Bosses often tell their employees to speak “faster, faster, and faster” when the employee is giving a presentation to the boss. This causes problems for all involved. The employee giving the presentation thinks that the boss wants him or her to literally speak faster, so the employee starts racing through bullet point fact after bullet point fact on the PowerPoint slides. Any remaining interesting examples, anecdotes and tidbits are stripped away from the presentation.
With sweat on the brow, the employee finally finishes the speech and slinks away.
Here is what the boss is actually thinking when he tells the employee to speaker
faster: “My God, Dithers is amazingly boring. When is he going to tell me something I don’t already know? Doesn’t he know that I know how to read? Does he think I am stupid? What’s the significant of any of this? I might as well just read the handouts. This is torture. Would someone please put me out of my misery quickly? I can’t take this any longer.”
At that point, the boss now instructs the employee to proceed “faster” with the presentation because the boss figure it’s not going to get any better, so it might as well end quickly to minimize the pain. But it is crucial to note why the boss wants thing to go faster. It’s not because the employee is speaking to slowly or is giving too many interesting details or too many relevant stories.
The boss said, “Speak faster” because the employee was just too boring to listen to anymore and didn’t seem to be adding anything to numbers or words already on the printed out page.
The solution for the employee isn’t literally to go faster. The answer is to be more interesting, to add additional insights to the data, to explain relevance, and to engage the audience. So the next time your boss or anyone else instructs you to be faster during a presentation, you must realize that you need to be faster at getting to interesting content, not faster at sitting down.
