Karin Reed: Professionally Presenting Yourself in a Video/Virtual World (Ep. #28)

Wendy Hanson  0:24  

My guest Karen Reed is an Emmy Award winning journalist. She has spent years on the air and knows how to be in front of a webcam, a camera, and will show you lots of things that you can do to be more effective. Whether you're in sales and executive doing Virtual Training. This is a really good podcast for you. Enjoy the show. Welcome, everybody. You know, we all need tips on how to present ourselves on video in a virtual world. leaders and managers have an amazing tool for connection and collaboration if they know how to use it. My guest today Karen Reed is indeed an expert in this area. Let me tell you a little bit about Karen before I bring her on. Karen is and I love Karen's title she CEO and Chief confidence creator of speaker dynamics, a corporate communications training firm featured in Forbes while speaking through a webcam might be too much in the world. Karen has been teaching business professionals how to be effective on camera communicators for nearly a decade, translating her experience as an Emmy Award winning broadcast journalist and on camera spokesperson into a specific methodology based upon MVPs of on camera success. And you'll learn more about that. And I have to throw in this piece being a Rhode Islander is that Karen was on WSJ, AR and Providence for many years. And if you mentioned her name to any Rhode Islander, they will remember that Karen and her team have been chosen partners for some of the world's most recognized companies, and most respected academic institutions in the world, from Nike to the Lenovo from Duke University to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. So welcome, Karen, I am so glad you're here. The world of corporate needs you more than ever.

Karin Reed  2:25  

Wendy, it is such a pleasure to be here. And thank you for the shout out for w j. r i spent so many wonderful years in Rhode Island. We love that area. And actually both of my kids were born at women and infants. And I had many Rhode Islanders, knit me baby booties and blankets and send them to me at this station and the kids got so much airtime. It was ridiculous.

Wendy Hanson  2:50  

But well, for any Rhode Islanders listening, they'll be very happy to hear about that. Now, you will have a new book that is actually perfectly timed. Suddenly virtual making remote meetings work. And it's the perfect book for this present moment. What inspired it besides a pandemic.

Karin Reed  3:10  

It kind of was the pandemic though, you know, really if we get back to the heart of it. So just to give you a little bit of background on me. So I was a broadcast journalist for many, many years and really loved the business. I interviewed everybody from Muhammad Ali to Bill Clinton won an Emmy, as you mentioned along the way. And in 2004, though, I transitioned into the corporate world where I applied my skills as an on camera spokesperson. And what I saw was that there were a lot of people who were being brought in from the corner office or the corner cubicle to appear on camera alongside of me, and expected to perform at the same level of skill that often did not work out so well. And so I recognized a business opportunity to tell it to help people who had never imagined they'd have to be on camera how to do that better. So speaker dynamics might my company was born. And so I've been teaching these kind of skills where you're communicating through a camera lens for Gosh, about a decade now, the skills have become mission critical over the past 10 months. So getting to the point of why we wrote the book. So I had been a subject matter expert for Logitech, which is a big player in the collaboration space. And my co author, Dr. Joseph Allen was also a subject matter expert, but he's a meeting scientist. So we were doing a webinar together the first week of March of 2020. So think back to what was going on at that time. You know, there was this hint of something going on relative to the Coronavirus, but at that point the world was still pretty much running the way it normally had. The webinar itself was entitled, was all about the modern meeting and so we postulated that and you know three to five years, maybe even 10 years out, there would be this heavy reliance on video meetings on virtual meetings with video at their core. While the following week, the world shut down. And there was this immediate adoption of video collaboration tools is the primary way of getting business done. So at that point, I had people calling me from all over the place saying, Please help us to do this better. We don't know how to get comfortable communicating through a camera lens, Joe had the same situation where his consulting clients were saying, you know, our meetings are just not working in this new world help us figure this out. So a couple of months into the pandemic, we reconnected and realized that we were solving the same problem in a slightly different way. But we wanted to be able to amplify the message to help people to be more effective in this new way of meeting. So that's kind of how the meaning of the book came to be. And I think it does come at a good time, because initially, folks, were just kind of doing whatever they could to move business forward. It was like emergency meeting methodologies. But now people are starting to be more strategic. Okay, what are the tools that we need to use? How should we be approaching these meetings? What do we need to train our folks so that they're better at doing it? And, you know, as we shift into perhaps the next phase, which we would say is probably going to be primarily hybrid, there's still going to be a heavy need for knowing how to make these virtual meetings be successful?

