Storytelling is a pretty important skill in any business context, particularly if you want to get attention from people at the top of the organisation.

Not just any storytelling, of course, poetry is not going to be much use in most business contexts unfortunately. No… business storytelling. The kind where you recognise that humans have a capped amount of energy they are able to spend each day on work and it is therefore your responsibility to make your interactions with any business humans clear, compelling and engaging. Particularly with individuals or groups that you need attention from, and whose attention is required from many people across the organisation e.g. senior leaders. Being clear, compelling and engaging will allow your audience to focus their energy on what you need them to focus their energy on, and not on trying to keep up with you.

And because PowerPoint, Word documents and emails are so often used as the main offline communication tools in businesses, to get good at business storytelling you ideally need to get good at those three things.

Let’s focus on PowerPoint for now.

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‍‘Being good at PowerPoint’ is an underrated superpower.

In medium and large organisations, slides are very often sent offline to a group of senior leaders as a way to share information that they need to read before meeting as a group to make any decisions. Most of the time, those slides are the only snapshot of your work that those senior leaders will see. More often than not, you are not there to talk your audience through your work, so your slides must speak for themselves.

Use that opportunity to showcase your work - and showcase yourself - wisely!

Too many times have I seen senior leaders receive packs of dozens (if not hundreds) of slides to read ahead of their weekly meeting. The slides are often wordy, poorly formatted, full of unnecessary detail, and unclear on what it is exactly that the group is expected to make a decision on. The kind of reading that any human would want to give up on. But your senior leaders can’t really give up on reading because they need to make sure they understand your work before stepping into the board meeting.

So… make it easy for them to engage with your work.

If you produce a bunch of unclear slides, both you and your work will be perceived as messy and unclear and you probably won’t get the support you need from the group. On the other hand, if you produce clear, concise and engaging slides, both you and your work will get positive attention and the group will focus their energy on what you want them to focus on. Simple.

If you do this well, senior leaders will remember you as one of the people with whom it is easy to engage, and they will want to see more of you moving forward, particularly on complex or critical projects. This is great news for you and your career!

Now, let’s focus on how you can leverage PowerPoint to serve you directly and immediately, and not just your audience or your future career.

One of the big truths in communications is that you cannot tell a clear, concise and engaging story if the story is not clear, concise and engaging in your head.

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‍Turning your story into a set of good slides will actually help you think differently and better - and it will help you do better work.

When you put your story down on paper (or PowerPoint) and start reading it from your audience’s perspective, more often that not you will suddenly become incredibly aware of how much (or how little!) you have to say, and that some bits of your story are not quite right. Maybe you’re geeking about a topic that your audience doesn’t need to know about. Maybe there’s even a whole section that can go in appendix because it’s ‘nice to know’ but you’re not actually asking your audience to do anything with it. When you see all the information in one place, you can then easily decide which bits you want to keep vs discard.

In addition, working in PowerPoint allows you to articulate your thinking in more visual ways e.g. using combinations of words, graphs and visual representations to share your thinking instead of producing paragraphs on a page. Doing this is incredibly useful for two reasons. First, because it keeps your audience engaged. Senior leaders usually see paragraphs of words all day long so seeing a visual articulation of your thoughts will be refreshing for their brains. Then - and importantly - using PowerPoint as a visual tool will also help you see your story from a different perspective. In a way, it’s like you’re telling your story in a completely different language which, more often than not, will highlight gaps in your story that you hadn’t noticed up until now. You can then work to fill thoseIt’s a genuine cheat code!

By the time you’ve gone through the process of articulating your thoughts in PowerPoint, your story will be much clearer, more concise and more engaging than it was when it was stored in your head. And once you get more comfortable with using PowerPoint in that way, you can start working on your slides as you progress in your work rather than the day before you need to submit them to your senior leaders (yes, we’re all guilty of having done this). This allows you to address the gaps in your work as your progress.

Of course, there are a few things you can do to make sure you consistently produce clear, concise and engaging PowerPoint presentations - see here.