Presentations have a cadence. Notices are sent out to the mailing list or promoted through some form of media. Interested people sign up and attend the event. There is a hosting organisation representative delegated to get proceedings underway. I went into detail on that component last week, so if you have missed it, please go back and listen to that episode #280 on “How To Introduce A Speaker”. When the presentation is over the host organisation has to wrap things up. Usually, in well organised events the role of the MC and the person thanking the speaker are separated. The MC will call on the person designated to give a vote of thanks to the speaker and then conclude the event once that part is completed. If that is you, it is important you do a good job, because all of this is coming at the end of the event and this is contributing to people’s final impressions. Those final impressions will also include how they think about you and this will be one of the last things they remember. Last impressions can be deadly, if we don’t plan for them to succeed.
If we have been given that task to thank the speaker, we need to pay careful attention to what the speaker says, so that we can refer to it at the end. If we can get hold of the slides or the speech outline before the presentation, this will make our job that much easier.
We have to remember that we are in the public eye, when we carry out this role. This is like a mini-presentation of our own. Again, these are our personal and professional brands on show, so people are judging how well we can do it.
However, it shouldn’t become a complete summary of the speech, so that we come across as wanting to compete with the speaker. Have you ever seen that? The person thanking the speaker decides to take this opportunity to promote themselves and they try to hog the limelight. People are mentally heading for the door and their next appointment and here is some windbag raving on, wasting everyone’s time. We need to keep it short, sharp and terrific. I didn’t pay much attention to the final thanks to the speaker because most of them were very pedestrian or they were a self-centered rendition of this person’s own views on the subject.
That changed when I heard Thierry Porte, then President of Morgan Stanley Japan, give the thank you speech at an event I attended. The actual presentation was a disaster. The banker giving it had put up his actual text document on screen and was scrolling through it. The font was abysmally tiny and basically he was reading to us what was on screen. It was a dagger in the heart of his firm’s brand at that point, because this guy was obviously clueless about giving presentations. Then Thierry, who later became my boss at Shinsei Bank, gave his comments thanking the speaker for his talk. Actually his short comments were a lot more impressive than the actual presentation.
I didn’t know Thierry at that point, so it was my first exposure to him and today I cannot remember the detail of the points he made years earlier, but what I do remember was that I thought they very intelligent and concise. It was impressive and I recall thinking, “this guy is really smart” and I made a point of exchanging business cards with him. It also showed me the power of being able to thank the speaker in an intelligent way and make an impression with the audience, promoting your personal and professional brands at the same time. The point is to think like that – “this activity is going to add to or subtract from my personal and professional brands”.
So how should we carry out this important role? We have a formula for this we can rely on called the TIS model.
T-Thanks. We might thank the speaker using their personal name if appropriate.This degree of familiarity will vary depending on our personal relationship with the speaker and the culture we are in. Japan is a very formal country, so it is more likely we will be using their title or highly polite forms of address like sama instead of san. So I would say “thank you Suzuki sama” rather than “thank you Suzuki san”. There is a world of difference in Japan between those two polite forms. Recently, I attended an online webinar and the person giving the presentation was a bengoshi or lawyer and the person giving the final remarks addressed him as “Sensei”, which is a very polite reference taking into account his prestigious line of work.
I-Interest. We pick up one area of the talk which we think would have been of most interest to the audience. This is an important decision because there are probably a lot of fascinating things the speaker was able to cover in the 40 minutes of their talk. We have to be listening carefully to the content and at the same time making a judgement about which particular aspects we think will have resonated most with the audience. We don't have that much time, because as soon as the applause dies down, we are up on our feet making our contribution to the event.
F-Formal Thanks. If the MC is doing their job, then they will take over from us and wrap things up. In this case, we would just thank the speaker and then hand over the baton to the MC. If it is down to us however, to bring things to a close, then we make a formal statement of thanks for the speaker, using their title and full name. We ask the audience to join us in applause, thanking the speaker for their presentation. For example, “May I ask everyone to join me, to again express our warm appreciation for Dr. Greg Story, giving us this wonderful presentation today”, at which point we start applauding to signal to everyone that they should now start applauding too.
There are always different levels of understanding of simple roles in a presentation event and the thing I notice is how few people actually understand how to do them properly. From now on, pay careful attention to how the MC opens and closes proceedings and to how the person designated to give the thanks, carries out their role. You quickly realise it is very easy to get into the top 1% of professionalism in these areas, because most people are not much good. What a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands!