Wendy Hanson  6:33  

Oh, yes. Let's talk about being in the right place at the right time. People are needing you so badly at this point?

Karin Reed  6:42  

It definitely is. It was a blessing, and a curse in some ways. Because, you know, for the majority of my second career as a communication expert, and coach, I was training mainly the executive leadership teams of companies. But I went from training the executive to training the enterprise, practically overnight, so it wasn't Hey, can you folks train 10 people it was can you train 1000 are like, boom, how to make that work. So it really forced us to scale up, you know, and figure out new ways of delivering the content. That makes sense. So that's why we created an online course, virtual video engagement training that allows us to, you know, say yes, when people say, can you train 1000 people efficiently? We're like, Yes, we can. This is a course that that your folks can take that reflects the content that we would normally be doing using, like a high touch methodology, but still in an impactful way that you get good value out of it.

Wendy Hanson  7:45  

Yes, wow. what's the what's some of the differences with working with executives, versus working with managers who have teams out there that are global, you know, I run into this all the time, as we coach people at BetterManager, that you have a manager trying to work with their team, and some people don't want to even put on their camera and, and I love that your partner is a meeting scientist, yes. Because we spend so much time at meetings, they need to be better,

Karin Reed  8:13  

right. And he will say the same thing, you know, there's so much time and money invested in, in meetings themselves. And you would think that we also want to invest some time and money into making them actually work better. So you know, I'm excited to be able to help him to kind of spread his his version of the gospel and that as well. So you know, honestly, Wendy, a lot of the challenges that executives have are the same for for anyone across the enterprise, it's just really getting comfortable communicating effectively through the camera lens and and also understanding the proper approach relative to keeping people engaged when they're in this environment. So the biggest hurdle that most people have is just turning the webcam on. And it's imperative that you do because from the research that Joe has done, he has found that that is one of the the single most important factors in determining, meeting success and satisfaction and effectiveness. And it makes a lot of sense, because whenever you have video enabled in a meeting, you accomplish a lot of things you help people to pay better attention. You know, you are constantly finding distractions in the environment, your own distractions in your own environment, the distractions that anybody on the call is facing within their environment. So the camera is a way to help people stay focused, and it also holds them accountable. Because it's much more difficult to multitask whenever people can see you. So that that's a critical component, but the one that you know, I think is really valuable from just a communication expert. perspective is, so much of how we communicate a message is to our body language. And if you don't have video enabled, that body language is silent. So it's very difficult to read the intent of the message without those nonverbal cues. But it's also difficult as the speaker to understand the impact of your message if you can't see how people are reacting to it. So you create all of these black holes, figuratively and literally if you don't use the webcam, but I think sometimes people think well, as soon as I turn the camera on, you know, this is a performance. And I have to make sure that I look like I'm straight off of Hollywood said, that is not the case at all. It's more of setting up your what I call personal production value in a way that it allows for an efficient communication of your message. Wow,

Wendy Hanson  10:45  

yes, it's so true. The neuroscience of it. We talk about that a lot in coaching. That's why we do all of our coaching calls, I've been a coach for over 20 years. And in the beginning, we did everything by phone, and you could really begin to feel and sense things. And now since we've been doing it on video, I can't imagine going back to just the phone, because I want to see how what we're talking about relates, you know, when we coach people, oftentimes they will stop, they might change their head position, because you ask them a question. And they'll say, That's a really good question. And if you don't have that visual, you don't get that piece of the neuroscience of what's going on and how that person is. So whether you're a salesperson delivering a message, and we when we do sales, and we get on with somebody who won't turn on their camera, oh my god, it's so frustrating, because it's so hard to read people that are sitting there, and they're, they're like, Nah, my rooms a mess, I don't want to turn on my camera today.

Karin Reed  11:42  

Right. And so what I tell people is, you need to have a lot of space curated in order to, you know, show up in a professional way, you can only see like, in our case, right now, I know your listeners can't see it, but I have about five feet behind me, and that I have carefully curated, so there's nothing distracting and so that that's also something I want to stress, it's not a matter of, you know, doing set design, it's a matter of removing distractions in your space, on either side of my frame, I could have complete and total chaos, and you wouldn't know it. You know, similar to I often hear of my clients who have, you know, their animals sleeping at their feet, I can't see that sometimes I hear it if like the dog is snoring. But I mean, you can hide a wealth of things, it's just a matter of giving yourself a little bit of space, so that you are showing up with a professional background, that's not going to be detracting from your message.

