How To Moderate OnLine Meetings
It is a curious word “moderate”. It means “make or become less extreme, intense, rigorous, or violent”. The chances of being responsible for a meeting which became violent or extreme in business, would be a fairly exotic occurrence. If opinions were charged and opposing, the situation could become intense and the vigorous exchange of opinions might become rigorous. How often do we see any of these things in Japan? This is a country of conservative counterbalance between personal and collective interests. Disturbing the “wa”, the group harmony, is an anathema in this society and so attacking other speakers in public is not going to surface anytime soon. I have been here thirty five years and have only experienced it once.
So the moderator’s role in Japan is a walk in the park compared to more bolshie societies. Having said that though, if you are active in foreign community groups like chambers of commerce, national societies, etc., you can always relive the good old days back in your own country, where people will push the boundaries of polite society and you are the one supposedly in control of the situation.
I will deal with dealing with difficult people a little later, so let’s turn our attention to the more garden variety aspects of the role. It should be clear to you, that you are not the star of the show here. Sounds trite, but how often have you seen the moderator want to hog the limelight, to show off how intelligent and massively well informed they are? The traffic cop metaphor is a good one. Your job is to direct the traffic flow of conversation.
There is a balance required between the speakers. The seriously self awareness challenged and thrusting must be contained and the more decorous members of the panel need to be allowed to get their words in edge wise. They usually don’t have a dog in the fight, so you need to draw them out of their quizzical state and encourage their contributions.
Online this can be a bit challenging, because of consistent issues with audio delays and technical incompetence on the part of panellists. In the in person meeting room, the moderator can more easily interject themselves mid-flow during the panellist’s comments and shut them down, to open up to the views of another panellist. Online, we both wind up speaking over the top of each other, because of the slight delay in the audio being broadcast. The end result is no one can hear clearly what is going on from anyone. Our body language signals are also eclipsed, because we have become a tiny talking head, in a tiny box, in a remote part of the screen territory.
Live or online, the moderator cannot just brazenly front up to the session and start bossing people around. Each panellist has an academic and work history, which informs us of their possible range of expertise and experience on the subject. We need to talk to them beforehand, to ascertain when we can best call on them for comment. Asking a panellist for comment on a subject they don’t have much experience or knowledge of, casts a gloom over the proceedings, as the interlocutor has now publicly embarrassed the panellist and themselves. A more professional moderator would direct the questions to the person most expert in that area and the proceedings would flow seamlessly.
The moderator is also duty bound to dig in a bit deeper with panellist comments, to yield a richer vein of insight. Experts will sometimes make statements which are obvious to other experts and need no further elucidation, but to the rest of us, they sound elusive. We need to challenge the panellist, in a supportive way, to explain in more depth what they have said. Drawing in other comments from the panel is also needed, to get the right balance of views and airtime. Keeping silent mental score on how much speaking time each person has received and then adjusting the balance is the mark of a skilled moderator. All of this is a bit easier in the on line world, because the moderator is usually invisible to the audience, as the tech focuses on whoever has active audio.
It makes a lot of sense to have the audience cameras off and everyone muted throughout, except perhaps for question time. The same visual and vocal isolation should apply to the panellists. As the moderator, we have briefed them that when they are called upon by us to comment, they need to come on camera and unmute themselves. How often have you seen one of the other panellists suddenly lurch unprepared on screen, because they left their audio on and made a scuffling noise in the background, triggering the tech to focus on them? Or a specific panellist is asked to speak and away they go, but they have forgotten to unmute themselves, adding a certain tragic, comedic aspect to the affair.
Refereeing heated exchanges between fired up panellists is always brimming with danger. Without too much effort, you can be dragged into the affray, as the attacker goes after you as well. This is when you pull out the “professionals reference” get out of jail card, when one or more of the panellists goes ballistic. You appeal to all the panellists that “we are all professionals here, so let’s have a robust yet fair debate, devoid of any malice”. You have now framed anyone who continues to be obnoxious as a loser. At this point you cleverly circumnavigate the brawlers and get comments from the remaining non-combatants on the panel. This allows everyone to calm down a bit and the focus is no longer on you as the moderator.
Moderating panels looks easy, but when you reflect on your own observations, you realise few do it well. When it is our turn, let’s make sure we bolster our personal professional brand.
Be Clear With Your On-Line Instructions
When we are immersed in our subject, be it a topic we are speaking on or a work theme we have lived and breathed, we need to be careful about letting familiarity breed confusion. In the on-line world we are often asking people to go into breakout rooms to discuss various weighty topics and then come back and report. The host can usually pop into these sealed off rooms and join the discussion. What you find when you do this can be alarming.
