workshops work Podcast
This is a podcast about facilitation: the practice of creating conditions for people to think better together.
Whether you’re leading strategy, navigating change or developing leaders, the quality of your conversations shapes the quality of your decisions.
Hosted by Dr Myriam Hadnes, behavioural economist, facilitator and founder of workshops.work, each episode explores the human dynamics of working together: how psychological safety is built, why some conversations lead to action while others stall, how leaders foster genuine participation, and what behavioural science can teach us about collaboration. Alongside these conversations, Dr Hadnes shares reflections from her own client work, offering practical insights from the realities of designing and facilitating workshops in organisations.
Recognised as the facilitation community’s most-recommended podcast in SessionLab’s State of Facilitation reports from 2024 to 2026, the show has grown into an archive of more than 350 conversations spanning the craft, the inner work, and the unexpected edges of facilitation. Whether you’re a facilitator, leader, consultant or L&D professional, you'll come away with sharper questions and a few ideas worth borrowing.
workshops work Podcast
017 - Master the Room! How to Create Engagement with Your Audience with Derek Bruce
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In this episode, I talk to Derek Bruce. He is a Leadership Development Director, and has worked in HR, Learning & Development and is also an expert keynote speaker and event moderator and host.
Derek and I speak about the importance of engaging the audience - whether it is in a workshop, meeting or at a conference. When our audience feels engaged, they will listen to us and interact, they will feel enabled to act upon the content we try to bring across.
Besides engaging the audience, Derek and I touch on a million other topics: the skillset of managers to survive the “future of work”, the impact of preparation on our mindset and the workshop atmosphere, and: why you may want to ask your audience to take a selfie.
Don’t miss the part when Derek shares his lessons learned from facilitating a workshop where half the participants were physically present and the other half joined via video call. Tune in to learn how to assure that the virtual participants are as engaged as if they sat in the same room….
Questions and Answers
[1:32] If you were a hashtag, what would it be?
[1:53] What is your story? Where does your energy and your skill to engage the audience come from?
[2:56] What have you learned from your roles in HR and Learning & Development about facilitation?
[4:34] Where do you see the challenges and benefits of being a corporate versus an external facilitator?
[8:02] What is your experience in collaborating with an external facilitator?
[8:52] How do you measure success?
[10:32] What does it take to engage an audience?
[12:54] To what extent does seating matter and how do you set up the room?
[14:06] Do you use different approaches to engage the audience depending on whether it is a meeting, workshop or conference?
[19:50] When you say that engagement starts within the first minute and you often use humour. What have you learned from improv or stand-up comedy about engagement?
[22:59] Stand-up is scripted whereas improv is not. Would you script your first joke when coming on stage?
[24:41] So, does “humour” boil down to “authenticity”?
[25:35] What makes for you a good facilitator?
[28:26] Do facilitators of e.g. Design Sprints need different skills than facilitators who teach groups?
[31:18] How did you connect the virtual and physical participants in the beginning? What were the exercises?
[33:41] For anyone who hasn’t facilitated a partly virtual workshop – what would you advise?
[35:40] What is your opinion on the statement that in the future of work, every manager must develop facilitation skills?
[38:22] What’s the difference between soft and emotional skills?
[40:40] Are these emotional skills then also the ingredients you need to engage the audience?
[47:59] What’s your silver bullet exercise?
Related links you may want to check out:
Our sponsor Session Lab (affiliate link)
Other shows we mentioned:
Episode 016 with Tamar Broadbent: Why every facilitator should take improv classes”
Episode 007 with Jeremy Akers: Mindset Management
Connect to Derek:
Any thoughts? Share them with us!
👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/ 👈
What if your next team workshop delivered the results you hoped for? What if everyone believed that the working session was a valuable use of their time and felt inspired to take action? My name is Miriam Hapnus, and it is my mission to help you to deliver workshops that work. Today with me on the show is Derek Bruce. He's an HR expert, public speaker, master of ceremony, and corporate facilitator. Derek, in fact, has been my mentor during my journey of self and job discovery when I left my job about two years ago. And today he's here to talk with me about engaging the audience by mastering the room, whether it's a conference, meeting, or workshop. So stay tuned. Hi Derek.
SPEAKER_02Hi Miriam.
SPEAKER_01It's so nice to have you on the show.
SPEAKER_02Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and we had so many interesting, inspiring conversations already. I learned a million from you. And now I'm happy to share this wisdom and insights and experience with a wider audience.
SPEAKER_02Looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you for doing that. You have actually quite an interesting profile. That's why I stopped you on LinkedIn. That's how we got in contact in the first place. Um if you were hashtag, if you had to summarize your profile, what would be the one word?
SPEAKER_02My profile? Um I would say it'll be all around hashtag hashtag hashtag energy.
