Whether the occasion is a new year, a new job, a renewed sense of commitment & enthusiasm, or adjusting to new work flows amidst a global pandemic, the most successful leaders know there are habits, values, and best practices that will help them achieve results.

We’ve compiled an updated 10 point checklist to help guide you to be the best leader you can be!

Emotional Intelligence is the key differentiator that sets the best leaders apart from the rest. The benefits gained from continuing to develop your emotional intelligence are far reaching and touch every aspect of a leaders role. From personal relationships and influence to earning potential and career advancement, increasing your emotional intelligence will be an investment that pays off exponentially.

Bookmark our Public Workshops page for upcoming opportunities on Increasing Your Emotional Intelligence or subscribe to be notified of this and other Leadership Development workshops!

Klassen Performance Group – relentless commitment to developing today’s best leaders!

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As I work with leaders to increase their ability to influence, PowerPoint questions inevitably come up. Following the 10-step checklist below will help you create slides that effectively support your presentation with a leadership audience.

I can’t stress enough that PowerPoint is a visual aid and should not become the presentation. The impact comes from the delivery of the message, not the slides.

The best way to ensure that you don’t use too many slides or overload your slides with information is to create them after you write the content for your presentation. Once you have the content created, the following checklist will help you prepare slides that will effectively support your presentation.

Keep in mind, we are talking about creating slides for a presentation already written, not writing a presentation on PowerPoint.

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Clearly convey your purpose.
The best purpose can be stated in one clear sentence and should convey the impact you want. The purpose could include making a decision, allocating funds, agreeing to a course of action, etc. It may be helpful to put your purpose or objective on the first slide.

Consider your audience.
A leadership audience tends to listen in a comprehensive and evaluative way. They want to get to the point as quickly and simply as possible. Only include concisely stated, relevant information on the slides. Exclude redundant information and unnecessary details. For example, don’t include the last four quarters of data if you only need the current quarter. Don’t include an entire spreadsheet when you’re only focusing on two key numbers. Remember, a leadership audience is most interested in the trends or insights from the data. Although details don’t belong on the slide for a leadership audience, be ready to discuss them if asked.

Create headings or titles that reflect one clear main point per slide.
Your slides should reflect the logical flow of your presentation, and this step is the perfect place to test the flow. The audience should be able to easily follow the “story”. For example, you may start with the challenge the team faces and then go to the solution, the investment, the anticipated return on that investment, and end with next steps.

Use bullet points for supporting information.
The purpose of bullets is to make sure your audience gets the important points needed to achieve your purpose. Shorten sentences to clear, concise bullets excluding information that leadership doesn’t need. Bullets make your presentation more engaging because they allow you to be conversational rather than reading. Using bullets also eliminates the possibility of your audience reading a lot of content as you speak.

Add emphasis sparingly.
There are many simple options to draw attention to a word, phrase, or number including bigger font, color, italics, bold. Use them sparingly or they will lose their impact.

Add high-impact graphics or pictures to support the main point.
Pictures are a great way to grab attention and make an emotional connection. Use a relevant picture or graph to illustrate a point rather than bullets when possible. Keep in mind that you can emphasize the point you’re making by using a text box to write on the picture.

Avoid information overload.
Too much information on individual slides or too many slides during a presentation make it very difficult for an audience to focus on what it important. Only include the information that helps achieve your purpose using as few slides as possible. As you edit your slides, continue to ask yourself if the information on them helps you achieve your purpose. If not, take it out.

Guide attention through animation.
If you don’t want people reading ahead, use animation to bring bullets, arrows, or other information onto the slide with the click of a remote as you discuss it. If you choose to do this, make the animation simple, not distracting, and only use it when you want to guide attention.

Make sure each slide is easy to read.
Your audience should be able to easily read any information on a slide whether it is text, a graph, or a picture. Five rules of thumb for a readable slide:

1. Font size between 24-30
2. 6 lines of text with 6 words per line
3. Sans Serif fonts (such at Ariel, Helvetica, and Calibri)
4. Add a little space between lines of text
5. Make sure there is good contrast between text and background

These rules of thumb are meant to be guidelines. When you find yourself going against them, just make sure you still have a readable slide.

Avoid distractions.
Although the use of animation and various types of emphasis can be very useful, be careful to only use them purposefully and sparingly or they could become a distraction. It is best to avoid unique font, transitions, and sound effects altogether for a leadership audience.

Woman’s equality has come a long way, yet the heads of workplace are still predominantly male. In this Ted Talk Sheryl Sandberg goes over just what the problem is and why she believes it is still happening today. This topic has gained in popularity in recent years, and this talk is rich in real world examples and practical actions.

“I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, “Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.” I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it’s not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone’s nodding, because we all know this to be true.”

Click on the video above to watch, or view the full written transcript on this Ted Talk here

There is compelling research that backs the impact of our body language on our performance. There are some easy, painless ways to give yourself a boost of confidence before going into stressful situations that alters brain chemistry and impacts performance. We discuss this deeper, referencing this video and research, in our Maximum Influence course. Watch the video and challenge yourself to test out these performance boosting actions the next time you are faced with a stressful situation!

“…I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There’s a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?

There’s some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we’re forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you’re more likely to do this, but it’s also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.”

Click on the video above to watch, or view the full written transcript on this Ted Talk here

“… in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines. It is basically the interplay. How the parts work together. The connections, the interactions, the synapses. It is not the skeleton of boxes, it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence. You know, you could call it cooperation, basically. Whenever people cooperate, they use less resources. In everything.”

In a work world full of complexity, we could all use some simplification. You may find some of Yves Morieux’s techniques for simplification are just what you need.

View the full written transcript of this Ted Talk here.

“…So now I do that Tuesday morning jump, but it’s not any jump — that was September 11th, 2001. And when we took off from the airfield, America was at peace. When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed. And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real — and leadership seemed important. But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general. I’d been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn’t know it.”

In this entertaining Ted Talk, Stanley McChrystal talks about what he has learned over time about effective leadership

View of written transcript of this Ted Talk here.

“What makes a great leader today? Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers. But that’s kind of an image from another time, and what’s also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was, not a world that is or that is coming.”

In this Ted Talk, Roselinde Torres asks three provocative questions of leaders. I encourage you to consider how your answers impact your effectiveness.

View the transcript of this great Ted Talk here.