Do You Want to Demonstrate Your Intelligence In A Meeting?

If you want to demonstrate your intelligence in a meeting, you have two options.

Based on more than 60 workshops and meetings over the past few weeks for a bank in the United Kingdom, I noticed among all presentations one consistent element.

Of the time allotted to them …

The presenter filled up the agenda with themselves: they did almost all of the talking, leaving little time for Q&A and keeping audience interaction to a minimum. In you could draw the agenda visually, the meeting would look like Example A.
A few presenters chose to use the agenda to get their organized points across quickly, then spent the remaining time discussing and debating the recommendations. These agendas looked like Example B.

I asked why they chose to organize the meeting as they did. The common answer was the presenter wanted to get the maximum amount of information across to their audience, to show how much they knew about their topic or recommendation, or to show they were thorough and comprehensive.

Drilling deeper, I found the presenters were in two different camps.

Presenters in Group A often had two parallel issues.
- The audience was notoriously anal-retentive and controlling. Although the Presenter felt the objective of the meeting was to outline their recommendation, in reality the meeting was an exercise in wallowing in detail. The Presenter thus filled up ALL of the allotted time trying to review each piece of minutiae.
- Second and equally important, most people knew the bank was on the verge of axing up to 1,000 jobs, many of them at the level of the Presenters. Fearful of losing their jobs, most Presenters subconsciously filled their slides with so much detail, as if to prove they were too valuable and filled with vital information to be fired.
- Between the two issues – no surprise – the Presenters in Group A were poor presenters.
Presenters in Group B had a different mindset.
- Regardless of the audience, this group chose to dictate how their presentation would go. They chose to convey their recommendations in messages which were clear, succinct or prioritised. (They knew the Rule of 3s.) They distilled a volume of information down to its essential points as a way to demonstrate as much (if not more) command of the topic rather than fill up a slide up with charts, graphs and detail. Their response to the anal retentive boss was to show they could differentiate between strategic data and minutiae. Their response to a tenuous position was to show their efficiency and effectiveness.
- Group B presenters never showed any signs of nervousness. They were in total control. As you do, when you know what you’re doing, your confidence shows.

There’s a certain irony working here.

The people we consider ‘smart’ take a complex subject and make it simple for the audience to understand.
The people we consider ‘dumb’/’annoying’/’unhelpful’ take a simple subject and make it more complex, usually to disguise the fact they don’t even understand a simple subject.

You want to demonstrate your intelligence? Follow the first point above:

Make your topic simple to understand.

(This discussion reminds me of the famous Einstein quote.)

If you want to demonstrate your intelligence:

Make the Q&A section be the largest part of the agenda, not the smallest.
The most engaging and dynamic part of the meeting is the interaction between presenter and audience, not the reading of the information to the audience. Remember: your audience can read faster than you can talk.
Don’t give us numbers. Tell us what the numbers mean.

All of this might be a long way of saying your intelligence shines through when we (the audience) watches you think on your feet. It shows you trust you know what you know.

This reminds me of an odd thing my Nana Eklund once said to me;