Leading from the Middle

Caption: Bored! Who’s at fault? Audience or Presenter?

A friend’s Facebook post got my attention. She wrote that some professional organizations are now charging speakers to hold forth at their conferences.
You want to be on the program?
Pay up front.
Semi=facetiously, I have a question.
Will having the speaker pay result in a better grade of audience? Or will the pay-to-speak audience still want you – the speaker - “to keep them engaged and enticed” throughout?
Possibly the reasons for the pay-to-speak model are purely economic and have nothing to do with quality of audience.
Maybe the profession is going broke; so the days of what was once a “free ride” for presenters (like a “free lunch”) is over.
In a roundabout way, the Facebook post got me thinking about the participants in my classes and workshops.
Most went well – I, the presenter learned something and the participants confirmed they did as well.
But, there were a few worrisome workshops over two decades that felt like they went nowhere; neither I or the participants gained anything.
I tend to blame myself for those downers; I could have done better. Well, I could have done better even at those sessions that ended in standing ovations.
After years of blaming myself for such failures, I’ve concluded that I should be less hard on myself. And that led to this essay’s title: Detention.
Like a spring-time morning, it dawned on me that those failures were not, solely, my fault.
In reflection I now realize that, some - not all - of the participants acted as if they were in high school “detention” and I was their “monitor”.
Back in the day, detention was where the “bad boys” and “bad girls”, in high school, were sent for misbehaving in class. Some of the participants took pride in being there; it was “cool” to be a delinquent (think of the iconic James Dean in the film “Rebel Without a Cause”).
Being in detention reminds me of Mark Twain’s claim that “..heaven (was) for climate, and hell (or detention was) for society.”
However, the cool kids were not there to learn. They were there to disrupt anyone making an effort to teach or learn.
So, when a majority of participants in a workshop resist thinking, participating and discussing, that’s like my being the lead teacher in detention.
There are indeed two sides to a workshop’s failure.
Don’t the participants have a responsibility - equal to the presenter - to be prepared to think, to contribute, to engage?
For me, engagement means when I sit myself down at a conference to hear someone, I have an open and active mind to the speaker’s expressed ideas and experiences.
I respond to what I hear, either agreeing or disagreeing or, serendipitously, ricocheting off in an altogether new direction.
In turn, as a presenter, I promote engagement by using break-out sessions, small group activities, case studies, and role playing along with brief lectures on theory and practice.
I never expect a speaker or panelist to entertain me.
If they do, great but if they do not, I don’t feel let down.
So, I rely heavily on participants behaving like I do.
The audiences I speak to are all professionals and their job descriptions all include Thinking.
I have on occasion been disappointed that some participants do not think – why they are there is a puzzle.
I have always relied heavily on participants who come prepared to engage, who have something to offer, who, when asked, speak up.
Their doing so “breaks the ice” and helps engage others. Absent those “spark plug” participants, I have an uphill struggle to get the group to open up.
A few, like the delinquents in detention, are passive-aggressive. Either they have nothing to offer or are unwilling to take part except to disrupt learning.
It should be obvious that a one-day program or a one-hour lecture will not “cure” anyone of their resentment or their unwillingness to rethink assumptions and tradition.
That’s a supervisor’s long-term job requiring endless patience and persistence to bring about positive behavioral change or, more likely, termination.

My book, Fables for Leaders, makes for great Detention Hall reading. Click on the image and order up!

And, my book on democratic workplaces has lots of cues on how to let go, how to build trust, how to build effective teams, how to be a strong follower and a good leader.
Buy here.


© Copyright commentary by John Lubans 2023