Either when you are in the room or when everyone comes back you discover the punters were not really clear what they were supposed to be discussing. Now we will get this same phenomenon in the real world as well and the puzzled punter can just ask for a clarification. In the on-line world, people are hesitant to mention they didn’t quite understand the task, before they are rocketed off to the breakout room, because they don’t want to admit they missed what everyone else seemed to get. All those little faces with beady eyes in tiny boxes on screen, can be a bit terrifying.
Once in the breakout room it becomes apparent they were not alone and no-one is exactly sure how this is supposed to work. I was on an international on-line session recently with nearly 170 people spread around the planet. We were given our task and swiftly bundled off to our rooms. Now being the note taking type, I had dutifully written down the steps we were we supposed to work through. What I discovered though, was that I was the odd ball bunny, because no one else had taken any notes. Consequently, they didn’t have a clear picture of what they needed to get to work on.
When we are running these things ourselves, we are captured by the tech and the breakout room requires a bit of finessing of the tech to get every one in place, so we are usually pre-occupied with the process. We forget to ask if anyone has a question or to double check on what people think is about to happen. It is a good practice to get the instructions on to a white board or a slide before we propel people into the ether and isolate them from humanity for the next number of minutes. Getting people to take a photo of the screen before they embark on their cyber journey is also handy.
My international on-line excursion was instructive, because the speaker was authentic, entertaining, the real deal and had bucketloads of knowledge of his subject. Yet at the crucial furlong he faltered and was spilled, unseated and we were left lost as we descended into cosmic isolation, trying to plumb what he said we needed to do. We may be doing the same thing with our people, when we have them on-line. We may be forgetting that if you ask 20 people to turn right, at least three will turn left. The simplest of instructions doesn't compute for some people, because they weren’t listening or they were preoccupied with other more attractive thoughts, than listening to us drone on.
Zoom meetings with a lot of people with their cameras turned on can be quite distracting. I suggest to turn them off and have none or only your face in that pathetic little box you get given on-screen. Do we really need to see all of those faces, all of the time. In a real life meeting, we are seated such that we can see the speaker and we hardly even look at the people seated to the left or right of us. Now in the on-line world, the speaker has to compete with all of these other faces vying for the attention of the audience. Cut the competition for your message down and have people focus on you alone. Turn the cameras off, hit “B” to make the slide deck go to black and then everyone is forced to concentrate on you. Hit “W” to bring up the slide deck again and keep going.
Breakouts give us the chance for discussions that are done with a manageable number of people. However, if people don’t know what they are supposed to be doing, because we flubbed it, then the whole exercise becomes one of frustration, dissatisfaction and pointlessness. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them before you dispatch them to the on-line equivalent of the isolation ward.
Confused Or Competent Online Presenting?
The tech factor in online presenting is a juggernaut which sweeps all in its path. I was finishing up a three hour online Successful Public Speaking class, when one of the participants asked me what I thought was the most difficult aspect of presenting online. Many issues flooded my mind, but by far the most elusive of a fix, would have to be the technology. The screen with your face in it, is a tiny, little, even microscopic image, the audio is dodgy, the punters can’t get into their breakout rooms, the pre-prepared polls evaporate before your eyes. The tech God leads us astray from the fundamentals of a good presentation.
We should have divined our clear purpose with this talk. Are we here to inform people of insights, information, data, or knowledge? Are we doing this to persuade them and bring theminto the fold of our way of thinking? Are we here to inspire them to storm the barricades, to take up their cudgels and right wrongs, to become the complete person they can be? Or are we here to motivate them by using our communication skills, to have them determine they want to do something we think makes a lot of sense, and which they now desire. Depending on our purpose, the design, content and delivery will be wildly different.
We need to know our stuff. That means we bring a lot of intellect and experience firepower to the fore. We don’t have unlimited time to present and presenting online is supremely tiring for both parties, both presenter and audience. We need to strike a rich vein, unearth the motherlode and then be scrupulous about the gems we bring forth. One hour of online presentation deserves a short break for everyone.
Sharing video of your own nasal passage with everyone, by locating your laptop on your desk, is a bad look and seriously sad first impression. Yet so many people do this. Amazing. Get the camera up to eye height and then spend as much of the time as you can, looking at the camera, rather than the screen.
