Communicating with Numbers

Communicating with Numbers – Make them talk, tell stories and get YES

Most presentations involving many tables, charts and graphs, tend to be tedious and boring. The primary reason is that the presenters have never been taught to find the human interest stories—the pain, promise and pleasure embedded in the numbers. Find them, make them come alive, and not only will your audience understand and be interested, but they will also tend to remember them.

The leader who is good with words but poor with numbers is not good enough. The great leader knows, among other skills, how to make numbers come alive; how to represent, portray and illustrate numbers to inform, persuade, negotiate or simply enroll others.

Learn how to tell the story conveyed by numbers and avoid boring, confusing approaches common to so many communicators. Use numbers to get agreement, authorization, support and more.

 

 WHAT PARTICIPANTS LEARN

Learn the five step Best Practices process—the best in class of approaches observed with business leaders across the world.

  1. Sanitize – Make sure the numbers are authentic, eliminating aberrations, noise and spurious data
  2. Organize – Find similarities and relationships that allow you to categorize and group data subsets to make them more manageable and meaningful
  3. Analyze – Determine what the data says—the why, how, when and so what. Identify the meaning, implications and mandates for action.
  4. Represent – Decide how to communicate the meaning, implications and mandate—page design, content depiction, presentation structure, media & multimedia for maximum clarity
  5. Present – The way to communicate the numbers to an audience in a live presentation, written report and other methods.

Participants learn to use numbers to enrich a presentation rather than to weigh it down.

 

 HOW THEY BENEFIT

The effect is immediate…participants develop heightened sensitivity to boring and confusing an audience; they also develop the know-how to search for the most important numbers and relationship, as well as how to represent and present them. In summary, they gain:

  • Tools to be more resilient and circumstance-proof in Improved analytical skills;
  • More intuitive understanding of numbers;
  • Ability to see meaning and directions from data;
  • Increased credibility and authority in presentations;
  • More effective communication of facts & figures by attaching feelings and emotions to data;
  • Ability to present numbers without boring or confusing the audience; use numbers to drive action and behavior change.

This is an uncommon competence as it is not normally found on Human Resource or College curricula. However, it provides participants with heightened skill sets that can noticeably and measurably impact results, recognition and rewards.

 

What Do You Want to Do Now?