I have coached people who can hold a boardroom without any visible effort. They read the energy in the space, adjust their pace, and land their point without seeming to try. Put the same person in front of a webcam, delivering the same content to the same audience, and something changes. The message does not land the way it did in the room. Often, they cannot explain why.
This is one of the more consistent things I see in coaching, and it is worth understanding properly, because the usual advice- be more energetic, smile more, sit up straight- does not really address what is actually going on.
The Camera Removes More Than People Realise
In a room, presence is built from many small things happening at once: where you stand, how the group is arranged, the shared sense of attention in the space, the ability to glance around and read who is following you and who is not. None of that exists on a screen. What is left is a small rectangle of your face and shoulders, and a much narrower channel through which to build connection.
This is not simply a smaller version of the same experience. It is a different kind of experience altogether. Research from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has shown that video calls require people to consciously manufacture nonverbal signals- nods, expressions, gestures- that would normally happen automatically in person. That takes real mental effort, for the presenter and for the audience watching them. A presentation that felt effortless in a room can feel laboured on a screen, not because the presenter has changed, but because the medium is asking much more of everyone involved.
Why “Be Bigger” Is the Wrong Advice
The most common advice given to people moving from in-room to on-screen presenting is to turn everything up: more energy, more expression, more enthusiasm, to compensate for what the camera loses. This advice is well-intentioned and often makes things worse.
Given that the audience is already working harder than usual to process nonverbal signals on a screen, adding more exaggerated energy increases that load rather than easing it. What actually helps is recalibration, not amplification: finding the right level of expression for this specific medium, rather than simply making everything louder.
In practice, this usually means slower, not faster. Clearer, not busier. A presenter who over-animates on camera, gesturing broadly and speaking with heightened intensity, often comes across as tiring to watch rather than compelling. The presenters who land best on screen tend to be more contained than they would be in a room, not less expressive, but more precise about where that expression goes.
What Actually Needs to Change
Three things shift the most between a room and a screen, and each one is really about recalibration rather than doing more of the same thing.
Eye contact works differently. In a room, eye contact is a genuine exchange: you look at someone, they know it, and something passes between you. On a screen, looking at a person’s face on your display means you appear to be looking away from the camera, which reads to them as avoiding eye contact altogether. The adjustment is not more eye contact. It is redirected eye contact, learning to trust that looking into the lens, even though it feels like looking at nothing, is what creates the connection.
Framing carries more weight than it does in person. In a room, your physical presence fills the space regardless of where people are sitting. On a screen, how much of the frame you occupy directly affects how much authority and presence you convey. Sitting too far back, or being poorly lit, quietly undermines a presentation before a word has been spoken, something that barely registers as a factor in a physical room.
Pacing needs to slow rather than speed up. Audio lag, cognitive load, and the general fatigue of screen-based attention all mean that a pace which works well in a room will often feel rushed and difficult to absorb on a call. Presenters under pressure tend to speed up rather than slow down, which is precisely the wrong direction for this medium.
The One Thing That Trips Up Even Confident Presenters
The single biggest adjustment, and the one that catches out even highly capable in-room presenters, is the loss of real-time feedback.
In a room, an experienced presenter is constantly reading the audience without necessarily realising it: a shift in posture, a puzzled expression, someone leaning in. That feedback shapes the presentation as it happens: slowing down here, cutting something short there, spending longer on a point that clearly landed. This is often the exact skill that makes someone excellent in a room.
On a screen, that feedback loop mostly disappears. Cameras may be off. Faces are small and harder to read. The presenter is often looking at their own slides rather than at a gallery of reactions. This is precisely why confident in-room presenters can struggle more on camera than people who were never especially strong presenters to begin with; their skill was built on a form of real-time adjustment that the screen simply does not offer. Without that feedback, they have to trust a structure and a plan, rather than adjusting on the fly, and that is a genuinely different skill to build.
Part of what coaching does here is help someone build a substitute for that missing feedback. This might mean planning deliberate pause points to ask a direct question rather than waiting for a visual cue that will never come, or building in a midway check-in, “I would like to get your thoughts on what I have said so far- John what do you think….?” as a structural habit rather than an improvised reaction. It replaces a skill that used to happen instinctively with one that is planned in advance, which feels less natural at first but becomes just as reliable with practice.
This matters more, not less, for senior leaders, because the moments where screen presenting counts most- a board update, an investor call, a decision that needs to land with a client- tend to be exactly the moments where there is no room for a presentation to underperform simply because of the format it happens to be delivered in. The stakes of the content stay the same. Only the medium has changed, and the medium is not something most people have been trained for.
Why Coaching for Both Formats Matters
Because presenting on camera draws on a distinct set of skills, it needs to be practised on camera specifically. Reading about it, or applying general presentation advice, only goes so far. The gap only closes with repeated, honest practice in the actual medium, recorded, reviewed, and adjusted with real feedback on what is working and what is not.
This is one of the reasons 121 presentation skills coaching works with people in both formats. Someone who presents mostly in rooms but occasionally on screen needs to build genuine capability in both, because the two are not interchangeable, and strength in one does not guarantee strength in the other. Practising on camera is not an optional add-on to becoming a better presenter. For most senior professionals today, it is a core part of the skill itself.
Working With Nua Training
If a presentation that lands well in a room has ever fallen flat on a screen, this is very likely why: not a change in your ability, but a change in the medium’s demands that has not yet been matched by a change in approach.
We work with leaders to build genuine capability in both settings, so that presence and connection carry through regardless of where the presentation is happening. If this is something you would like support with, we would welcome a conversation.