University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
What’s Your Presentation Persona?
Book

What’s Your Presentation Persona?

Discover Your Unique Communication Style and Succeed in Any Arena

Scott Schwertly and Sunday Mancini
McGraw-Hill, 2017
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Applicable
  • Insider's Take

Recommendation

To make a successful presentation, you need to identify your primary presentation style, which is an expression of your psychological makeup. You cannot present well or connect with your audience if you don’t know who you are. Presentation experts Scott Schwertly and Sunday Mancini introduce 16 basic “presentation personas” and list their defining personality traits. Their informative manual provides useful tips on how to identify your innate style so you can become a better presenter. To help determine where you fit within the 16 personas, try Schwertly’s and Mancini’s free online self-assessment tool, the “Badge.” It explains how your personality assets shape your public speaking and how to work with your strengths. getAbstract recommends this outstanding guide to everyone who makes presentations, and to those who manage them.   

Summary

Self-Awareness

Microsoft estimates that some 30 million people make presentations each day. However, the majority of those presentations don’t work, because people are largely unaware of their impact as speakers.

Every speaker has strengths and weaknesses that emerge in four presentation areas, or so called “quadrants.” The way you perform in each of these areas when you’re giving a presentation – in combination with your personality traits – will determine your “presentation persona.”

Presentation Quadrants

The four quadrants are:

  1. “Exploration” – This quadrant focuses on preparation, research and rehearsal, the activities you undertake to prepare for making a public presentation.  
  2. “Sharing” – This quadrant focuses on how well you share information with an audience and how you deliver your presentation and its message. It covers your “charisma, confidence, humor, authenticity” and similar personal factors.
  3. “Response” – This quadrant focuses on how the audience you’re talking to reacts to your presentation.
  4. “Durability...

About the Authors

Scott Schwertly is the CEO of Ethos3, a presentation design and training company where Sunday Mancini was content strategist. Their “Badge” presentation tool is available at http://ethos3.com/treats/introduction.

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