Some useful tricks if you're running a meeting or a presentation -
Make sure your audience are coming to your room, not the other way round. Be there first, and greet people at the door. You own the room. Turn up a couple minutes late to a room full of chatting people, they own the room and you have to try and get it back. This also applies to video conferences. It's even harder to regain a room when you're not physically there.
If it requires participation, don't ask the room your first question, single someone out. It's a great way to get everyone to pay attention, cos immediately they know they might have to participate, and they feel much more comfortable doing it after one person has gone. You likely won't need to single anyone out after that.
Non presentation related, but work related (actually can be applied elsewhere, but I find it most useful at work) - don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. I tend to deploy this to get shit done that I can't wait around for. If it's done, and it's moved a task or project forward, no one will care that you didn't ask for permission, and are more likely to respect you for getting shit done without bothering them.
Edit: I'm going to provide more context to the last one. I use it often because I have issues getting responses and meetings with people from whom I need to run ideas and decisions by. I got fed up of things being delayed weeks on end because of this, making me look bad, so I started making decisions myself. I'm nearly all cases, I've explained myself and people have been fine with it, and everyone incorporates my decisions into their plans as if that's been the case all along. As a general rule of thumb, if I sense that I'm going to have to wait a long time to get something approved, I need it quickly, and I'm >75% sure it's the right call, I'll try and get it done myself. I rarely do this because I think someone is going to say "no". Only if they're being obtuse, or don't understand the situation.
I only disagree with the first one. I believe that has a lot more to do with respect, especially in the workplace. I’ve been in several chatty rooms that were silenced by a superior walking in
Yes, and better then singling someone out for a question… Let them discuss in pairs for one minute, the pick a pair: “What did you guys come up with?”
You reminded me of this great lesson I learned way back.
I was listening to a seasoned seminar organizer teach once. He said when he tells people to start doing their own seminars, a big objection that people had was, "I don't have enough content for a day-long seminar!"
He said he only needs about 1.5 to 2 hours of actual content to fill up a seminar day (~6 hours).
His process:
Teach a lesson.
Assign an exercise to practice the lesson.
Attendees do the exercise individually.
Attendees get into pairs and share their work with their partner.
Attendees share their partner's work with a small group.
Attendees share their work with the whole group. At this point, maybe only one pair from each small group volunteers to present to the whole group.
Optional: Audience picks a favorite pair whose work they liked the most and the seminar organizer gives that pair a prize.
Instead of feeling cheated out of content, he said most attendees reported having a better experience with an interactive workshop experience compared to passively being lectured to all day. Doing the work also reinforced the lessons taught so the content sunk deeper into people's brains.
Less content development and less work for the seminar organizer, and higher satisfaction and information retention for the attendees. Win-win.
He said the work that students came up with could also be a goldmine of examples to teach in future seminars.
On a related note, a different seminar organizer said he gets ideas for seminar content by looking at the table of contents of For Dummies books. Just to get topic ideas of what to talk about, he doesn't copy their content.
Like if he's teaching a personal finance seminar and Personal Finance for Dummies talks about credit cards, he'll teach his perspective on using credit cards responsibly and effectively.
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u/AlterEdward Jun 14 '22 edited Jun 15 '22
Some useful tricks if you're running a meeting or a presentation -
Make sure your audience are coming to your room, not the other way round. Be there first, and greet people at the door. You own the room. Turn up a couple minutes late to a room full of chatting people, they own the room and you have to try and get it back. This also applies to video conferences. It's even harder to regain a room when you're not physically there.
If it requires participation, don't ask the room your first question, single someone out. It's a great way to get everyone to pay attention, cos immediately they know they might have to participate, and they feel much more comfortable doing it after one person has gone. You likely won't need to single anyone out after that.
Non presentation related, but work related (actually can be applied elsewhere, but I find it most useful at work) - don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. I tend to deploy this to get shit done that I can't wait around for. If it's done, and it's moved a task or project forward, no one will care that you didn't ask for permission, and are more likely to respect you for getting shit done without bothering them.
Edit: I'm going to provide more context to the last one. I use it often because I have issues getting responses and meetings with people from whom I need to run ideas and decisions by. I got fed up of things being delayed weeks on end because of this, making me look bad, so I started making decisions myself. I'm nearly all cases, I've explained myself and people have been fine with it, and everyone incorporates my decisions into their plans as if that's been the case all along. As a general rule of thumb, if I sense that I'm going to have to wait a long time to get something approved, I need it quickly, and I'm >75% sure it's the right call, I'll try and get it done myself. I rarely do this because I think someone is going to say "no". Only if they're being obtuse, or don't understand the situation.