SPEAKER_01Energy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Nice. So what's your story? How did you get to this energy? And how did you actually get to the point where you can engage the audience so greatly?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, um, in a in a very small summarised way, was working a lot in London, in the UK, um, for different industries in HR and also in learning and development, and have done numerous roles over the years which involved speaking in front of people, presenting in front of people, facilitating groups, and it all kind of worked its way to where I am now, which is working in Amsterdam for a really cool tech company, and being given the opportunity to to speak to large groups, but also to continue to facilitate um smaller groups outside my organization, but also then start moving into external organisations as well. So the journey has been one of diverse industries, diverse roles, changing countries, but still doing something that I really enjoy.
SPEAKER_01So, what have you learned from your background in HR and learning and development about facilitation?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think the first thing is facilitation isn't easy. Um, a lot of people say you can you can just do it. I think the first learning has been that you really need to understand your audience. Um, may sound obvious, but it's really whether it's facilitating a small group of five to six, a medium-sized group of 50 or over 200, you need to know what the audience is there and what they want to walk out knowing. The second thing I've learned from HR is people can be annoying. Um in that context, be prepared for anything. Um, because people are people, I would suggest. And the third thing I've learned is whatever you do, enjoy it. Um because HR learning development isn't one of those easy industries where everything is black and white, where you can measure the benefit, black and white. So you need to have that energy and that motivation to enjoy it because it can be challenging at times.
SPEAKER_01Yes. I know. And when you mentioned that you need to know your audience, so the group, you're a corporate facilitator. This means the people or the participants in your workshops are usually working for the same company as you do. And there are many external facilitators, as myself, for example. How do you see the benefits or the challenges of a corporate facilitator compared to an external facilitator?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's there's pros and cons for both. If I start with thinking about a corporate worker in their own corporation, a lot of the benefits relate to knowing the audience in terms of knowing the culture, knowing the way, and in my particular situation, it's leaders, so knowing the style of leadership we have in an organization, and also knowing the style you can facilitate in, whether it's formal, informal combination of both, and how that lands with the audience. If you come in as an external into a corporate, you don't know that, which also can be a benefit because people perceive you rightly or wrongly in a way where you are the expert. So sometimes we have had situations where we have the expertise in an organization and we have expertise outside of the organization, but by bringing in somebody external to co-facilitate, that then heightens the and this is gonna sound strange, it heightens the perception of expertise and professionalism, even though you have the same level between the two people. It's a strange reaction I've seen on numerous times as well. So there are pros and cons. I think that the biggest challenge for an external is it's not as much the facilitation, how you do the session, how you work with people, but I've heard a lot of people I've spoken to say, I don't know what happens when I leave. So it's more that I've done a great session, I've done a great whatever. I don't know if it's made a difference, I don't know if it's made an impact because I don't see them every day going forward. So that I think is from a personal perspective more of a challenge than the physical being in a room, working with people and engaging them.
SPEAKER_01I can totally relate to that. And I actually discussed this point with a few guests already, um, to what extent the facilitator actually has responsibility to follow up and to make sure that the group sticks to their commitments made during the workshop time. On the other hand, I see a benefit from an external that they see or they're they're in a position where they can question the status quo, the beliefs, where they maybe see the blind spots of the narrative that is told inside an organization that employees might not even see anymore because they've been brainwashed for so long.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's also true. I recently um was in Warsaw and we had an external facilitator running a really cool session to 20 senior leaders, and I was observing. And one of the great things I saw was her ability to ask the difficult questions without any fear of um conflict or any fear of it coming back to haunt her because she wasn't working for the company. And I think that's one of the strengths you have as an external facilitator where you can ask difficult questions from a perspective of wanting to make sure they get the most out of a session, not from the perspective of politics or any other those potentially negative connotations.
SPEAKER_01How's your experience in uh collaborating with an external?
SPEAKER_02My experiences, and at the moment I'm also working with a number of external parties on leadership development, has always been positive, but that goes back to making sure I have the right partner. Um, and I would say this openly: the partner quality doesn't always have an equal ratio to the size of the organization or how much you pay. Um, so there is no correlation between size, how much you pay versus quality. I think the bigger thing is also the fit for the audience as well. So in my situation, I do a lot of research into is this the right partner who's gonna work, and it's also gonna be in a position to be successful when they come and do work alongside me or with me as well.
SPEAKER_01How do you measure success?
SPEAKER_02Success is measured before we even start. So it's thinking about what kind of outcome we want the behaviours to be when they leave, the mindset to be, um, the engagement levels to be during sessions as well. Um, and there's also a number of harder metrics which we we try to focus much more on sustainable use of the learning rather than bums-on-seats measures. So my measures also include working with the teams of people to see if they're seeing a change in behavior of the leaders they're working with. It's also around seeing and using hard metrics to see we have evaluations, are they really highlights over the next three to six months and improve in where they came from? So there's there's lots of different measures to to see what's been successful.