Wendy Hanson  12:38  

Yeah, what's your take Karen on the virtual backgrounds, because I often get on calls with people who are at the beach with their virtual background, or other things. And that's can be a little distracting, too, and you raise your arms and you lose them.

Karin Reed  12:51  

Right? Right or, or sometimes people will put up a virtual background of a beach, which I find to be very odd is that actually if they're moving, you know, like, I don't need to see the waves rolling behind you. You, I'll give you just the initial findings of the research that's been done with respect to virtual backgrounds. The bottom line is most people do not like them. The most popular thing for people to see behind you is something that's real. And you know, some of the particular options that people like would be like bookcases or a bookshelf, artwork. You know, even you know, do something like I have over my shoulder, which is you know, a pop of color by way of greenery, I just have a plant there that that kind of breaks up the space, you want to create some visual interest, but you don't want it to be distracting. And you talk about distraction. If you have a virtual background, that is not layering crisply, behind you, that is really annoying to watch, right, because you've got those those fuzzy edges around your head around your shoulders. If you put your hands up, sometimes their hands like will disappear. I was working with a client the other day, and she had to go get something in in her office and she she had a virtual background up. And when she stood up, like our whole body disappeared, it's like she went into the ether. It was such a strange effect. So I am not a fan of the virtual backgrounds in general. But there are some exceptions. So say for example, you have a shared space, and you know that you're going to have a bunch of people who are walking by behind you during your call, then a virtual background is definitely a better option. So you just can kind of determine is this helping me or is this hurting me, but before you throw it up there in a high stakes situation, test it out in a low stakes way because sometimes the artificial intelligence that is used to layer that virtual background is not going to do it perfectly. I had another client who tried it in the middle of a workshop and one of the stock images that had been uploaded into our virtual backgrounds. was the Northern Lights. And so she chose to put the Northern Lights as her backdrop. And instead it layered on her face. So she had the Northern Lights as her face. And the only thing you saw were the frames of her glasses. So and that obviously would not be something that you would want to do with a client or even with your team who might find it funny at first, but then it becomes a distraction.

Wendy Hanson  15:23  

Yes, totally, totally a good thing for people to think about. Now, the ones the the experiences that we have every day is the one on one coaching, using zoom, having zoom meetings that managers have. And then we have executives that need to be doing all hands meetings. Yeah, no town halls, they're doing them globally. And when they're in that position, and some of them, I've heard some great stories there that leaders that have their two year old on their lap to try to empathize with some of the things that are going on at home. Yeah, but if you're trying to make a real, you know, message to all of the people that you have, you know, what are ways that executives can really do that. And Chris, that up, I love your idea of you only need a small space with a good background, you know, even if chaos is around you.

Karin Reed  16:10  

Yeah, so I call it leading through the lens, which is a critical skill for any executive who is trying to inspire by communicating through video. So I'm really glad that you brought this up, the one major factor in how you come across is where you're directing your gaze. So when you want to speak with impact, you need to be looking at the camera lens, which goes against every natural impulse that you have, because whenever you're doing an all hands meeting, and you've got, you know what I call The Brady Bunch boxes with a gallery view, and you have all the people who are up on the screen, you naturally want to be looking at their faces as well, right. But whenever you do that, it appears to your conversation partners on the other side, like you are not looking at them at all, like you are disconnected. So in order to be really effective in reaching the folks on the other side of the lens, you have to be looking at the camera lens. So there are a couple of quick cheats that you can use, you can take a picture of a family member or a friend and stick it beside the camera lens to remind you that you're talking to people, I had a client who took googly eyes and on either side of their camera loads, just to be a visual cue that oh, I need to be looking and focusing my attention and my energy through the camera lens. So that would be the the number one thing I would worry about. The second thing I would be considering is my production value, how am I showing up. And it's not just a matter of visual, it's also a matter of making sure that your audio is crisp and clear. And I want to actually delve into this briefly because it's important when we're in this virtual video environment. We can't tell how our audio is. And the only way we know is if somebody is candid with us on the other side and says, Hey, Karen, you sound like you're talking in a tin can. But oftentimes with executives, there's no one who is willing to tell them that. So what I would suggest is if you are a leader, hop on a zoom, call yourself and record it, and then check out the different audio inputs that you might have. So if you use the built in microphone on your laptop, typically that is not a good choice, because you just do not have good audio fidelity through those microphones. So I recommend either getting what I'm using right now is a lavalier lapel mic, which is connected by USB directly into my computer. It is like 20 bucks on Amazon. It might be a little bit more now but I mean it has really excellent audio fidelity. Stand up microphones were great headsets work fantastic. Sometimes people don't like to wear them because they're uncomfortable or they just don't like how they appear on on video. But they do have excellent audio quality. So I would definitely check that out. If you want to also ensure that you are able to convey as much of the the body language that you possibly can in this environment, you want to think about how you're framing yourself. So that means making sure that you have yourself frames so that on the screen you appear from about mid chest up, because that is the way to best emulate the way you would be having a face to face conversation with somebody you know when you're talking to them face to face. It's not like you're looking from the top of their head down to their toes. Now you're typically taking in the nonverbals from about mid chest up. So you want to create that same sort of Canvas in a virtual setting for them to derive the the meaning of your message through your body language.

