Group Meetings: Group Hug or Group Mug(ging)?

Every technical organization seems to have a big annual meeting of some sort. The last one of these that I attended was put on by an Executive Director at a firm who liked to do these twice a year. He would fly in all of his direct reports and have them spend 30 minutes each talking about what their team had accomplished. Some awards were given out, the Executive Director spoke some words of encouragement and then his vice president who had also flown in for the meeting wrapped things up with a motivational talk. This took the better part of a full day and for the life of me, an hour after the meeting was over I could have told you how many emails I had waiting for me once I got back to the office, but not what was discussed.

The motivation for these meetings can be quite different from group to group or even from year to year; however, each meeting seems to be painfully familiar. Although the scope of the meeting often depends on the size of the company. Now that we've got the inner game of public speaking taken care of, let's talk about the outer game of how to throw a BIG meeting - those are often the biggest communications disasters.

What's the purpose of these meetings? Often the firm has so many different products / projects / programs that they decide that a big meeting is just the way to ensure that everyone knows what's going on at the company. These meetings are, on the surface, quite expensive to put on, and if you take an even closer look they turn out to be really, really expensive once you take into consideration the lost productivity that they cause. They could be a good use of time; however, here are a few reasons why they generally miss the mark:

1. Who You Talking To? Most of these technical organization meetings are planned and put on by the same set of non-technical folks (the people who drew the short straws). What this means is that the topics that are covered and the sequence in which they are covered tends to be the same from meeting to meeting - why mess with success? How can you possibly expect an audience to "stay in the moment" for these types of presentations? What makes a great meeting is when controversial topics are included. Yes, this can be dangerous but that's exactly why people will remember them.
   
   
2. My Way Or The Highway. Who is invited to do what and how they are permitted to do it can be a real sticking point at these meetings. If every speaker is required to have 25 slides and to talk for 30 minutes and participate in one big panel session at the end, then congratulations - everyone is going to look the same and be forgotten just as quickly. If instead, each presenter is encouraged to do what they need to do in order to get their message across, then at least you'll have some variety. Sure, there will still be some with 25 slides and 30 minute presentations; however, you'll also have others that just might have their message stick.
   
   
3. You're So Popular To Me. Just because someone who is presenting during one of these meetings is popular, doesn't mean that anyone is learning anything. I have seen plenty of presentations where a well-liked manager delivers a presentation to a packed house. However, afterwords I realized that he/she really hadn't said anything. What a waste of time! Making sure that everyone has a point to their presentation is a key preparation step.
   
   
4. Complex Meetings Need Simple Solutions. The more complicated the subject matter, the more simple it must be for the audience to attend and to understand what is being discussed. If the discussion requires detailed charts or process flows, then make sure that handouts are available and that the slides only show a subset of the information - no need to remind your audience that they aren't getting any younger by making them squint at tiny fonts on a screen all the way up at the front of the room. Likewise, if everyone is going to be in one room listening to one speaker who is talking about a complex subject, make sure that everyone can see the speaker - ensure that there is a raised platform. This will go a long way to help keep their interest.
   
   
5. Watch Those Awards. The one part of a meeting like this that can kill the whole deal is the awards show. This introduces two problems: first, they are boring and second, if I'm not winning an award then I'll start to resent the person who is. Keep in mind what you are trying to achieve with the whole meeting and make sure that an awards show fits. If it does, then make it like a hotel room tryst - quick, pleasant, and forgotten once its done.
   

There are more communications keys that you need to keep in mind when planning a large meeting like this; however, we'll cover those next time.

Have you ever had to plan one of these meetings? How did it turn out - huge success or crashing bore? Did you get picked to do it again or did someone else get lucky? Leave me a comment and tell me about your experiences.


Tags: group meeting, training, speech topics, organization, project management

Huh? Learning To Stay In The Moment

So there I was, on one of those conference calls with way too many people and all of a sudden it started to happen. The moderator would ask a question of someone who was on the call and that person would say "Huh? I'm sorry, but could you repeat the question?" This happened over and over again with different people. I just sat there and thought to myself - "Man, is nobody paying attention to this call?" Although it sounds simple, it turns out that staying in the moment is getting more and more difficult to do...

