They clapped and congratulated you after your speech. You received a few pats on the back. Yet a nagging feeling is telling you your performance missed the mark.
You can likely recall times you’ve politely clapped out of courtesy, telling others, “Great speech!” merely to avoid sharing a candid – and potentially unwelcome – critique. Feedback can sting, especially when you’ve poured your heart and soul into your presentation. But genuine, constructive feedback can also make us better presenters. That’s why it can be essential to actively seek post-presentation feedback – and constructively apply it to your next presentation.
Why Presentation Feedback Is So Important
Great presentation skills, honed by feedback over time, can help fuel business growth by impacting anything from clinching a sale to fostering a strategic partnership. Feedback about a presentation can be helpful for presenters as it mirrors how your message resonated with the audience. But it’s not just a measure for engagement: feedback also can give you valuable insights into the effectiveness of your delivery and the overall content. By identifying your strong points and areas for improvement, feedback can help sharpen your presentation prowess.
Drawing insights from your audience, whether through surveys, feedback forms, or follow-ups, can help support a well-rounded perspective that pushes beyond superficial praise or criticism. But the true art can lie in your ability to constructively use critiques to prepare better presentations.
How to Elicit Useful Presentation Feedback
Obtaining effective presentation feedback can depend on how you ask questions. While it may be tempting to rely on general inquiries post-presentation, this can lead to generic and uninformative responses. Instead, you can facilitate an environment where your audience feels comfortable offering genuine insights.
Adopting the right presentation feedback method for your needs can be important, as is asking the right questions.
Adopt the right presentation feedback method.
- Feedback forms and surveys: A presentation feedback survey can help you get structured feedback. You can include questions that ask audience members to rate aspects of the presentation from 1-10, as well as open-ended queries. Using survey questions for presentation feedback can provide a mix of quantitative and qualitative insights. For in-person presentations, you can consider giving audience members a brief form to fill out while the presentation material is still fresh in their minds. You can also send out a survey via email a few hours or days after the presentation. For virtual presentations, chat feedback, post-presentation emails, and even in-app polling tools can help.
- Follow-up emails and calls: These approaches can allow for a deeper, more personalized dive into specific topics that brief surveys might miss. You may be able to get more out of a conversation than a one-off response, but that may require more time and effort from both the presenter and audience member. Direct interactions may also inhibit audience members from sharing honest critical feedback.
- Observing audience body language: Sometimes nonverbal cues can speak volumes. During your presentation, you can watch for signs of engagement or disinterest, such as nodding in agreement or glancing at the clock. This isn’t always possible during virtual presentations, but it can help to glance at chat activity or participant attentiveness if you can.
Ask the right questions.
To avoid the generic “You were great!” responses, you can use questions that prompt deeper reflection, such as:
- “What was the most crucial concept or idea you derived from the presentation?”
- “Which parts required more clarity or depth?”
- “Were there sections that felt redundant or that could be added to enhance the presentation?”
- “Were there moments you found your attention drifting?”
By leading with thought-provoking questions and creating an environment where honest responses are encouraged, you can set the stage for valuable, inspiring feedback. The purpose of feedback can include understanding what can be done better.
Tips to Constructively Receive and Utilize Presentation Feedback
If you want to grow as a speaker, being open to genuine feedback on a presentation can be helpful. But embracing critique while safeguarding your sense of self can be a delicate balance. Here are some strategies to help you extract value from feedback without hurting your confidence:
Let go of your ego.
I used to have a hard time accepting criticism until I attended a leadership workshop some years ago. We were tasked with a group project and had to follow two key rules: One rule stated that any idea voiced no longer belonged to the individual; it became the collective property of the group. Unexpectedly, I found it freeing to no longer own the “rights” to my ideas and instead send them off to evolve in other people’s hands and minds. From this place, I could begin to learn.
Listen actively.
At the same workshop, the second rule centered on the art of listening, emphasizing why it’s important we listen to hear, not to respond. During our group project, we were given a “talking stick.” Only the holder of the stick was allowed to talk. This created an environment in which participants were better able to absorb what was being said.
This taught me to really take in feedback that’s being shared and work to genuinely understand the critic’s point of view, without hastily connecting the dots or making premature conclusions. Fresh perspectives can shine light on areas we tend to overlook.
Seek clarity, not a defense.
It can be easy to get defensive when your work is under scrutiny. But instead of justifying or defending your choices, you can ask probing questions to gain a clearer understanding. Questions like, “Could you elaborate on that point?” or “What would you suggest as an alternative approach?” can help you dive more deeply into the feedback and potentially uncover actionable insights, rather than getting caught up in emotions.
Prioritize and act on feedback.
Not all feedback will be actionable or even relevant. It can be important to distinguish between feedback that can inspire genuine improvement and comments that may not offer much substance.
“I didn’t like the font on some slides” may reflect one opinion and not be as useful as “I noticed that some slides were densely packed with numbers, making it hard to read. It might help to incorporate some graphical representations.” The former feedback might be based on personal preference and lacks specificity, whereas the latter provides a clear area for improvement and even a potential solution. Once you’ve evaluated feedback types, you can prioritize the most beneficial insights and create a plan for implementation.
The Takeaway
The secret to growing as a presenter can be an openness to critique. You can do that by encouraging audience feedback through forms and surveys or follow-up conversations. Actually embracing this feedback can require letting go of your ego, actively listening, and prioritizing useful insights. While it can be natural to feel protective of our work, constructive feedback can help improve it.
A version of this article was originally published on March 29, 2016.
Photo: Getty Images
