How to develop compelling structure, delivery, and rapport
Written by Dan Parry • 25 March, 2026
Presenting Article
There is an unsettling truth at the heart of presentation skills: you might have written prize-winning material, but once you’re in the room your audience is just as important. Your content may promise a rocket ride into the secrets of the universe. But if dull delivery leaves the audience behind, your presentation may fail to get off the ground. Here’s how to bring everyone with you.
Effective presentations can influence decisions, build trust, and initiate actions. Confident delivery strengthens your credibility and helps your career prospects.
Presenting well – whether in the room or online – begins with a multi-step process, parts of which can sometimes be misunderstood.
How should you prepare for a presentation? Start with a step by step process. Then, once you’re in the room, your carefully crafted structure must allow room for rapport – neither works well without the other. To build your structure, start with a process that includes:
Research your material beyond the level needed for your audience, so that on the day you feel – and look – authoritative. Research your audience so that you understand their seniority, experience, and familiarity with the subject.
Are you aiming to simply update your audience, or perhaps persuade them to act? When shaping the structure of your message, think about your beginning, middle, and end, along with the sentiment (emotion) you need to express – upbeat perhaps, or urgent, or cautioning.
Once you know your audience, your objectives, and the sentiment you want to convey, you can begin to assemble your content – thinking about phrasing, visual aids, data, tone, and duration. Think clarity over cleverness. Slides only play a supporting role, they’re not the main act.
Say it out loud, not in your head. Develop a strong start that will quickly win the trust of the audience ( – and give you peace of mind). Think about timing, transitions, and problem areas that might lead you to stumble.
During practise sessions, content is the main focus. Once you’re with the audience however, your role is to transform your dry facts and stats into an engaging experience. Your audience are human – with odd socks, unresolved issues, and thoughts about lunch, they’re not remote and unrelatable.
Fundamentally, presentation skills are about building rapport with people through storytelling, eye-contact, open body language, and a relaxed approach.
A lecture delivered from memory feels like it’s stuck in the past – without any sense of connection with the present. Rapport, however, is alive and well and living in the moment. It includes a dose of emotion that helps to make your presentation stick with the audience long after you’ve finished.
Presentations can be delivered in different styles, which the best presenters are able to blend together, choosing from:
Conviction in your argument will always help to make the case, no matter how difficult your conclusions, especially when delivered with logical structure and articulate agility. Audiences need to feel assured by the person they’re listening to. They need to trust the presenter’s words, logic, and conclusions.
Conviction, like sentiment, isn’t about decks or data, it isn’t even a well-constructed argument. It’s a human sense of connection, it’s what the audience latch on to. Other tips and techniques include:
Connect with the audience: Make it clear why your topic is important to your audience. Aim to connect with them on an emotional level. Should your content make them feel good, or scared, or concerned?
Keep it relevant: Talking about something people want to hear about isn’t the same as saying what they want to hear. Addressing something that concerns people in some way is a good way of getting their attention.
Care about your content: If you don’t care about what you’re saying, your audience won’t either. You might have to address people who couldn’t care less, but your enthusiasm might make them sit up and listen after all.
Engage in conversation: Treat presenting as engagement – talk and share if appropriate, and address the audience in a human way. Jargon is fine – when you’re sure everyone knows what it means and it’s relevant.
Keep it clear and concise: Streamline your delivery, keep on topic, and don’t worry about slipping up or saying the wrong thing. Your audience are looking for human connection far more than perfection.
Try not to treat your presentation as a memory test. If you’re worried and tense, with your brain scrunched in readiness, you’ll risk coming off as nervous. And nervous presenters are hard to trust.
Everyone makes mistakes, it’s how you respond that counts. Whether you’ve said the wrong word, garbled a sentence, or lost your train of thought, the rules are the same. Here’s how to avoid some of the most frequent presentation mistakes:
Failing to consider the audience: This is the most common problem in presentations. It can be hard to understand someone who doesn’t connect with the audience, for example a speaker who gabbles, mumbles, or stumbles. With no connection, there’s not much point getting started. Develop empathy and use it to build rapport.
Not engaging your audience: To keep people interested in what’s being said, try breaking up long segments with interactive activities like polls or Q&A sessions. These encourage audience participation, letting listeners express their thoughts which can help them better understand your material.
Relying too much on visual aids: Decks or videos can help support what you are saying during a presentation; however, relying too much on them may distract from your message rather than enhance it. Make sure that visuals add value by providing insight into your discussion points instead of repeating what you’ve already said.
Being unprepared for questions: Asking questions is a normal part of any successful presentation. Thinking about the audience in advance will allow you to anticipate questions and comments – so that you can prepare answers even before you get into the room.
If you make a mistake, take a breath. Deep breathing helps to calm the nerves. Pause for as long as you need and resist the urge to quickly start talking again; only begin when you know you have something to say. A pause can make you look thoughtful and in control. Other tips include:
Don’t apologise: Apologising can reduce your credibility, and make you feel embarrassed. A mistake isn’t going to ruin anyone’s day. Acknowledge it and move on.
Own the mistake: By taking responsibility for a mistake, you appear confident. Tripping up on a word can be quickly solved, even with a simple smile. Any informational mistakes should always be corrected.
Talk to the audience: It’s OK to talk to the audience, especially if you’ve forgotten what you just said. Asking the audience what you were saying, or the name of something you’ve forgotten, can seem planned and inclusive.
Training helps individuals communicate more effectively – whether delivering a persuasive presentation to a roomful of people or shaping an important one-to-one conversation. At Working Voices, our presentation skills training course shows participants how to create memorable visual aids, tailor messages to different audiences, and manage anxiety when addressing a group.
Being a great public speaker isn’t about whether or not you have charisma. These skills can be learned by anyone and developed over time. The objective is not to achieve perfection but to know how to hold the attention of other people so that they quickly trust you and your material. Ultimately, audiences simply want a speaker who is true to themselves. Stick to that thought, and everything else will fall into place.
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The founder and CEO of Working Voices, Nick Smallman has been at the top of his profession for 25 years. Advising global blue-chip clients on engagement, productivity, and retention, he counsels leaders on increasing revenue via simple cultural adjustments.
Overseeing the successful expansion of Working Voices across the UK, the US, Asia, and the Middle East, Nick supports the leadership and communication capabilities of clients in a wide range of sectors. In particular, he has advised companies such as JP Morgan, Barclays, Sony, Nomura, M&S, and Blackrock for more than 15 years.
Developing his reputation for thought leadership, in recent years Nick has been leading work on The Sustainable Human, the subject of his forthcoming book. A concept unique to Working Voices, The Sustainable Human offers a package of solutions focusing on leadership enablement, future skills, and cultural harmony.
Working closely with HR specialist Mercer, Nick has developed solutions to four key modern workplace challenges:
“I’m excited to share the conclusions of three years of research that, if implemented, can make an immediate practical difference to leaders and their organisations.”
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