What's really going on here? It's always been difficult to get people to remember & retain what has gone on it a meeting; however, now we seem to be having problems with people not being able to keep up with the flow of a meeting. According to author Cherie Kerr we may have the wrong focus. Outside of those folks who are deliberately doing other work during a meeting (BlackBerry anyone?), the people who are actually trying to participate often make the mistake of focusing on the goals of the meeting instead of what is being said right now.

The real goal of a meeting is achieve some sort of result. This can be an agreement, determine a next step, or reach a decision. That's the end point. How you get there is the responsibility of the person who is running the meeting. If that's you , then what you want to have happen is for everyone in the meeting to build on what has already been said instead of coming up with completely new directions for the meeting to head off in. Note that we're not talking about Brainstorming sessions here, but rather normal business meetings.

By building on top of what has already been said, there will be a clear path from where you started to where the goal of the meeting is. Each discussion in the meeting will have a clear start, middle, and end as you lead into the next conversation. It will also quickly become clear if you've gone off the path and you'll be able to bring the meeting back in line. Your participants will be more engaged because they'll have a better understanding of where the meeting has been and where it is going.

This suggestion is not new. In fact the folks who do improv comedy do this all the time. Their skits flow from one character's actions to another's quickly. Hey, if it works for a 30 minute TV show, then surely it will work for your next business meeting!

Are you ready to keep your next meeting in line? Do you think that an incremental approach to conversations is the way to go or do you like a more open and free ranging approach? What works best in your life - leave a comment and let me know.


Tags: attention, focus, retention, meetings, groups, teams, training

5 Ways To Deliver A Disastrous Presentation

So you can find self-help info on how to deliver better presentations just about anywhere on the web (including this blog!); however, where can you find guidance on how to really deliver a disastrous presentation? Well fear not, that's what we'll cover today...

Monica is one of my friends who is a professional speaker by trade. She is very good at what she does which is to teach retail sales folks in the wireless industry how to sell more. She appears to be about nine feet tall when you meet her for the first time, has an enormous amount of blond hair, and speaks with a Texas drawl that makes it almost impossible to try to not picture her wearing a cowboy hat. Naturally I went to her to get answers to my questions about how to give a bad presentation.

As you can well imagine, Monica was quite surprised when I asked her what I needed to know in order to give a bad presentation - "... but why would you EVER want to give a bad presentation. Who do you hate that much that you'd force them to sit through that?..." Once I explained that I was trying a bit of reverse psychology here and that if I understood what made up a bad presentation, then I'd know what to avoid she calmed down just a bit. She is from Texas you know so calm is always a relative thing with her.


If you really want to do a poor job of presenting, please consider this to be a checklist provided by Monica. If you'd like to do a good job of presenting, then don't do any of these things!

1. Don't Rehearse. What me worry? Why bother to practice - you know this stuff inside and out, you'll just go up there and wing it and the crowd will love you because it will seem more natural and less rehearsed than all the other presenters. Yeah right. Look: actors and musicians practice, practice, practice in order to get good enough to perform. What makes you think that you can get away without rehearsing? No matter how silly you look while practicing, you'll look much better when you go to do the real thing!
   
   
2. Don't Tell The Audience Why They Are Sitting In Uncomfortable Chairs. When you take the stage, you have everyone's attention. When you open your mouth to speak, you will start to lose them. Since you'd really like to keep as much attention as possible, you really should explain why you're there. Don't launch into your detailed presentation on how to optimize an Oracle 11g database using only a ball-point pen and a roll of aluminum foil until you connect with the audience by explaining why you've come to tell them this information.
   
   
3. Tell Them What You're Going To Tell Them, Tell Them, And Then Tell Them What You Told Them. I'm not sure if this was ever a good idea; however, it has become a cornerstone of public speaking courses and books. Too bad it's really bad advise. We live in an age of text messages, Blackberrys, and TIVO time shifters. Nobody has the time or the energy to sit through a presentation where the content is just being summarized and represented three times over. You always want to lead up to your closing - end with a bang not a whimper. If you are summarizing for your audience, then you'll lose them. Instead tell them that the murder was done by Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick.
   
   
4. Use As Many Slides As Possible. No matter how you feel about PowerPoint you have to admit one thing: it's made creating slides very easy to do. As with most things about PowerPoint, this can be a bad thing. Look, your presentation is all about you and what you have to say, it's not about the slides. Every new slide that you show to your audience will cause them to take their attention away from you to look at the slide. You will then have to fight them to get their attention back. Slides should complement and enhance what you are saying. Try this: use one slide for every 5 minutes of your presentation.
   
