Presenting to a Difficult Audience
This blog entry has been adapted from the March 2011 issue of The Quest for Workplace Excellence (sign up here)
This is the day for which you’ve been preparing for weeks. Your boss has asked you to give a project update to your entire department on a very successful program you’ve initiated. You’re excited because it’s your opportunity to showcase both yourself and your program. You know your stuff. You’re practiced, well-prepared and eager to share your exciting results with the team members. You’ve just completed your captivating opening when suddenly a jokester throws out some inappropriate humor, completely throwing off your train of thought. At that point, you find yourself thinking . . . why is this happening to me?
We have successfully delivered thousands of programs on multiple topics to diverse audiences for the past twenty years. We have experienced loud mouths, experts, jokesters, non-participants, side-conversationalists and people with what we call, “severe hardening of the attitude.” In our time, we have experienced just about any type of audience member who, for whatever their reason, feels a need to draw attention to themselves or otherwise sidetrack a great presentation.
Here are a few tips we’ve learned along the way to help corral the occasional deviant audience member who seems bent on capturing your show and taking the crowd with them. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen often but, when it does, these tips will help you maintain your composure and successfully deliver the program you have so carefully developed and practiced.
Filed under: Communication, Peter's Blog, Quest Newsletter on March 29th, 2011 1 Comment »