Wendy Hanson  20:00  

That's, that's great. And I love I never thought of the Lavalier as another option on that, because I'm always worried about keeping me the you know, if there's sounds that are coming in that a lavalier mic pick them up a little bit more than if you're using a headset.

Karin Reed  20:15  

Well, and but I think that's a valid point to Wendy. I mean, I have a pretty quiet environment right now except one my dog likes to bark, but she's not a big Barker. She's a moaner, she'll like actually stand up my door and be like, please let me in. But, but for the most part, she's pretty quiet. But if you do have a space that you're likely to have a lot of extraneous noise than a headset is typically a better option. If I do have a scenario like that, I'll even use like my air pods, because they actually have pretty good audio quality.

Wendy Hanson  20:45  

Yes. Oh, that's great. Now do you in in your course. And in the book, do you talk about slides at all, like when you go back and forth with slides, because I guess that is an you know, an uncomfortable situation for many.

Karin Reed  20:59  

Absolutely. So and it's I'm glad you also mentioned this, because this is something that has happened. When we've shifted into these virtual meetings, whenever you are meeting in person, you are providing the value. But in the slides maybe are complementing what you're saying. When you are in a virtual setting, oftentimes, the slides take center stage and dominate the screen for way too long and diminishes your value in this space. So what I recommend is not spending too much time sharing your screen, allow yourself to have a true conversation by using the slide to impart information, you know, maybe you want to, you know, talk about a series of data points, and you talk your your conversation partner through that. But as soon as you're done, you're speaking to that slide, stop sharing your screen and come back to a situation where it's the two of you, or the three of you, or the five of you, on camera, and have a discussion, because it's much easier to have a dialogue whenever people are bigger on the screen.

Wendy Hanson  22:10  

Yes. Oh, that makes so much sense. Because I think there's too much Well, there's always been too much of a reliance on slides. You know, people putting up slides and reading them. That's an old, terrible concept that we got into oftentimes in corporate environments. So yeah, see the face, the face?

Karin Reed  22:28  

What's really like to hide behind the slides, right? Because, you know, it feels more comfortable. I'd like to be smaller on the screen, but you are missing out on an opportunity to really have that that great discussion with your conversation partners.

Wendy Hanson  22:44  

What are some of the things that you've seen people really have challenges with? Because, you know, there's what are those biggest mistakes that we need to make sure that we're aware of before they happen? Yeah, well, I

Karin Reed  22:55  

would say, let's talk about kind of global meeting structure, because what happened initially, was, when we went all remote, very suddenly, everybody thought, Okay, well, let's just take all of those meetings that we would have in person and stick them on zoom. And we're using zoom kind of in a generic sense. But whatever platform you made, was being used by your organization. And what they're at what happened was, there was this lack of understanding of, of the time spent in zoom feels very different than the time spent in person. And so you had these very long meetings, which might have been done in a conference room, but punctuated with breaks or casual conversation, or something that would kind of disrupt the flow in person that were put in virtual world. And it became so draining and exhausting, and non productive, because it is too much, you have to understand the limits of endurance, and attention in a virtual space. So what I'm hoping will occur now is that there will be a recognition that virtual meetings cannot be two hours long, certainly without breaks, you know, if you have a two hour meeting, then you've got to build in at least a 10 minute break halfway through. But what we found is that the most effective meetings are those that are shorter, and are very purpose driven, meaning Okay, rather than having 10 items on the agenda, maybe you have two items on the agenda, and you do them and you get something done, you have action items, and then you get out of the meetings so that people can actually do work. Because the only thing that happens is people go back to back to back, and there's no time to get the real work done, or to task switch. And we all need to do that. So that we can, you know, shift our brains from the previous meeting into and prepare for the meeting that's coming up. The other thing that I'm often seeing is people are now starting to recognize that you do not need to have 20 people on a meeting unless they all absolutely, positively need to be there. You know, Joe will tell you that the best meeting science indicates that five to seven people is the sweet spot for decision making. And it definitely is true in a virtual setting. Because if you want to have true dialogue, it's very unwieldy if you get beyond five to seven people.