SPEAKER_01I've seen you performing on stage, and it was actually I think it was the first time we met in person at a conference in Berlin where you were hired as a keynote speaker. And as soon as you stepped in front of the people, I could perceive this charisma, and the audience was engaged immediately. And I wonder what does it take to engage an audience and whether it's a difference, whether there is a difference between engaging an audience in a conference setting, a meeting, and a workshop.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Okay. Um thinking about the start of a question in terms of what it takes to engage an audience, I think one of the things I've always used is, and the reason why I like this, what I'm doing now so much, is I've been on the other end. I've been in conferences, in workshops, in sessions where I've sat and thought, I am not engaged. I'm thinking about my shopping list, I'm wondering, I'm doodling what would make me really want to listen to this person. And when I took that mindset, it really was all around making sure the time the person was in front of me was something which I could then walk away and go, wow, that was really good use of my 35-40 minutes, which goes back to knowing the audience and what the audience wants. I think from a personal perspective, it's also around using humour and connecting to the people. So whenever I do and use the word perform, I do see it as performing. It's very much the first 30 to 60 seconds are just around trying to radiate a warmth with the audience, trying to connect with them, and a lot of looking at people, smiling is a huge, huge, huge thing. Yeah, um, and also moving, and I know it's it's really odd. I I generally just move around to make sure my body is in everybody's line of vision so they can see me as opposed to trying to trying to see me. And so I think engagement is very much something you can get as you start, but it does always go back to what it is that the audience wants to get from you being there, what is the purpose of them coming to spend their time and money in cases to listen to you as well? So that's the first piece. And the second question, just going back to what you wanted to know, my memory getting up.
SPEAKER_01But now that you're mentioning that you want to be seen by all the participants, I wonder to what extent does the seating of the room or the um composition of the room matters and whether you do anything to the room when you arrive.
SPEAKER_02It's a really good question. One of the things I learned early on was whenever you turn up to a new venue, it's your space and take the time to make sure you're comfortable in your space. Is that the same as if you get into a higher car, you change the seat, you change the mirrors, you change the um all the other things to make sure you can not be safe. So, from a perspective of how I facilitate, it's always making sure if I'm using technology, it's in a place where it's not gonna get in my way. If there are seats where people are gonna struggle to see screens, me, I mean generally move them. Um, it's generally around just preparing the environment that I'm gonna be successful and people can see me. So, I mean that that's that's one of the key things I would say the space. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And this might lead us back to the second part of the question. Um, because the seating basically is very different if you are in a conference or workshop or in a meeting. So would you have different approaches to engage the audience depending on the format you're speaking or facilitating?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, if it if it's if it's a and I've done recently a conference where I was master ceremony for two and a half days for 200 people, and the environment was weirdly a round room setup. So if you imagine a a square and me in the middle of your square and people around me, and it was a U2 concert. Yeah, I I had a microphone I thought very glamorous, a bit like um Holly Manogue. Um not polymonogue, that sounds odd. Um, but somebody with a headset down to um but the the thing which so for that particular situation, my role was very much around connecting the dots and connecting the sessions throughout the day, but also making sure the energy of the room stayed at a point where the speaker coming on next had the right kind of response and reaction from the audience, and the speaker who'd gone on before, I was able to link their content to who was coming on next. So the master ceremony world is much more around keeping a line of vision between day one and the end of whichever day you're ending on with the content and keeping energy up and making sure people are engaged, and also logistically back in a room at the right time with that kind of stuff. When it comes to if I'm hosting workshops on, for example, psychological safety and how we do that and my company, that's much more around helping people to understand the content, that's much more around helping people to connect what they're gonna learn in the room away from their offices to when they get out of a room back into their normal office and how they can apply it. So there are two different styles that I would apply. I would still use the same persona I use for each event, but there are certain areas I would focus more on and less on, depending on what particular style of event it was. And if it's very much a learning workshop facilitating, then it's making sure people can understand the content, they feel comfortable to ask the stupid questions as they see it as well. But more importantly, they leave with a confidence to use what's new. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And how do you engage people in large groups?
SPEAKER_02So what do you mean by large?
SPEAKER_01When I think of a meeting or a workshop with up to ten people, it's quite easy to do a check-in and to let everyone speak in the first place, and then it's easier for them to speak up again. But at a conference, it's usually one-way communication. So maybe I have a wrong definition of engagement. Maybe we need to discuss this first. Um, but for me, engagement happens when there's also two-way communication or when there's some feedback from your audience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that's a really good question, and that's something where I take a bit of the engagement methodology of asking questions and making it two-way into my big conferences. So going back to when I had the 200 odd people, I still ask them questions. I still interacted with members of the audience in the same way as if it had been 20 people. But one of the techniques I've learned, and I think it was through doing work around NLP, was if you really can't have that physical two-way interaction, ask people questions where they answer the questions in their heads anyway, and they're having almost like a virtual conversation with you, and so put those kinds of interactions into the content. Um, and I'm trying to think of a good example. So, for example, imagine you're now in a situation. How would you deal with this? Think in your head what you would say, and so somebody wouldn't physically say, but it's just getting them to engage mentally with the content. Um, the other thing is always is also to get people just to physically move or have a sensation of movement as well, and that's where again I tend to move around a room so they're following me and not just static in one area.