   
5. Use Your Slide Deck As A Speech Outline. We've all seen this done: the presenter turns either 90 or 180 degrees from the audience and stares at the slides on the wall during the entire presentation. The audience spends it's time thinking that they could just read the slides and not have to sit through this entire presentation since the presenter is just reading them to the audience. In a nutshell, this just shows that you didn't take any time to prepare.
   

Monica told me that she could go on and on (and I believed her), but that these were the top 5 tips that she would provide to anyone who really wanted to do a bad job delivering a presentation. I'm not sure if she's ever going to talk to me again, but at least I got the info that I had asked for.

So how many of these little gems have you seen in action? Anyone care to confess to actually doing any of them (I've done them all, just not all at the same time). If you did any of them, what made you stop doing it or why haven't you stopped?


Tags: presentation tips, rehearse, public speaking, purpose, PowerPoint

Arrgh! Isn't There A Law Against Giving Bad Presentations?

I probably need to apologize in advance for this rant -- I've finally reached my breaking point.

I somehow got myself trapped in a presentation on changes to my 401k retirement program. I guess that I should start by admitting that I really can't think of a much more boring topic to talk about in the first place even though I know that I should be really interested because, after all, it is my retirement. However, the person giving the presentation was beyond bad -- they were just awful. To make matters worse, the presentation went on for over 1-1/2 hours. Well before the end I was wondering if I could sneak out the back door, but alas, it was not to be.

When I finally stumbled out of this colossal waste of time, I found myself wondering how I could avoid getting trapped in any such presentations in the future. Yes, I did for just a minute dream of a world in which presentation police would show up and arrest anyone who did a poor or careless job of presenting information. I was thinking that the charge would have to be something along the lines of "... intent to do bodily harm."

Since we don't live in that world, what do ALL presenters of complex information need to know (we'll leave motivational speakers out of it for now)? At the end of the day I believe that there are two critical skills that all speakers must have: (1) the ability to understand and use how adults learn when constructing a speech, and (2) the ability to appeal to all types of learning methods during the same presentation.

The days of sitting in school and having a teacher talk at us are over. We get bombarded with way too much information every day. Ultimately, I believe that it's the presenters responsibility to deliver information in a way that we can understand and remember it. So there you go, there are no presentation police, but if there were would you have an arrest record?


Tags: training, adult learning, public speaking, memory, retention

"Once Upon A Time..." - The Role Of Storytelling In Business Communication

In the eternal quest to communicate better and have our message "stick" with our audience, a powerful tool is often overlooked by us technical types. A good story, told at the right time, in the right way, to the right audience can have a lasting effect that can transform an organization. Proof of this can be found on the business best seller list over the past few years: "Who Moved My Cheese", "Zapp: The Lightning of Empowerment", "A Message From Garcia", etc. have all proved that everyone loves a good story. Ah, but as always, the devil is in the details. Done wrong, a story can backfire and send your career down in flames. Let's see if we can discover how to tame this wild stallion so that we can ride it to career success.

We've got lots of ways to communicate information, why bother with stories? We all know how to create and use analytical charts and their associated graphs (3-D pie chart anyone?), written reports, etc. A story is the right tool to use when your standard tools just aren't working. Joseph Badaracco, a Harvard Business School professor, says that "People don't simply hear stories. It triggers things - pictures, thoughts, and associations - in their minds". The end result of all of this triggering is that a story can communicate your point in a very powerful way that fully engages your audience.

As always there is a catch. The catch to storytelling is that you need to know where to draw the line between making a dry business story more compelling by embellishing it and changing the story into an outright lie. I can't even begin to stress just how important this rule is. An embellishment is when you transform "I took the test on a hot day" into "As I walked to the most important certification test in my life, the hot Texas sun felt like it was hovering just 10 feet above my head and the melted asphalt splashed as I walked though it." See? You've made a dry story just a bit more interesting. A LIE would be when you say "I worked at ACME products for over 10 years in the Coyote specialty division where I invented the first rocket powered shoes." If you weren't there for 10 years or if you didn't invent that, then that's a lie.

In order for your story to have the impact that you want it to have, it has got to ring true with your audience. If your audience doubts even one part of your story, then they will spend the rest of the time looking for other holes in your tale. However, if your story is true and contains a powerful message that your audience can both picture and feel, then you will have accomplished what very few other communicators can do -- you will have gotten your message across.