Wendy Hanson  25:26  

Yeah, well, those are, those are good tips. Because I'm hearing about this all the time with folks that we're coaching. And even in our organizations, I tried to say, never do more than a 45 minute meeting, because if it's there all hours, when do people take bio breaks, and they never had a chance to walk around, you know, before you could walk around and say hello to people and talk to them. And that energetic thing is what's wearing people out not being able to communicate.

Karin Reed  25:52  

So I call it zoom abuse, you know, where people are like, oh, any touchpoint with a person needs to be on zoom. It really doesn't. Yeah, so the first question that both Joe and I always advocate asking is, does this need to be a meeting in the first place? You know, can this be an email? Can this be a text? Can this be as a quick phone call? If you determine Yeah, we do need to meet on this, then. Okay, let's think about, do you need to have your video on if it is a discussion? Yes, I would say you do absolutely need to have it on. The time when I would say you can keep it off is if you know your conversation partner as well. Because you have all of this information stored from previous experience with them so that if you take away the visual, you can fill in the gaps in your brain. But if you don't know the people very well, having video on allows you to continue to build and foster that relationship. Yeah,

Wendy Hanson  26:51  

we advocate for that in coaching conversations that people could go out for a walk. And you could you could talk to do your one on ones with people while you're out walking, if you're not in Rhode Island in the winter, or some of these other like terrible, you know, snow, snow ridden places that we have right now. But right, no, change your environment. You know, get out, get on a call with somebody and go walk around and do your one on one and connect in that way. Because I do I totally agree with you. We need to switch this up. So that we're not because at the end of the day, people have really had too much.

Karin Reed  27:28  

Yeah, absolutely.

Wendy Hanson  27:29  

Yeah. Now another question I have, because this is a something that I've never been able to figure out how to do well at all is a teleprompter. Okay, I'm a very improv person. So I don't normally do that. But sometimes there are very key things that you need. And if you have an executive who was speaking to all of his people around the world, they want to be able to have a teleprompter, they're like any keys on that or, or tricks on that, that, you know, we can get a sense of and and then they will learn more in your class or in the book.

Karin Reed  27:59  

Yeah, well, and I it's funny. In my first book on camera coach, I talked about teleprompter techniques. So I would definitely encourage people to check that out. I also have a blog written specifically about teleprompter. The one overarching concept I would want to convey is that a teleprompter might make you feel more comfortable. But doing that well is is not easy. And and my concern with people relying upon teleprompters is they're focusing on the wrong thing. They're focusing on articulating words in a particular order, rather than conveying a message with conviction. So my first thing that I say to folks is, okay, if you want to use a teleprompter, tell me why. And, you know, is there a way that instead of having it scripted, you know, word for word? Can you change it into bullets, so that you're communicating concepts and allowing specific wording to come to you in the moment? Sometimes people are okay with that. And other times, they're like, No, I'm too stressed about it, I'm afraid I'll miss something. If they do, say I just want to use the teleprompter, then what I recommend is applying a variation of what's called analytical reading. So analytical reading is a way to mark your copy, which is your text, for emphasis and for pauses, because oftentimes, what happens when we read is we lose a lot of our natural inflection. So we have a porosity to our speech, which is a whole combination of factors, but it can be like your change in pitch. It can be variations in pace, it can be variations in in the pausing that you do. And in order to recapture some of that, you almost have to provide yourself some visual cues so that you do things like emphasizing words. So when you go through your script underline what I would call the meaning words in the sentence. And the meaning words are the ones that are doing the heavy lifting in the sentence, they convey the gist of the concept you're trying to present. Underline those specific words. And whenever you get to them actually in the script, then you will typically emphasize them by raising your pitch. Or maybe you pause afterwards, or maybe you elongate them. So that is the one thing I would suggest. So underline the meaning words, so that you break up just kind of the chunk of copy, because that can be overwhelming in a teleprompter, it was just like a series of words. The other thing I recommend is ensuring that you mark pauses. So there are basically two kinds of pauses, there's like a pause for breath. And then there's a power pause for impact. After you deliver a key takeaway, rather than just plowing into the next sentence, you want to give people an opportunity to consider what you just said, and ruminate on it and digest it. They can't do that if you've already jumped into the next concept, you know, I equated to, like a comedian who tells a joke delivers a punchline, and instead of giving time for the audience to laugh just moves right into the next joke, what happens to the impact of that punch line, it's lost. So if you want your words to land with impact, you need to create space for them to appreciate it. So provide them that space, more difficult to do in a virtual setting. Because sometimes we feel like we are speaking in a vacuum, we don't have the typical ambient noise that we would have, if we're in an office space, like the murmur of conversation down the hall, or even the big h vac system kicking on and off. So you have to almost like force yourself to create those pauses. So after you deliver a key takeaway, which is can be indicated on your script with ellipses, it can be indicated by a slash, it can be indicated by a hyphen, whatever works for you, you know, allow yourself to count 1001 1002 in your head, before moving on to the next thing.