SPEAKER_01Keep them awake. Yeah, they're never gonna, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Hopefully, they're not gonna be falling asleep. Uh otherwise I'm not doing my job. Um, but also get them to interact with their audience as well, so people next to them as well.
SPEAKER_01So okay, so engagement doesn't necessarily mean that they have to have a conversation with you, but a conversation with themselves mentally and with their partners.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I with you my definition of engagement. Thank you for that. Love it. And you mentioned before that uh sorry, just keep uh keep getting back and digging deeper. That's what I do. You mentioned that the first few seconds are key, yeah, and that you put yourself in a mental state of performing, literally, and that you're using humor for that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I know that we both love comedy and improv theater. Yeah. And last for the last episode, I actually interviewed my improv teacher. And I believe that every facilitator should take improv classes, and I very rarely use the word should. Yeah. So I really mean it. So, what have you learned from comedy or even from improv about engaging the audience or even facilitating?
SPEAKER_02I think there's there's three things I've learned from taking a number of classes and also observing really good facilitators, speaking to colleagues who actually do improv as well, and just observing people who speak in public. The first thing is not to take yourself too seriously. Um, and one of the improv classes I did, I spent an hour doing the most surreal stuff and saying random words and physically doing stuff with my hands and almost acting like a five-year-old. Um, and the whole idea was to get you just to be comfortable in your body and how to understand, not to take it too seriously. And I think in corporate worlds, we have this thing where we think everything has to be serious, and people are gonna learn because I'm the most serious person. And if I ask a hundred people what's the most important thing you've learned, and how did you learn, not many people are gonna say I learned it when I was really static, I wasn't enjoying myself, it wasn't fun, but I was spoken to.
SPEAKER_01That's a way how our brain works. Yeah, we learn when it's fun.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so so that I think improv has taught me that whole being comfortable with just being a bit silly. The second thing it's taught me is also just how to think for the audience. Um, there's a couple of activities I can't remember exactly, but you had to make a story with another person in your group. And the key thing that I remember was the teacher was saying you need to make sure the story makes sense to the audience, not to you, and you're not trying to be funny, you're trying to make yourself as a group entertaining for the audience, and so I think that's a really good learning in terms of thinking about the audience as I mentioned before, but thinking about what is it going to go away with. The last thing, and this has been something I've learned from one of my one of my colleagues now who's written a book on improv as well, is just being quick minded. Um, and I think I'm lucky because I think I had. That I have that quick-minded gene anyway, so I can respond to things sometimes inappropriately, which I need to sometimes temper, but I do have that ability to respond quickly. I think the improv piece has helped me just to structure it better and make sure it stays focused on what I'm doing rather than being a bit random, which I have done historically. So I think they're the three things, and I do do agree with you, it's definitely something if you're gonna speak in front of anybody, it's a really great thing to have in your toolkit if you understand how improv works and how it can support you in particular in public as well.
SPEAKER_01The main difference between comedy and improv is that comedy is scripted and improv is not. So when you say that you like to use humour, would you script your jokes, or do you have some jokes that you always use?
SPEAKER_02Um, I don't script anything apart from the things I have to say. So the humour does come off the top of my head, um, as I said, sometimes inappropriately. And that also slightly has a connotation working internationally, being from London as well, in terms of British humour versus non-British humour. Um, no, I mean the only the only my go-to place though, um, in a very loving, supportive, respectful way, is my wife. Um because she's unintentionally funny a lot of the times. Um sometimes with it's unintentionally unintentionally, yeah. So sometimes my humour refers back to her, and that's because I spend most of my time outside of work with her too. Um, but I found to just to end this point the the fact that humour can relate to you as a person and you being genuine and you telling something which shows a bit of um you as a person, it also helps with a connection of you of the audience as well. And I found I don't use it throughout a lot of events, but if I if something pops into my head, I will say it. Obviously, now tempering it and making sure it's structured. And people also connect to that because people do have families and friends and partners and stuff they can relate to in the same way, and that ability to relate also then helps the connection as well with a group.
SPEAKER_01So does it boil down to authenticity?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I think so. And the point around comedians versus facilitation, the best comedians are the ones where you don't think it's scripted, you think they've just come out and are just saying that. The ones where you can almost foresee the punchline are the ones where you don't find that funny.
