Wednesday. 9:04 AM. Cohort one, session one.
A senior VP, reading his own slide aloud, word for word, to a room that had already stopped listening by the third bullet.
Corporate Learning — Vantage Leadership Lab
Teaching forty leaders to stop reading their slides
Vantage Leadership Lab — Corporate Learning
01
The Challenge
Vantage's internal leadership program had strong material and one consistent failure: leaders presenting it by reading it, killing the room's attention before the first break.
02
The Thinking
The content wasn't the issue. The format was training people to write speeches and hide behind them. We redesigned the program around delivery, not content — treating each talk as a performance to rehearse, not a document to finalize.
03
The Execution
Rebuilt the slide format so it physically couldn't be read from — visual arguments only, no full sentences — which forced every presenter to actually know their material.
One recorded rehearsal and one round of direct, specific feedback per leader before the live session, across two cohorts of 40.
04
The Outcome
"This leader held my attention" scores rose from 6.1 to 8.7 average — the largest year-over-year jump in the program's history.
05
Lessons Learned
You can't coach someone off a bad habit while handing them the tool that causes it. Fix the format first.