Presentation Pitfalls: 10 Traps Business Professionals Fall Into and How to Avoid Them hits shelves on September 3, 2025. Thanks to those who’ve pre-ordered a copy for making it #1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers in Business Communication list.
Bulk order Presentation Pitfalls for your team and build a culture of presentation excellence! Email or message us on LinkedIn for special bulk pricing. If you’re pitching this to your boss, feel free to point out: it’s an Amazon #1 Bestseller!
✨ Bonus 1: The first three bulk orders will come with a free virtual Book Club kickoff or wrap-up with John or Justin. We’ll walk your team through the biggest presentation traps and fire them up to avoid them.
✨ Bonus 2: Send us your receipt of your book order, and we’ll send you bonus content that didn’t make the book.
Here are the opening pages of the introduction. It includes our case for how improving your presentation skills will supercharge your career.
Introduction
Present your way to a promotion, a new job, new customers, or startup funding.
“I can’t believe they just got promoted again!” How many times have you heard that phrase? Or said that phrase? Or muttered that phrase under your breath? Even if you’re happy for a promoted coworker, it’s easy to wonder, “What do they have that I don’t?”
The promotion process is opaque at most companies. In some organizations, managers determine performance ratings and promotions through a cross-calibration process, where they meet to discuss and rate their associates’ performance. This improves the odds that associates receive a fair performance rating rather than leaving it to their boss’s discretion. While ensuring associates get a fair performance rating is important, this process can be painful. We sat through approximately 250 cross-calibration conversations for almost 2,500 associates in our careers. If you’ve never experienced one, trust us, they’re no fun.
At the end of each cross-calibration, leaders discussed promotion candidates. While it might not feel like it, the difference between a good and an excellent rating is a relatively small step. Getting promoted to the next level is clearing a high bar, like in Figure 0.1.
In promotion discussions, we noticed a pattern in the associate feedback. Rarely did the debate focus on technical skills, subject-matter expertise, or results — when associates were up for promotion, they’ve already demonstrated those strengths. Instead, the competency gaps that typically held associates back were communication, influence, or the mystical “leadership presence.”
Guess what? You demonstrate all these competencies through your ability to design and deliver effective presentations. Presentations are more than just slides. They encompass your speech, body language, audience interaction, emotional impact, and chosen medium.
While this book focuses on presentation design and delivery, the techniques apply broadly to all communications, including emails, memos, and hallway conversations.
To that end, we aim to help you get that promotion, land the next client, greenlight a big idea, or get your startup funded. So, if you haven’t invested in your presentation skills, you might be missing the skill that puts you over the top.
If Figure 0.1 doesn’t look like a typical high jump, it’s because of a tectonic shift in the high-jump technique in the 1970s. Dick Fosbury struggled with conventional approaches like the scissor kick and developed a new style where he jumped with his back to the bar. The innovative “Fosbury flop” allowed him to set world records, and by the 1980 Olympics, all but a few athletes were using it.
Because people talk all day, it’s natural to think you’re good at communicating. But that is the equivalent of scissor kicking. The Fosbury flop is more challenging but more effective and requires practice. With this book, we’ll take your presentation game to the next level.
Elevate your career with effective presentation skills
Your boss hired you for job-specific skills like strategy, analytics, tech, project management, or product management. Being excellent at those skills should lead to a promotion, right? Not without excellent communication skills.
Communication is the lens through which others judge your competencies.
If you’re a brilliant analyst but can’t communicate your insights effectively, no one thinks you’re brilliant. If you’re a talented software engineer and can’t explain your buy/build/partner proposal, no one trusts your recommendation. If you’re a creative product manager and can’t connect your features roadmap to customer value … well, you get the point.
Presentations are a critical opportunity to familiarize stakeholders with your strategy, get feedback, and gain buy-in. That buy-in leads to the results that get you on the promotion shortlist. Improving presentation skills drives promotion along (at least) four dimensions:
- Showcasing the work: Your boss and others who influence your promotion are busy people. They can’t know everything you and your team accomplished. Presentations let you capture and communicate results efficiently. There are other ways to share accomplishments with the boss, but they rarely carry as much weight as a formal presentation.
- Getting visibility with leaders and a sneak peek at their strategy: When you have a knack for writing presentations, your boss and your boss’s boss will ask for help with their strategy presentations. You’ll gain early insight into the strategy, spot opportunities to contribute, and demonstrate your strategic-thinking skills by actively shaping its direction. Being in the room with the leadership team means they know who you are and have seen you do good work. That’s important when those same leaders decide who to promote.
- Learning how to do the boss’s job: Did we mention how busy leaders are? If you lighten their workload by ghostwriting their presentations or helping set their strategy, you demonstrate your potential. Creating presentations for your boss often leads to an invitation to the meeting where your boss is presenting. That’s an opportunity to observe how to perform in high-pressure meetings. Promoting you to that level is much easier once leaders see you doing next level tasks.
- Magnifying results and core job skills: You get a paycheck to deliver company value, and presentations advance every stage of the projects and processes that deliver value. Presentations such as business cases, stakeholder socialization decks, and implementation plans harness teamwork to drive results.
Presentations are the language of leadership — communicating strategy and culture gets the team on the same page. Sharing results in a logical, graphical presentation is an opportunity to convey the skills and thinking it took to achieve those results.
If you’re not a manager (yet), teach others your expertise to improve their performance while practicing presentation skills. Host a workshop or mentor others to spread best practices, allowing your leaders to see you demonstrate leadership skills. We taught over 10,000 associates presentation skills while working at Capital One.
Note: Portions of this introduction were first published in the article “You’ve Visualized Your Data, Now Actualize Your Promotion” by John Polk in Nightingale, Journal of the Data Visualization Society, July 27, 2021.