SPEAKER_01True. And the ones are the most funny when you have the impression that they're actually telling a real story, yeah. And a story with with which you can connect or which reminds you of which reminds me of myself, then I laugh the loudest. Yeah, which might be sometimes very embarrassing.
SPEAKER_02In a small audience.
SPEAKER_01True. When you boil it down, and we touched upon it a couple of times, um, and I would like to hear it concisely, what makes for you a good facilitator?
SPEAKER_02Wow. Um if I think about people I've seen and they have been amazing, I would say one being able to understand what they say, the articulation. If I'm talking more around specifics, articulation and I being able to understand how and what they're saying sounds obvious, but that is is really really key. Two, as I mentioned, the ability to connect with them to feel that they're talking to me as well as everybody else, as opposed to they're just talking because they're gonna be gone in 45 minutes to an X gig. So the authenticity is is also a huge thing for me. Obviously, knowledge, if it's more of a workshop or a content-driven session, they need to know their stuff, they need to be confident in what they're saying, and confident to be challenged on what they're saying, and confident also to be able to flex with what they're saying. And I think back to an event I was at just after Christmas with a facilitator who had point one and he had point two, but when challenged on a really valid point from the audience, he wasn't able to to balance the new information he'd got from the audience member with what he'd done. So he was almost so stuck to his internal script he couldn't then flex, which then turns people off.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because they're like, okay, so you don't even see what you're saying as being you can improve it even more. So I think that you have a content piece, knowing expertise, but authenticity is huge. Articulation and understanding what people are saying, the usual, as I said, around being able to connect, engage, um, but also, yeah, being being able to listen when when you when you ask questions from an audience. And I think that's always one of those strange things where questions are solicited and then questions come, and then some facilitators don't like the questions. And it's one of those where if you're gonna ask a question, you need to be prepared for the questions. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I hear that you're now referring to workshops that are mostly content-driven. So there's a facilitator or even a coach who's coming in to teach something. And then there are these other workshops, and I know that you have facilitated design thinking workshops for ABN. Do you think that these kind of facilitators would need different skills?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, um, a good example. I also facilitated a design workshop, I won't it was in early April for Signify as well, and that was a test for me. The context being there were eight people in a room, and then there were six people on a Skype call. And we had we had connected everybody in the room through an awesome piece of technology where we had a whiteboard, a video camera, speakers all linked into a TV, which I tried to steal but wouldn't fit in my rucksack, so it's still there. Um and so that skill, which I hadn't practiced before, was very much around engaging the people in the room, and we had a stand-in meeting intentionally, and making sure the people who were in Germany, Hong Kong, another part of the Netherlands, and I think it may have been in the UK as well, were also engaged in the session.
SPEAKER_04Wow.
SPEAKER_02And that was it was interesting, it was fun because it was new, and it was it was one of the key things I had to keep remembering was to specifically pinpoint and highlight the guys who weren't in the room if they had questions, how they were doing, what was going on, what their views were, and making sure the people in the room also were connecting to the people outside of the room. So a couple of times the point I made was okay, don't ask me the question, ask so-and-so the question, what do they think? And directing the how do I word this? The the virtual versus the non-virtual, physical, physical, that's the one that's physical people, the people who were in the room, yeah, the physical people with the virtual, and the skills are very much around then being aware of the group, being aware of the dynamics, being aware of the energy across all groups, being very aware of the time because it was still a three-hour session we had, but also just being very aware of making sure everybody still felt like it was one group, and that was really fun and it was very successful. Um, but the skill was very much around seeing, hearing, picking up on nuances, picking up on if somebody virtually hadn't spoken for three or four minutes, what's going on, also incorporating the the chat room function so people also could connect that way. So it was lots of different elements of just thinking, okay, how do we make sure we get the same outcome as if these people had all been sat in the room at the same time at the same place?
SPEAKER_01So, how did you manage to connect them in the first place? Were there some specific exercises?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, the first exercise was very much around an open question around how we look at leadership in our organization. And the challenge, and I thought, okay, we're gonna try this. What we're gonna do is break into two groups, which was yeah, physically difficult. So intentionally, then broke the physical people to one group, and I facilitated the virtual people virtually, and then bought the two groups back into the main room, and then had both the groups talking the virtual group with the physical group on what the learnings were. That was the very, very first activity, not because we needed to know the answer to the question, but because it got everybody talking to each other as well. Um, so it got the virtual people talking to the virtual people to start with. The physical people, it's a nice icebreaker. After, and it was no more than I think 22 minutes, we had very odd time, so people come back on time. Then having the virtual group as one present back their feelings and thinkings, and vice versa, which then led into how we use the content from the workshop for the second, third, and fourth elements as well.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Before we continue the show, let me take a brief moment to thank our sponsor, Session Lab. Are you using Excel or Word to prepare and schedule your workshops? Try something that is designed for facilitators. With an easy-to-use drag and drop agenda builder, Session Lab allows you to be free and creative in your workshop process design. Session Lab also comes with an immense built-in library of workshop activities and facilitation techniques to help you to find new inspiration for your sessions. Stop messing with spreadsheets and focus on designing engaging workshops. Try it as Sessionlab.com. I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't believe in its value myself. I've never facilitated a workshop like that. And I would be curious if you had one lesson learned for someone who's never done that before. What would you do differently or what would you be happy to have known before?
