What’s Your Presenter Personality Style?

In order to give High-Performance Presentations every time, you need to base it on your personality.

There are four Presenter Personality Styles which are explored in Dee Clayton’s new book “High-Performance Presentations – Public Speaking Tips and Presentations Skills to Engage, Persuade and Inspire!”  

The book is based on our Presentation Strengths & Weaknesses Identifier, an in-depth look at your presentation style, with coaching to help you improve your performance. A short quiz will help you assess your style preferences so you are aware of both your strengths and weaknesses. It then details how you can use this information to develop a successful presentation style to suit your personality.

Here’s a taster of the different presenter personality styles discussed in the book:

Introverted Presenter Personality Styles

Introversion, as identified by Carl Jung, is about how people prefer to “recharging their batteries”. To increase your energy levels do you prefer time for yourself (introversion preference) or being with others/groups (extroversion preference)?  

Both Caring & Information styles tend to be more suited to introverts who like to spend their energy thinking about concepts and ideas in depth.

Caring

This style uses feelings, not just facts, to persuade others. Presenters are more likely to be relaxed, informal, patient and agreeable.

Potential obstacles:

• Speaking too quietly, especially with larger audiences or when you’re less confident in your subject matter.
• Unconsciously looking low status due to your preference for everyone to be equal.
• Inviting too much debate and look to others as if you lack strong opinions.

You may find it beneficial to work on your “Presenter Stance”: click here for tips on body language.

Information

This style tends to use relevant research, information and facts. As a presenter, you’ll have done a lot of research and preparation but you may not feel entirely comfortable presenting them.

Potential obstacles:

• Starting with detail without first presenting the bigger picture (some people may see this as a lack of strategic thinking).
• Taking too long to get to the key points and highlighting all the risks in minute detail rather than summarising key issues.
• Coming across as too cautious.
• Lacking variation of expression or appearing boring/lacking in passion for the subject. Consider developing your voice tonality to bring more emotion into your talks.
• Killing the presentation with too much information (aka “death by PowerPoint”!) You need to show data visually and simply, using a mix of line, pie and bar charts and only pull out data that your audience will value. For more tips on using visual aids well in your presentation take a look here.

Extroverted Presenter Personality Styles

Extroverts gain energy doing things and spending time with people and tend to focus less on the details. Their Presenter Personality styles are Results and Sociable.

Results

This style is used by extroverts who like to present brief top line facts and then move onto the next thing.

Potential obstacles:

• Not pacing the audience by moving too quickly, literally or figuratively, through the material.
• Concentrating more on a “tell” style rather than spending time gaining genuine buy-in.
• Assuming that silence is a buy-in and wondering why no one does what you thought they were going to do.

Top tip: Work on your planning, structure and delivery so that everyone in the audience can come along on the journey with you. This would translate into even better results, such as sales or sign-ups.

Sociable

For the extrovert who loves presenting, persuading their audience with feelings, not just facts. They like presentations to be light-hearted, entertaining and fun.

Potential obstacles:

• Being unstructured, difficult to follow and lacking clarity.
• Sharing impractical ideas without the supporting detail.
• Unconsciously looking low status due to your preference for informality and playing the joker.

Top tip: You may find it beneficial to live and breathe the concept that “the presentation isn’t about you, it’s about the audience”. Take particular note of the Audience Preparation section and the Simply Amazing Structure (SAS) chapters in Dee’s book.

Monkey Personality Style

Monkey

Monkey isn’t really a Presenter Personality Style but we include it for people who are nervous about presenting. If presenting is part of your job, then it’s time to get over your fear now! Once you’re confident, you may even enjoy it! Get started using Dee Clayton’s other book “Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeys” to overcome that fear, or book onto a programme with us.

These styles are generalised, so not everything about the type will suit you. It is, however, a useful starting point, allowing you to tailor your approach. If you would like more help with a qualified coach, check out our presentation skills training courses.