Online can become very one way and boring. We need to engage our audience. Most of the platforms have polling. This is always useful as way to inject humour or create deeper self awareness. Instead of disappearing off to secretive breakouts all the time, we can also use the whole room together, as a way to share ideas and insights. I am not keen on the chat box because if you have a lot of people, it starts to become a Las Vegas slot machine, with the screen information rapidly spiralling upwards out of control.
The machine adds each new chat at the bottom of the column, pushing the previous comments higher and higher, until you cannot physically keep up anymore. We had 150 people doing a Stress Management class online, broke WebEx and temporarily lost all audio and had to retreat to the chat. What a nightmare that proved to be, at that volume of punters adding their two bits worth.
Whiteboards are okay if you have a limited number of people and have time. You have to make sure the font size works too, because often the default is microscopic and you can hardly read it. We can share files which is truly dangerous. Before you know it, you the presenter, are now a slave to the slide deck. The screen is taken up by your visuals and you get a 5% share of the screen real estate, dangling in some corner, with your tiny little head rammed into a tiny box. Definitely keep your slides spartan, pare back as much content as you can and go for images which require you to explain what it means in this context, so that you can wrench back some modicum of control.
Video is the refuge of scoundrels in presenting. This applies in the online presenting world just as much as it does in the live meeting venue. Video is what the President often goes to for dross, pap and filler from the marketing department or even worse from the Goebbelian Investor Relations pond scum, propaganda merchants. It is extremely rare in my experience that the video ever significantly matches the content of the presentation or adds any value.
Presenters are invariably gun shy about rehearsing their presentations, preferring to grapple with the finer points of slide deck construction. In the online world, this is a formula for tech humiliation. Practice with the tech, until you have mastered it and then practice a bit more for when the tech betrays you, stabbing you in the back, just when you were depending on it to come through for you. You don’t need Plan B. You need Plans B, C and D with today’s treacherous tech.
When the audio crashed out on WebEx, in that infamous 150 person all singing, all dancing extravaganza, our producer quickly phoned in to re-establish audio and did a tremendous job tap dancing, until the trainer could log back in and pick up the pace again. You don’t want to be trying to work this stuff out on the fly. Practice, practice, practice.
Dealing With Confrontational Questions In The On-Line World
When we give our presentation on-line we are in full control of the situation. We know what we are going to say. When we get to the end, or part way through, and someone asks us a really tough question, this can be difficult to deal with. Especially, if they are stressed and ask the question in a very aggressive or accusatory manner, we can easily react emotionally. The normal response for human beings in these cases can be the release of chemicals into the body to get ready for flight or fight. This is how we survived from cavemen days, when confronted by a sabre toothed tiger and it still applies today. Regardless of our species roots, we have to make sure we keep our control and a cool head. Good in theory, but not so easy.
Apart from our release of chemicals into the body, we find our mind can often become confused, as we try to think of the best way to respond to our interlocutor. We usually never know when we are going to be hit with a tough question, asked in an angry or aggressive manner. The ambush factor is the reason we have trouble knowing how to respond. If we know the person will be difficult, then we can mentally prepare ourselves. We need to have a plan. It is when the person is new and unknown, or a known person suddenly behaving unpredictably that we can get into trouble.
Because of the random nature of these occurrences, it means we need to consider this possibility before every meeting. We should consider what might be some issues the members of the audience may raise with us and think about how we should answer them. When we get hit with a tough question, we can quickly go to an emotional response. We need to consider those answers beforehand about why what they said isn’t true or not the scale of the problem they say it is. We should also prepare some positive messages to get ourselves back on the front foot and in control of the conversation.
The other area we need to pay attention to is our voice tone. We may show to the client that we are lacking in confidence by mumbling or sounding hesitant or unsure of what we are saying. We may sound like we are scared of what they said or the way they said it. We may sound defensive and even angrily dismissive of their opinion. We need to maintain a cool, calm and collected tone, totally unfazed by what they have just said. This makes us sound more confident and credible.
We should ask clarifying questions before we try to give an answer. We want the verbal assassin to give us more detail. It well may be there has been a misunderstanding or there has been some miscommunication. We need to know that before we try to respond. Letting them hang themselves on the ridiculousness of their outburst is a good ploy.
Here is 7 step process to follow
Tempers are frayed because of the business disruption generated by Covid-19. People are more stressed than normal and outbursts will arise without warning. We need to anticipate rather than react. Consider every meeting to have the potential to blow up in your face and if it doesn’t, great, but if it does we must be ready to roll.