SPEAKER_02Um trying to think. But the one thing I I don't think I would do differently because I'm not sure I could have, but the one thing I would say you definitely have to do if it's a virtual workshop is make sure everybody who's dialing in on the other side has the ability to have a camera switched on. It sounds really, really small, but a couple of locations, one in the UK, because of a technology issue she had at her end, she was unable to have the camera switched on all the time. Um, and I think that you need to see people, you can't just have this avatar, you need to have people who you can see their eyes, you can see what they're doing, what they're wearing, and you can talk about small things. Oh, that's a nice blouse. So they know you've recognized pieces. Um, so I think that's the one thing in hindsight. If I could have guaranteed that all the cameras were working 100%, that would have made it even better. Um, and the thing I would suggest to make sure you do is definitely build in enough time to prepare the setup of a technology. Um, I was in the room 90 minutes before we started just to make sure the whiteboard works, my laptop works, the Wi-Fi was working. All this all the silly things which you take for granted just to double check that okay, we're doing it now. When we log into a call and we start, everything is gonna work as it should.
SPEAKER_01Over the past few weeks, I heard a couple of times people saying that the next generation of managers or leaders must be facilitators or at least have facilitation skills. You with your background in leadership development and your current role, what is your opinion on that?
SPEAKER_02I think it's something which I see as being essential, actually. Yeah, I totally agree. There's if I give an example where I currently work, I work on a team of 14 odd people. We're based in free locations, and we generally have a face-to-face meeting once every six months. So the ability to have the skills to coach and facilitate, so listening, articulation, ask and write questions, empathy, authenticity, those kinds of real, and I'm not gonna say soft skills, emotional skills, are essential because teams, even in my company, are becoming much more diverse in location and much more diverse in what you also do as a team member. And our leaders are amazingly cool people who know a lot around our industry, especially the lighting industry. But result but the technology is moving so quickly, there are some things they just don't know. But by having the ability to tap into your team through facilitation, through coaching, have your team work together and understand how they can improve elements of what they do is something which you you should be doing as a leader. You should be creating that environment and that that um mindset through facilitation, through speaking, through listening, through questioning, through challenging, through saying simple things I I don't actually know, but okay, what do you guys think? Um and we're definitely moving that way as an organization, but I also see leadership. If I look outside of my company, a lot of the top skills people want from leaders focus more now on the emotional elements of being a human being. Yeah, they want you somebody who's they can trust, who has values, who will say what they feel, who would back up, you know, stick up for you. And that's what facilitation also gives you because as a facilitator, you don't know what might happen as you go through that journey. You have a begin and an end point, hopefully, if you planned it well. Um, if you haven't, then that's also a challenge. But the journey may well flex, and you need to have the ability to cope with that as well.
SPEAKER_01At one point you said soft skills, and then you made the precision emotional skills.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01What's the difference?
SPEAKER_02I think it's more of a branding thing. Um, I've been in the industry for a long time, and the brand soft skills always switches off people who don't work in HR. It has a certain connotation, it has a certain gut reflex when you hear that phrase. And yet, if I look at all the leadership reports, research, reviews which have happened, and what makes good leaders, in essence it is the soft skills. But to me, it's also about the emotional intelligence you have as a human being, it's the ability to connect, have empathy, as we said, with people, to understand, to listen. So that's why I move away from trying to use that phrase and move more into it around the emotional ability you have as a human being to connect with people.
SPEAKER_01So, would you say that soft skills are something that you can learn in a course, like negotiation, communication, and emotional skills is something that you learn through personal development and maturity?
SPEAKER_02I would say soft skills or emotionals you you can learn or you can improve, I would say. Um if I think about negotiation, that's to me still a hard skill because there's certain techniques you can use to negotiate, but the emotional bit is knowing when the technique you have or the model you have just is not working, um, or the model you have, you don't need to go through it because you have that connection and actually you can just bypass it and just have a normal conversation without all of it. That's where the emotional bit comes in, and I think for me, how I've learned it and how I see our leaders trying to learn it is through knowing what it is you haven't got to start with, is through having the the awareness to go, yeah, when it comes down to that, I struggle and admitting it, and then you start improving it. Um, so for me, that's really the element of how you learn it by first or recognizing you haven't got it to a level it needs to be to be leading people as a starting point.
