How to Make Meetings Fun for Engineers
By executive speech coach Patricia Fripp
One of my speech coaching clients is a Cisco manager who has the honor of emceeing a high level meeting between his colleagues, a business partner’s team, and the best and brightest of Cisco engineers. While helping him tighten his welcoming script he mentioned “First on the agenda everyone will introduce themselves.” Although this is a common practice it is a very predictable meeting opening. As I tell my clients “Being predictable can be boring.” My recommendation is to set the tone with his well crafted remarks selling the outcome of this meeting and why it was unique.
Then “to maximize the networking and productivity of the meeting we invite you to introduce yourself by name, title, years with your organization, and a little known fact that we do not know about you.”
My advice was that he model exactly how long their introductions should be, have several of his friends do the same. The result will be the 40 introductions would not take up all day.
The little known fact is a great way to add humor, build camaraderie, and make it easy to start a conversation with people you perceive as very important or scary!
In case you are interested…my lesser known facts….
While delivering a speech I stepped out of a space ship wearing a custom made Wonder Woman costume.
I once hosted a cocktail party with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as guests.
San Francisco magazine named me “One of the 10 sexiest women in San Francisco.” (Tough to believe? It was a long time ago. 1971)
As you can see there is no speaking challenge too big! If you really want to speak in a clear, concise, credible way invest in FrippVT Patricia Fripp’s online learning system for powerful, persuasive presentations. Why not take a trial?