Wendy Hanson  32:07  

That's great advice. And I think, the pause no matter what conversation you're having, you know, I, I learned this from somebody I was coaching A few years ago, he said, I was training salespeople, and they did not take a pause. If somebody didn't answer right away, they throw in Well, how about this deal instead. And you really need to let things settle, we need to we need to like slow down to move fast. And things will be much better.

Karin Reed  32:32  

I love how you said that. And and I think silence is one of the most powerful tools that you have and getting people to listen to it, people take note of it. But it's also a matter of just being cognizant of the way our audience experiences a pause relative to how we experience a pause. And there are big cultural differences as well. So if you are working with somebody who is from an Eastern culture, typically there can be not just an expectation, but a tolerance of silence for up to eight and a half seconds. Whereas in a Western culture, you top out at about two seconds before you got to fill in the gaps.

And what that does is it creates uneven participation or a lack of input. And you have to be aware of this cultural difference in order to have an effective conversation. Yeah, great point.

Wendy Hanson  33:26  

So you've done a lot of studying on this. So I think that you're able to look into the future. What do you think after this pandemic? How is how is this going to change us going forward in terms of virtual meetings and, and people working remotely? Because we know a lot of companies are closing, closing their their doors down? Everybody's going to be remote? So what's the impact going forward? Karen?

Karin Reed  33:49  

Well, and I will look into my crystal ball here. Wendy

Unknown Speaker  33:54  

Radwan, yes.

Karin Reed  33:55  

Well we're seeing is that the trends indicate that there will be a hybrid approach to work. Because, you know, right now, it's being driven primarily for safety reasons, you know, people want to ensure that they maintain their good health and, you know, the health of others. So, so people are remote primarily for that reason. But as the pandemic starts to wane, there is also going to be an evaluation of Okay, well, what do we want work to look like? There are some folks who are desperate to get back into the brick and mortar office, and they're going to try to get back there as quickly as possible. But there are going to be other folks who are like, you know what this remote work is really been great for me. I would like to at least continue to do this at least some of the time. So these virtual meetings that we're having, they're not going to go away, but they're going to change shape. So you might have a meeting where you've got three people co located in a conference room somewhere, meeting with three people who are co located Located in a conference room somewhere else, and then like five people who are joining through their personal webcams, and that hybrid meeting model is going to be so tricky, because as a leader, you have to figure out how to get all these people to talk to each other. And there's going to be a real bias and desire to talk within your own network within that meeting. So like the three people in that office, room, office, conference room, they're gonna all want to like chat amongst themselves as the other folks in the other conference room, and maybe the people who are all appearing in their egalitarian boxes on the screen will want to talk amongst themselves. But that can't happen, you actually have to get them to all engage. So that's going to require strong facilitation, either on the part of the leader, or possibly, by way of a new person who is coming into the meeting, who's serving only as the facilitator. And this is something that that Joe and I have talked about, as you know, perhaps a new way of conducting these meetings where you have somebody who is present, who does not really have a stake in the outcome of the meeting, but is familiar enough with the content that he or she can kind of make sure that there is even participation and that you have had everybody's voice being heard?