SPEAKER_01So is it then also this emotional, these emotional skills that you need eventually to really engage the audience?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think for me that's what I have. That's that's what I use. It it's more around them seeing me as a person who wants to make sure they have a really good experience, them see me as a person who has thought about them, who has their interest at heart, who's prepared to make sure what we're gonna do is really, really awesome. And then just connecting and thinking, okay, so if I'm authentic, if I use words I would use outside of a room, which are appropriate, obviously, um, if I behave in a way which shows me as a person, if I respond to questions in a way I would do, and don't pretend that I have all the answers where I know everything that's going to happen, they're the events when I've done in the past that have been the most successful. If I've walked into a room and I have occasionally a mindset, or I'm not in the right phrase, in the right zone, for example, they're the ones when I walk out knowing that could have been better because I haven't been myself, I haven't understood, I haven't whatever. And I think that the thing which I like about both situations is my coaches have said to me, you need to always come out and reflect on what's happened and then use that to then build, going back to your question, the additional emotional skills you can have to support, or in emotional intelligence you can support your audiences.
SPEAKER_01So, how did you learn that? Or do you have uh maybe an incident that you recall?
SPEAKER_04Oh wow, how did I learn that?
SPEAKER_01Well, you realised for the first time maybe that you could engage your audience.
SPEAKER_02Ah, that piece. That that happened quite early in a very strange setting. So I went to a Church of England school, which was in the UK, and I'm not religious, so it was quite ironic. And one of the things which happened every week was a child from each year would read a passage from the Bible to the whole school in assembly, and it became it was my turn, and so I walked up, and you have hundreds of kids different ages, all sat almost like in a rectangle, and I walked through the middle to the stage with my Bible and the passage earmarks, walked up to the speaker and looked down and looked up, and I saw all these kids looking at me. And the thing which strikes me most about that, and I was no more than probably I think eight or no, would have been 11, actually, 11 or 12, would have been secondary school. Was I didn't feel nervous at all. I actually was like, Oh, this is cool. Um, which even now I'm thinking that's pretty surreal. So looked down at the Bible and started reading, and I read a word incorrectly, and I went, Oh no, out loud, and people started. Chuckling because I just went, Oh no, and then I started again and read it correctly. And so from then on, I realized that I had an ability or my superpower, um, which was just to be really comfortable standing up and talking in front of anybody, um, and hence my career, I I imagine, is linked into that. So that that's where it started. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I can imagine seeing I mean, it depends a little bit on the way people chuckle. Um, but it can be also very comforting. So if it's an empathetic chuckle, like we're with you, um, this also gives you the confidence that it's okay if you make a minor mistake on stage. Yeah. And then you can take this as a kind of okay, if this is worst-case scenario, I don't need to be afraid.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And I think there's one thing this wanted to remind me of um in terms of how when when you think about preparing facilitation or preparing to master a huge event, the people generally on the other end don't know if you've messed up. So a couple of times, and I'll be honest, and I was at a big event um earlier this year, and a couple of things I misread in terms of my preparation, very small things. And then I realized ah, that's the wrong one. So I just and by the way, just to remind you, what I meant to say was this. And the audience was like, oh, cool. There was no, oh my god, you can't do it. There was nothing at all, which was this huge reaction to just a small correction. And I think that's one thing when I've seen facilitators or people who have hosted events, when they do something which they know isn't right, they react internally first, before the audience starts.
