you. So, when you are the presenter, please don’t make the same mistake. Let everyone participate. Think of it as a few moments you introduce to help you relax and refocus.

Ice-breakers

The most effective presentations or meetings that I’ve attended were those that were informative and enjoyable at the same time. These are meetings where the presenter or an attendee sneaks in some witty remarks – the ice-breakers.

How many, how often and what kind of jokes you introduce will matter here and if you push it too far over the limit, it can kill your presentation and most likely you would never present again. So, I must warn you that this technique is not for everyone. Its success is very dependent on your wits, the timing, the audience and most importantly your presentation style, which will differ from person to person. But if you can work it, you have a powerful presentation tool.

These are some of the many techniques that will make you an effective presenter. You may already be one or you maybe one in the making. Do send in your comments and share your tips and tricks with the rest of the world. Don’t keep it a secret.

Thank you for tuning in.