She Didn’t Read Her Audience!

TIP – If you or your team struggle with getting your messages across and speaking in public (like town hall meetings) fear not. You are NOT alone. I can help.??

This flip chart from the other week represents what many management teams feel like when they have to speak in public, at the ”summit” or a town hall event.

“I didn’t read my audience” one young director confessed in our session the other week. I felt her pain!

She bravely shared her story of how she’d bombed on stage at the global ‘summit’ in front of 500 leaders. She remembered leaving her audience HANGRY (hungry & angry) at over-running. Oops. Let’s learn and figure out how to avoid this key-note-crime in future.

The leadership team were asked to deliver their strategy about the “reshuffle” in one of Europe’s biggest consumer goods companies. However, the inexperienced speaker, Mariola, had an absolute nightmare because she didn’t read her audience.

I suggested to Mariola that sometimes you need to adapt your original plan to give your audience what they need AT THAT MOMENT, AT THAT TIME! If you don’t do that, you might lose them, or worst case scenario, make them HANGRY!

She THOUGHT she needed to:

• Deliver the company strategy – and be completely transparent
• Share the “org” chart of all the new positions (about 50 people)
• Go into detail about how it might work over the next 1-3 years
• Give the audience everything there was to know about the reshuffle
• Contextualise the reshuffle and why it needed to happen
• Be professional and credible

The trouble was, her presentation was from 12 noon – 1pm and the audience were…?HUNGRY!

They had also already sat through 4 other presentations so they were...?TIRED!

The “meeting” was meant to finish at 1pm and was clearly running over. And rather than cut her presentation short, Mariola carried on and over-ran by 25 minutes!

So the audience were...?HANGRY (hungry and angry, like my kids when they get home from school!)

So what could Mariola have done to avoid the “HANGER?”

What she actually NEEDED was to:?

• NOT deliver the company strategy – just the headlines
• NOT share the whole “org” chart – just the sections
• NOT go into detail – but tell a story of ONE aspect of the transformation
• NOT give the audience everything, just the highlights
• NOT bother contextualising the reshuffle (lunch beckons, they don’t care!)
• YES - Be professional and credible – tick!
• Give the audience somewhere to go for more information (a call to action)
• KEEP IT SHORT!

If she’d done 20 mins followed by 5 minutes of Q&A she’d have been early for lunch and satisfied what the audience actually needed at THAT MOMENT AT THAT TIME!

If you need to manage your ‘summits’ and presentations and give your audience what they NEED – get in touch. I can help you. It’s what I do.

#PublicSpeaking #ReadYourAudience #SpeakingTips