SPEAKER_01Monkey mind.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, which then gets the audience reacting, going, Oh, okay, something's not right here. And this negative energy comes out and eats into the session. So that's one thing I learned from that experience as well was yeah, even if you do say something, because no human being is perfect, audiences, especially corporate ones, facilitation, generally want you to be successful as well. They generally want you to have to get to a point where you've done what you're gonna do. Nobody generally walks into a room going, you're an external facilitator, you're an external host, I'm gonna make this as hard for you as I possibly can. I'm gonna make sure you have a day from hell. As if they don't have anything else to do with that. Yeah, but most people don't want that. So that's one thing I remembered in my whole career is if I think I've missed this or haven't done this, build it in naturally without the the fuss of it not being evident, and things carry on going smoothly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it reminds me of one feedback I received very early on from a participant in a trial, and he told me, Miriam, be aware that your energy is contagious and that your energy will impact the participants. Yeah. So if I'm in a good mood and feel inspired and happy, then they feel the same. But as soon as I get impatient, either with them or with myself, yeah, it totally switches the energy and it may ruin a workshop.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that that that's so true. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it's all about mindset management, once again. Yeah. If well, storm's going out. Um is there one exercise that you would consider your silver bullet, something that always works independent of the audience, the crowd that you just enjoy doing?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's one audience activity I I love doing when talking about the impact of development on people and how it's evolved and how people do things. And I'm gonna share it with you and the audience, but I need to promise I won't share it with anybody else, so nobody else knows. It's it's really simple and it's it's bought into the use of technology and it's positioned where normally you start an event and it's like everybody put your phones down, you know, turn them off, hide them, put them in a box, whatever. I generally start and I say, Okay, well, everybody just to take out your mobile phone. Um like, okay, and then I then say, can you just all take a selfie of the group? So this this works amazingly well. Um, it's also you have you can add some humour to it, and so you think it's humorist, yeah. It's like so so first we'll have to explain to some of our old generation what a selfie is, so it's a context, and then get the whole group just to take a selfie. Um, and it can be facing me, facing, but that that's the activity, and then they have to send the said selfie picture to a loved one, to a friend, whatever, just saying it's nine, whatever. This random guy has just said, take a picture, here you go, and send it. So the activity is basically stand up, send a selfie to somebody, job done. There's two ways I then use it. I either then ignore it for 20 minutes, and people go, Okay, we did this something, what's going on? Or I can then use the activity where I explain at that point why I've done it. And the key point in doing it is to highlight how over the last X amount of years the way people have learned has changed. And the question I then use is okay, so how did you know how to do that? How did you know how to pick up your I'm gonna name some brands, but Apple, Samsung, LG mobile phone, find the right bit, press the right bit to take the picture, but then send it to somebody as well. How did you learn how to do that? And people then say, Well, you know, I just did it. People then go, well, I've got my son, daughter, young person to show me. People go went on to YouTube, people, there's all these different ways. Um, the one I love the most is people go, Well, actually, I took a selfie by accident to somebody, so now I know because I don't want to do that again. So, some random person has a picture of me doing something random somewhere. Um, but the point of that is then just to highlight as we go into whatever session we're going into, people learn in different ways and appreciate that we're going to be learning in one particular way, or I'm focusing on how learning's been evolved in one way. But you, as a person, society is using technology in a very different way. I'm not a human, um, and interestingly, my phone is now responding to it because it was such an amazing thing to do. Um, and how learning has evolved and how people learn different ways, and nobody says, generally, I went on for two-day how to take a selfie course by Apple. No one says that. So it's also contextualizing some things you learn by doing, some things you learn by working to people, some things you do need the two-day course, but it's just positioning as we go through the experience. I'm aware that people learn in different ways, and this is one way I'm trying to educate people.
SPEAKER_01And I see even more benefits of this exercise. I mean, I love it. I'm it's genius, I think. Because it also the most difficult part, I believe, in a workshop, but even if it gets large, is to help people to get present in the room, not only physically but mentally. So they are on their phones and they want to text some people, or maybe they're twittering that they're at this great conference or whatsoever. So when you force them to do that, okay, you're taking a selfie, you're sending it to someone, and then you just check this box. Okay, everyone knows now that I'm here, so now I can be present. Genius. Yeah, I might copy it, and I cannot promise that it will remain between the two of us.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01But maybe someone fell asleep after minute one of this podcast and just woke up. And you don't want them to hear this kind of secret. But what would you like them to take home from our conversation?
SPEAKER_02Um, I think the one key thing around facilitation, running events with people, um, connecting, it's actually there's not one. I mean, to me, there's there's a couple, but one thing is your authenticity, be yourself. If you're gonna facilitate, if you've made a career choice where you're gonna get up and stand in front of people and educate, help them to learn, help them to understand, communicate, whatever the phrase is, be yourself because the energy you spend in not being yourself is wasted. So as much as possible, use a positive energy you have to radiate, as you mentioned, across the room. Um, but the key thing outside of all of that is still preparation, it's still knowing everything you need to know. So when you walk in there, you are set up for success. Um, and the day you don't prepare one or two small things is a day when, and I think you mentioned your energy changes because at the back of your mind, and we all leak emotions and behaviors as human beings, that one or two thing you haven't prepared is leaking. So get yourself sorted preparation-wise, be yourself, and yeah, make it fun, use humor.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah. Thank you so much, Derek. Awesome discussion. I could just go on and on and on, but maybe the audience wouldn't be happy. If someone after listening to this show wants to reach out to talk to you, hire you as a keynote speaker or a master of conference, he's great. How can they reach you?
SPEAKER_02At the moment, my my preferred method is LinkedIn because it's easy for me to then manage that. And soon there will then be a website with additional contact details. But LinkedIn is my preferred method of choice, and it's Derek Bruce.
SPEAKER_01And I will put it in the show notes. Definitely. Perfect. Thank you, Derek. Have a wonderful weekend.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for staying tuned and listening to the show. I appreciate your attention as I know how busy you are. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and engage by sharing your comments and thoughts and visit workshops.org to download the one page summary. I'm looking forward to seeing you back at the next episode, and I wish you a fruitful day.
