How To Stop A Presentation That's Going Badly
Not only does stopping the presentation keep you from (figuratively) crashing into a wall, it also awakens your audience. So few presenters have the courage to stop a presentation that it’s a surprise. And with presentations going badly, it’s a very nice surprise.
Lots of organizations acknowledge only three categories of performance: high, middle and low. Hiring managers in these organizations are tasked with hiring desirable high performers and avoiding undesirable low performers. Now, high, middle and low performers certainly exist, but low performers come in several different types, and some are a lot harder to discern in an interview than others because they tend to do a really good job faking high-performer qualities.
There is no such thing as a high performer with a bad attitude. When we talk about dealing with difficult people, think of performance as having two major components: Skills and Attitude. Now here's somebody that has great skills and a great attitude, this is a high performer.
If you’ve had a job for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly set a SMART Goal (most commonly defined as Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound). But while everyone knows how to set a SMART Goal, what most people don’t know is that they could really be hurting how they feel about their job.
It’s an unfortunate feature of humanity that people, even smart, ostensibly-rational people, don’t always like to hear the truth. That’s why the study
Everybody is familiar with behavioral interview questions. And in general, the idea behind them is good. Basically, you ask about a past situation that somebody faced as a way of predicting future behavior. All good. 
Working for a micromanager can be demoralizing. It’s hard to be confident and motivated when your boss is so obsessed with control that they hover over your every move. But typically, the boss’s micromanaging behavior has less to do with your actual performance and much more to do with their own anxiety.
I recently conducted a study called
One of our recent studies asked more than 30,000 employees to rate the statement “I know whether my performance is where it should be.” In an ideal world, every person in every job would say ‘I always know!’ But that’s not what I found. Just look at this chart...




