Archive for August, 2008

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Group Meetings: More Gain, Less Pain

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Four more suggestions on how to make technical team meetings more effective

We’ve talked about the fact that group meetings, especially for technical teams, can be a large expense and a big waste of time if not set up and run correctly. These are great opportunities to communicate with the entire team and you really don’t want to blow it. If you get picked to set one of these meetings up, I’ve got just a few more suggestions on how to make the meeting memorable not a memorial.

  1. Bridge Virtual and Real Worlds: all adults learn differently and they don’t stop doing this just because there’s a large group meeting going on. Blogs, podcasts, wikis all play a role in day-to-day life and have become the way that some team members prefer to learn. Don’t fight this, instead embrace it. If you don’t have time for everyone associated with a project to present their part of it, why not record a podcast and make it available to attendees to download. This way you can reduce the amount of time spent on that topic and yet still provide complete coverage. Use the tools to enhance the meeting experience.

  2. So What Did You Think About That? Providing the audience with an opportunity to comment on speakers and sessions is the key to completing the circle. Especially with Gen-X & Gen-Y’ers there is a need to be able to provide feedback in order to feel as though their participation really counted for something. This also helps shape the next meeting by telling the organizer what worked and what just flat out bombed.
  3. Context Gives Meaning To Content: Identify what you want the attendees to get out of attending the meeting. Why are they coming and what do you want them to be able to do when they leave? With this knowledge you can plan the day’s events to start everyone out in the same place and then gradually lead them to where you want to get them too. This sure beats just throwing together a bunch of speakers to fill a day.
  4. Is This Going To Be Graded? How the meeting is viewed after it is all over will be the summation of how each individual speaker was viewed. You really want to get the audience’s opinion of each speaker; however, having one of those one-size-fits-all speaker evaluation forms never really seems to provide any useful feedback. Instead, create a set of different evaluation forms based on the presenter’s content – technical, motivational, strategic, etc. This way you can truly learn who made a difference with your audience.

There you have it – everything that I currently know about putting on a good team meeting. I’m sure that there is more to it than I have been able to share here, so let me know what I missed. Have you ever had to run or help out running one of these big team meetings? How did it go – can you remember anything that was discussed and, perhaps more importantly, did the meeting cause any positive changes? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in evaluation, feedback, speech topics, training, virtual worlds | No Comments »

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

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

IT group meetings can either be done well or very, very badly

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.

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Posted in group meeting, organization, project management, speech topics, training | No Comments »

Huh? Learning To Stay In The Moment

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Audiences need to learn to pay attention!

Audiences need to learn to pay attention!


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.

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Posted in attention, focus, groups, meetings, retention, teams, training | No Comments »

5 Ways To Deliver A Disastrous Presentation

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

The Hindenburg explosion was a disaster just like your presentation might be

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?

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Posted in PowerPoint, presentation tips, public speaking, purpose, rehearse | 6 Comments »

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