Tags: story, storytelling, business, communication, lie, impact

Communication Skills From The Master: Edward Tufte

If you don't know who Edward Tufte is, then you really should. He is a Professor Emeritus at Yale University and his specialty is teaching people how to present data using information graphics. He is truly an expert on the best way to present complex information. A long time I was scanning the web when I ran across some notes that Craig Kaplan up at the University of Waterloo had jotted down on how to deliver great presentations after attending one of Tufte's seminars. We've already talked about how to write a great presentation. I now share these suggestions on how to give a good presentation with the reverence that one must show to the words of someone who is really, really good at what they do:

• Show Up Early!: Good things happen to those who show up early. Specifically, you can solve problems before they become unsolvable and you can take the time to introduce yourself to the audience as they arrive. This way when you start to speak neither one of you will be a stranger.
  
  
• Have A Strong Opening: There are three questions that every opening must quickly answer: (1) What's the problem?, (2) Who cares?, and (3) What's your solution? Answer these questions and the audience will listen to your every word.
  
  
• PGP: As you introduce a new sub-topic, make sure that you move from the particular, to the general, and then back to the particular. Although what you want the audience to take away from your presentation is the general info, the particulars will help make the info "stick".
  
  
• Know Your Audience -- By What They Read!: This is Tufte's twist on an old maxim of public speaking. He believes that knowing what your audience reads will help you understand what styles of information presentation works best for them.
  
  
• Take Care When Answering Questions: There is a good possibility that your audience's take-away impression of your presentation won't be based on your presentation, but rather on how you answer questions AFTER the presentation. Allow for long pauses after the question has been asked and before you answer -- this will give more weight to your reply.
  
  
• Let Everyone Know That You Belive In Your Material: Speak with lots of convection! Clearly letting everyone know that you believe in everything that you are telling them is the key to getting them to believe it just as much as you do.
  
  

There you have it. Now please remember that Tufte also has the ability to use amazing graphics with his presentations that clearly communicate what lots of data has to say. However, even the best graphics won't do you any good if you don't remember these presenting rules from the master.


Tags: Edward Tufte,
Presentation Tips, Information Overload

Persuasive Speech Time: How To Deal With Unspeakable Subjects

In the world of information technology, we actually have it pretty good. We don't work around spinning industrial machinery nor do we operate fork-lifts or work out in the hot sun. More or less everyone remains fairly healthy and we generally don't get injured on the job.

That being said, we do live in the real world and bad things happen to people. When something bad happens to a member of your team or your department, communicating with the rest of the team about what is going on is a critical part of your job. As always, the lawyers often jump in with valid concerns about the revealing of other people's personal information, etc. Let's put that aside for right now and make an abstract concept more concrete: lets talk about how you would handle it if a member of your department died.

If it falls on your shoulders to let everyone know what's going on, then this topic will require more tact, knowledge, and preparation than just about any other discussion you will have. Do it correctly and you'll be viewed as a sensitive leader. Do it poorly, and you'll instantly lose the respect of your team.

News of this kind of shocking nature will generate the full range of emotions in your audience. This, somewhat amazingly, includes hostility. The loss of a teammate could cause someone to get angry about having to pick up their work when they feel that they are already overloaded. This may not be a real issue, but instead it is how they start to deal with the loss. This will be the wrong time for you to get into a fight with someone as they are trying to come to terms with what you are saying. Instead, stay professional no matter what and make sure that you stay tuned in to your audience. One way to stay tuned in with your audience is to be sure to maintain eye contact with them. This shows them that you are talking "to them", not "at them".

Its the small details that will get remembered. Hopefully it goes without saying that your body language will always be talking louder than your mouth in this case. When you are talking about grief, you need to be sure to choose your words very carefully. In the case of a teammate's death, saying over and over again that he's "dead" or "been killed" can be very harsh and jarring. Saying it differently and talking about the "loss" can communicate the same meaning in a more gentle way. Finally, in our multicultural workplace, make sure that you have names correct. Nothing could be more disrespectful than a verbal fumble at this point in time.

We're lucky because we seem to be able to avoid having to deal with "heavy" topics most of the time. However, when these situations come up, and they always do, being ready to say the right things in the right way can make all the difference in the world.