According to The Edelman Trust Barometer, “People’s trust in business, government, NGOs, and media remained largely unchanged from 2017 — 20 of 28 countries surveyed now lie in distruster territory, up one from last year. Yet dramatic shifts are taking place at the country level and within the institution of media.” (https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer)

The United States had a 37- point drop in all types of institutions. China, in contrast, had a 27-point gain.

In my profession, I give a lot of speeches on change management tools and techniques, as well as longer roll-up-your-sleeves presentations/workshops. Over the years, it occurred to me that there were three things that distinguished presentations that truly stand out. I am talking about presentations in which you expect people to take something useful away. You hired a speaker because you believed he or she would offer something important to your organization.

When people are forced to attend a session or you bring in a speaker just to fill a slot in the agenda, you risk wasting people’s time and your money.If you expect people to learn something, then they need to come to the meeting with high expectations. They need to be hungry to hear what’s being said. When that occurs, people are engaged, they ask probing and challenging questions, and they start connecting what the speaker is saying to what they need to learn. And if the speaker fails to deliver, they will challenge him or her.

As I write this, I am attending a webinar on how to conduct effective webinars! (Really, I am not making this up!). You can see that I am multi-tasking, which means that I am barely paying attention to the speaker. Hmmm.

Someone wrote to me last week and asked, “How can I track energy during webinars that I conduct?” (In The Energy Bar video, I say that you must be able to read how well your meeting is going – is energy increasing or decreasing?)

You may know this story: researchers asked groups to count how often a team passed the ball to other members of their own basketball team.

Pretty simple.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a 2-hour webinar. It was rich with content. The speaker often asked for our input in the chat room and then used that information to amend his presentation. Near the end, he went into his sales pitch (which he said he was going to do, so no surprises there). And then he finished with a lengthy Q&A session. It was a great use of my time.

Using The Energy Bar as my gauge (www.energybartools.com), I was already ‘Interested’ when I joined the call, especially since it had been recommended by someone I trust. The webinar was so good, I purchased the product.