Boost Your Slide-Creating Skills
It takes months to learn slide-creating skills. But it's a foundational skill. If you learn it faster, the impact on performance will be huge. Here is one hack on how to boost your learning.
A nice small cake was delivered to my home the other day.
It was a gift from Brandon. He congratulated me on the birth of my 4th child.
It was his way to thank me for coaching him.
Brandon is a nice guy but grossly under-apprenticed.
I had some free time on my hands, so I decided to help him.
His main problem was that he couldn't create decent slides. Well, he was creating a lot of slides, but mostly unfinished drafts and dummies.
I decided to take him through the Slide Creation Bootcamp.
I developed that approach when I was a Manager. I used to upskill consultants at the beginning of each project.
My logic was simple. If I taught them to work better, they performed better, making my life much easier. Profit for everyone.
I took Brandon through this process. After one week, he was a changed man. He started delivering fewer but sharper slides. He gained confidence and became more versatile in problem-solving.
Then, he single-handedly completed a small strategy project with fantastic results. He gained great exposure to senior leadership. He kickstarted his momentum with staffing and future work.
Slide Creation Bootcamp
First, find a supporter in your firm who can coach you. Someone with whom you have a close relationship.
They can be a manager or a partner, ideally with high-quality standards.
The overall process will take 2-3 hours of leadership time. So it should be doable.
They don't need to know the whole process. Once you understand it, you can guide them through it.
Before you start, read the post How To Create Great Slides. It describes well what we will put into practice.
Eliminate Unforced Errors
For simplicity, the key idea of this approach is to eliminate unforced errors.
This term comes from tennis. Unforced errors are entirely a result of the player's own blunder. Not imposed by the opponent's effort or skill. In theory, players can reduce those errors to zero.
The same applies to slide creation. Consultants need to eliminate unforced errors. These errors kill productivity. They trigger unnecessary iterations, consuming all available time. Consultants go into reactive mode, fixing comments. As a result, they don't have time to think deep enough and add value.
Once you freed yourself from stupid work, you suddenly have time to think. You can create great content. Great content leads to leadership trust and increased motivation. With that, you can create even better content. This kickstarts a positive flywheel that you would want to spin again and again.
The impact is compounding. The more you do it right, the more impact you will notice on your performance.
A 3-Step Approach
This approach has three main steps.
1. Review Your Best Slides
First, ask your manager to review your 3-5 best slides.
Take your slides from previous projects. It’s important that these are your slides; you created and internalized them.
This step aims to get a full read of leadership expectations.
Ask them to comment by applying their strictest internal standards. They should not withhold any minor comments.
For example, I often don't tell consultants everything I see on slides. I don't want to come across as too obsessive.
But in reality, partners see so many small inconsistencies. They worked on thousands of slides and developed extensive pattern recognition.
They see un-MECE-ness, logical flaws, and unclear messages. They also can see the smallest errors - double spacing, misalignments, missing legends, color inconsistencies, etc.
This visual noise creates friction for content understanding. If partners feel that slides are unfinished, they subconsciously want to help through comments. That creates new stupid work.
Some consultants might think that this is a non-value-adding obsession. But in reality, they are missing out on the upside here. They have an opportunity to be a person who always creates impeccable slides. Partners would think that they are geniuses. Who doesn’t want this?
2. Create One Specific Slide
Second, your manager asks you to create a specific slide. Something that they already have in mind.
The objective is to learn to accept and execute tasks properly. Learn to transfer ideas from your manager's head into slides. If you don't get a good read of those ideas, delivering a good output will be nearly impossible.
The majority of slides you create will be specific tasks from leadership. Managers and partners think in slides and want them executed fast and flawlessly.
Your ultimate goal is to make this slide with a first go, with no major comments and follow-up iterations. Ideally, it is a much better version than they have imagined.
Read this post to learn how to accept tasks properly - Eliminate Work Waste.
3. Create Slides To Answer An Ambiguous Question
The final step is to create a few slides answering an ambiguous question.
At this stage, I test the whole slide-creation and problem-solving process. It is a great litmus test if consultants can work effectively. There are a few important questions to answer.
How do consultants structure the problem? How do they do research and analysis? Do they push beyond the obvious? How do they communicate their ideas? How do they manage their time? Can they prioritize between doing too much and too little?
You need to timebox this task to one day. You must plan a few hours for research and then slide production. It gives you good practice on how to work independently in a constrained timeline.
For this task, your problem statement could be anything. For example, I asked Brandon the following question.
The large Chinese coffee brand wants to enter a specific country in the Southeast Asia region. They want to meet with us and get our perspective. The meeting is tomorrow. I want to become smart on the topic before the meeting. Could you help me think through this problem and create a few slides for that meeting? Ideally, we want to show the country's market structure. It should be numbers-driven and insightful. But we don't need to have a proposal yet. It should have a good structure and a few great insights.
WHY Is More Important Than WHAT
When you work with your sponsor, ask why they suggest certain practices. What is the rationale behind it?
They might insist on certain stylistic preferences that you disagree with. They may seem random and arbitrary. But when you understand the rationale, you may appreciate them or develop your own solutions. Then, you will be able to adjust to different styles easily.
Learning Enhancement
This approach accelerates and enhances learning in a very compressed period of time.
It pushes you through the basic learning stages:
1. Unconscious incompetence. 2. Conscious incompetence. 3. Conscious competence. 4. Unconscious competence. 5. Consolidation.
This approach gets you from the 1st stage to the 3rd one. Getting to the 4th and 5th stages will take much time and practice. But at least you can stop scoring negative points. That would be a huge boost to your productivity. Much needed in the first year of consulting.
Try It Yourself
If you try this approach with your leaders, let me know how it works. I am curious how it works without my direct involvement.
P.S.
I feel your pain.
As a consultant, I struggled to perform and faced an impossible situation with extremely high expectations and minimal support.
My life turned into relentless stress, pain, and anxiety. But I always suspected that there should be a better way.
All that pain was not necessary with the right support.
Nine years later, I designed the coaching program I desperately needed back then. Its sole focus is helping you excel and achieve high performance.
Only then can you build strong sponsorships, find great projects, and become confident.
If you are an MBB consultant and want to achieve high performance, please
Book a 1-1 Discovery Session.
Learn more about the Hero Journey coaching program.