If you haven’t had one in a conference call—or any speaking engagement—consider yourself lucky.  Hecklers or “Stump the Chump” types are disruptive, hostile, and very counter-productive.  They can make us lose our train of thought, get emotional, say the wrong thing, or even destroy a presentation.  They’re out there, and we need to be prepared for handling hecklers.

 

Help is here in a blog post I found from SpeakFearlessly.net.  They list out eight ways to deal with disruptive people that help you remain in control, and even come out looking better.  Here are my favorite “mental judo” moves:

 

Keep warm and friendly – A caveat to this is to stay “calm, cool, and collected.”  No matter what they say, you let it wash over you.  This keeps you from losing control and getting emotional, and it gets the rest of the participants on your side.

 

Make them the “expert” – Judo FLIP!  Use their momentum against them by stepping out of their way.  Compliment them on their breadth of knowledge, and ask that they “fill us all in.”  Their ignorance will soon become apparent—if they rise to the challenge at all.  Who knows, they might even have something good to add.

 

Find Agreement – At some point it becomes less about the subject, and more with who is right.  By deflecting and distracting with a “safer” point that you both agree on, you assuage their combativeness, and can proceed.

 

Though it’s not in the list, we have two very powerful tools at our fingertips with each and every conference call: lecture mode and mute buttons.  Lecture mode ensures that only we can speak, and that we control who gets to talk and when.  But even if we can’t do global control, we can spot the dissenter on our conference call control dashboard and mute them at any time—or even kick them.  

 

Yes, this might be rude, and maybe it is a last resort, but instead of worrying about a bad apple, let’s consider the feelings and time of all the other participants.  They are just as important—maybe even more so—than one heckler.

 

Have you dealt with hecklers before?  Tell us about it, and what you did to disarm them.

Of course it was the title that caught my eye: “What does abdominal surgery have to do with organizational communication?”  That’s not a question I would normally have asked, and it was strange that someone had.  I had to check it out…

 

And they made a very good point!  The gist of the question is based on a study from the New England Journal of Medicine in which one group of patients was told exactly what their surgery would entail, as well as what to expect during recovery.  The other group was told nothing.  Somewhat surprisingly, the group that knew what was going on complained less, required less medication, and recovered faster.

 

Like surgery, you’re “blind” during a conference call, and afterwards it’s basically all up to you—with some directions and guidance.  So if surgery patients do better when they know all the details, well it makes sense that conference call participants would too.

 

To further duplicate the study, we should have a detailed agenda that’s distributed long in advance.  We should also include the assignments and “take away” information that would have been covered in the conference.  This is a bit counter-intuitive—“If we give them that, why bother with a conference call?”  This is a good point.

 

Imagine this scenario: the participant gets the agenda, sees what they’ll have to do, and starts working on it.  Worst case they get their part done early, before the conference call, and now we’re ahead of schedule.  Now what if they look into their assignment and spot a flaw, a problem, or an opportunity?

 

Knowing ahead of time also allows our participants to better prepare for the meeting, joining the conference call with solid answers and great questions.  And afterwards, they can jump right into their assignments because they weren’t ambushed in the conference call.

 

Try this method with your next conference call.  Tell us a bit about how you prepared your participants, as well as if things were better or worse after the call.

Getting participants to participate during a conference call can sometimes be a challenge.  We want to engage them, get a little back-and-forth going so that we know better how to reach them, and they in turn feel like they’re a part of the process.  So how can we do that?

 

In a blog post by Olivia Mitchell, I read about some dos and don’ts for getting participation.  Some of the things we shouldn’t do were trying to get participants involved before warming them up, not being clear on what we want them to do, and simply springing the spotlight on them.

 

So what should we do then?  An important point is that we need to make sure the participation we’re going for has a purpose.  We shouldn’t spend valuable conferencing time trying to get pointless information or interaction out of our participants.  It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and the participant’s lack of enthusiasm will reflect this.

 

It’s important to prepare them.  We could mention that, “in a minute,” we’ll be asking for a specific piece of information from them.  Then when it’s time, we should go first and demonstrate.  This allows them to know exactly what we want to happen, and it breaks the ice a bit.

 

Most people are a little nervous about speaking out in a conference.  With some preparation, demonstration, and encouragement, we can help them forget their nervousness, contribute to the conference call, and take away more than they would have as a silent listener.

Most conference calls last about an hour.  That’s one hour to make our case, engage our participants, get our message across, and deal with any questions.  So it’s good to find anything to make that hour more effective… which I did.

 

In Speaking About Presenting, I read fifteen ways to improve our presentations and make our conference calls better.  Some of them are obvious, some are not, and a lot of them we’ve covered before in this blog.  Here are two that really stood out for me.

 

 

Check out the other thirteen improvements, but come back here and tell us a way to improve that wasn’t on the list.

A PowerPoint presentation is like a sentence fragment; it’s incomplete on its own.  The rest of a presentation is the speaker telling the story behind a PowerPoint’s visuals and keywords, putting them into context.  In this form, PowerPoint can only be used when someone is there to complete it, but there’s a way we can make it stand on its own.

 

We do this by converting the PowerPoint to video, overlaying the slides with our recorded voice.  Why would we do this?  In video form, PowerPoint is a complete entity, one that’s no longer tethered to anyone.  

 

And talk about versatile!  We can play our video during a video conference, send it out to whomever to enjoy, and even upload it to our website.  It can also be shared on social networking sites, blogged, YouTubed, and put wherever else we can think of.

 

An idea I like is to put a video presentation on a registration webpage for future conference calls.  Visitors can sign-up, watch the video, and have a good foundation to build on in the upcoming conference.

 

If you’re interested in making your PowerPoint present 24/7 for you, check out these free PowerPoint to video converters.

Edward Tufte is an American statistician, professor emeritus at Yale University, outspoken voice for clear and effective visual representation of information, and a very smart man.  In an interview with Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive of Microsoft, a very interesting point was made about the past and future of presentations.

 

To summarize Ballmer: for the past few years there’s been a need to change how we present.  Up till now we’d bring a presentation to a meeting that shows, “your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion."  Or, like many meetings I’ve been in, there’s a main topic, but the main point isn’t revealed until the end, after all the supporting ideas and evidence.

 

Ballmer, Tufte, and—humbly in such company—myself agree that this isn’t the best way to do things.  The alternative?  Long before the meeting, write down the main point and the call to action.  Then below that, list the supporting arguments, evidence, and possibilities.  You do all this before the meeting because—here’s the kicker—you won’t be presenting any of that information in the meeting.

 

Instead, you will walk in and take questions.  Since all of the attendees have had time to read, think about, and make conclusions, the meeting time is spent on the valuable stuff: hashing out details, exploring possibilities, strategizing, and making decisions.  That valuable time is NOT spent on education or bringing up to speed, which afterwards of course would necessitate another meeting for decisions, etc..

 

Two problems come to my mind—and probably yours too:

 

For #1, you will easily be able to pick out, and get rid of the lazy, unneeded employees.  The rest will quickly learn to speed-read.  For #2, just prior to sending out your presentation visit your boss and “ask their opinion” on each point, effectively presenting the presentation to them.  You’ll get their input beforehand—a bonus—and they’ll be ready for the meeting.