This week, I was out dining with a group of people (which was a great experience in itself!). One person was discussing one of his challenges as a team leader. His teams included people from all over the world, and when he facilitated their Zoom team meetings, he felt like everyone was a separate entity. The result was them not really gelling as a group.
This discussion got me thinking about how the idea of an audience “gelling” is relevant to speakers too. Maybe not as much for a keynote speaker, because as a keynote speaker, you’re more likely to be doing an inspirational or motivational type of presentation. You certainly want to connect with your audience, but on a different level.
Keynotes aside, there are all manner of speaking opportunities where providing opportunities for our audiences to gel as a group is going to work in our favor. As a speaker (and in a way a “team leader”), it’s up to us to make sure our audiences feel like they’re part of a group. It’s up to us to make sure we’re holding their attention and engaging them in interesting ways. Much of this comes down to our ability to interact with our audience in a way that encourages conversation within the group. How? Here are 4 thoughts I contributed to our dinner companion’s discussion:
- People want to know who else is in the room: Allow folks to introduce themselves and how they’re connected to the topic at hand. This provides people with a chance to discover who’s in the room, who they might identify with, who they’d like to talk to, and/or want to learn more about.
- People don’t like to be talked at: Whether your speaker platform is on Zoom or in-person, you need to encourage your audience to contribute to the conversation. This comes about by asking open-ended questions and soliciting answers. If you’re on Zoom Webinar, encourage people to use the chat feature. If you’re on a Zoom meeting, in addition to the chat feature, encourage people to raise their digital hand and use other Zoom reaction emojis to share how they’re feeling about what’s being said. This way, people get to participate and feel like their thoughts and feedback count.
- People want to talk: Often, people have more than a passing comment to share. So provide them with the chance to say more with breakouts where they can converse with fellow attendees. You can do this on Zoom using the breakout session feature. You can do this in-person by physically breaking people into smaller groups. Just make sure to explain what they’re doing in their breakout. You can use breakouts as a way to have people work together on a constructive project with a specific goal or outcome, or provide them with a fun topic to talk about so they can get to know one another.
- People want to bond: Encourage your attendees to connect one-to-one with someone else in the group/audience and learn more about them. Boosting these individual relationship-building tasks is not only a great way for members to learn from one another, but also to hear how others feel about the discussion topic at hand.
As a leader and facilitator of several groups, I‘ve found that providing opportunities for the people in your audience to get to know each other goes a long way toward keeping your meetings interesting and getting folks more comfortable with one another. Hopefully, you can now see how these same strategies can be used to get your audiences to gel around you and your expertise too!
‘Til we speak again….
~Beth