Wendy Hanson  36:21  

Yes, yeah, we've had some challenges with that, because we do our trainings on zoom, and we might have 15 people. And when we first started, they would all want to be in one room, you know, before last year before the pandemic. And it always looked like we would call the witness protection program, because you couldn't see anybody's face and you couldn't read who was speaking. And we finally had to say, Please, I know you want to be together, but please stay at your desks on your own webcam, because otherwise, your facilitator trainer is not going to be able to connect with you.

Karin Reed  36:53  

And that's something that might happen as well. And we talked about that a little bit in the book, where, you know, one of the benefits of having everybody meeting virtually in their own box is, it's much more egalitarian than if you were meeting in person, you don't have those power positions around the conference room table, everybody is showing up in a very evenly spaced way. Now there's no back of the room either you can hide. But if you are going into a situation where you have that that hybrid situate hybrid approach, it starts to get out out of balance again. So one of the things that may occur is people you know, even if they are co located, they still go back into their own spaces and and still meet in the same way virtually as they did before, just because it's easier to be able to pull out even input across the board.

Wendy Hanson  37:48  

Yeah. And with so many global companies, you know, you have people in different offices, and we have to figure out how does this work for everybody? Not just those that are in headquarters. But if you happen to be in Dublin, you know, how do you be able to play with your friends in California and have it be egalitarian, as you say?

Karin Reed  38:05  

Right. And and there's also just this idea of everybody having a raised level of awareness of who's in the room? Yeah. So it's a matter of having the meeting leader say, Okay, these are, these are all the folks who are here, just to make you all aware, because it's harder to detect in a hybrid model. And, you know, so all of us are going to have to have this mind shift once again, that we're going to have to adapt and ensure that you know, business is done effectively, no matter where people are working at that time.

Wendy Hanson  38:42  

Well, I love what I've learned today from you, and very anxious to be able to get the book and learn more. So could you tell us a little bit about like the online class and how we would get that and the book and we will put all this in the show notes so that people will be able to access it as they want to learn more, because we're in this for the long run, we better be good at it.

Karin Reed  39:02  

Absolutely. And those who figure it out and could do it, well, we'll see their stock rise. So I'm happy that that we're able to kind of highlight the importance of this. So I appreciate the opportunity, Wendy. So the best place to to find all of this stuff before mentioned the course in the book and just the basics on the training that we do is on our website. So if you go to WWW dot speaker dynamics comm you will see different tabs for what we call speaker dynamics University, which is our online course and you can purchase a seat in that course as an individual as well as through a corporate license. Then you can also find both books that have been written on camera coach as well as suddenly virtual making remote meetings work. If you click on there, it'll take you to the appropriate place to buy the books or you can just go right onto Amazon and you or any of the other booksellers out there. You can easily purchase it as well. And you know, training We train the entire enterprise. It's just the way of doing that changes based upon the number of people who need to be trained and the ultimate goal. Right. And you talked about your blog, too. And I assume they can access that, oh, yeah, it's all on there. And there, we have a year's worth of content that is archived there. So if you put it into the search box, then you'll be able to, you know, find things about like the teleprompter and all those things that we discussed today. So, you know, as mentioned, I mean, we've been teaching this video communication skill set for 10 years. So there's a lot of content that is suddenly becoming really much more interesting to more people, which is exciting for us. And it's also very gratifying to,

Wendy Hanson  40:46  

that's great. Well, following this call, I am going to get googly eyes and put them on my camera, because I have been told to when I've been doing some webinars that you've got to look up there. And it is hard to do, because you want to look at somebody else's face. So it's it's

Karin Reed  41:03  

about relationship a little bit, right? Yes. Okay. Excellent. I want you to send me a picture of your Google.

Wendy Hanson  41:14  

Absolutely. Oh, thank you, Karen, for sharing your wisdom with us today. This is something that we all need and use every day. And we do not want to get zoomed out. You know, we need to make sure that we take care of ourselves and take care of each other. And we we really need to see our faces to be empathetic and to help collaborate but let's do it the right way. So thank you so much for everything today.

Karin Reed  41:37  

Thank you, Wendy. It's been great.

Wendy Hanson  41:39  

Bye, everybody and keep practicing these things that you're learning and go on to the website. What's the website one more time?

Karin Reed  41:45  

SpeakerDynamics.com