Anyone who has been to a few conferences has had at least some part of them ruined by session chairpersons performing their roles terribly.
Here’s how to avoid being an awful conference chairperson.
1) Manage time
If you do nothing else successfully as a chair, you need to manage the time of the session effectively. Managing time is your first, second and third priority. You can’t help it if the previous session had a poor chair, causing you to start late, but you can at least look good by comparison. Be ready to start before the allotted time (you should arrive first), and make sure you finish on time. To the second.
A couple of minutes early is fine. 30 seconds early is excellent. From the first moment of your session, you should be keeping an eye on the clock to make sure that whatever happens, your delegates and speakers can escape, either to their next session or to coffee. You don’t ‘just have time for one more quick question’ when the session is due to finish in 18 seconds.
Don’t be that session chair who holds an entire conference to ransom by deciding that ‘this subject is really important’ and allows audience questions to go 10 minutes over. It’s disrespectful to everyone and implies that you think the rest of the conference program is a waste of time. And definitely don’t eat into people’s coffee or lunch breaks with your opinions on what’s a good use of 500 people’s time. People need a rest, need the bathroom, want to catch up with colleagues or check the cricket score. Stick to the schedule.
I once sat, horrified, in the audience for an hour-long session with three speakers and a panel discussion at the end. The first speaker started…and kept going. The chair smiled and nodded – he seemed to be paying attention on some level – and kept right on nodding while we got through 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes. The first speaker finished, and the chair pointed out somewhat glibly that we didn’t have much time left for the other two speakers. The chair did not seem to appreciate that this was entirely their responsibility.
These poor remaining speakers had to cram in their talks to less than 5 minutes apiece and the session still ran over. It was awful to watch, embarrassing for the speakers, irritating for the audience and reflected terribly on the chair. We only got out at all because the next session had a good chair, who kicked us all out of the room so she could do her job properly. This sort of session, with multiple speakers and switch-overs of presentations, is particularly tricky because you have to give people equal time and account for the time it takes to transition between slide decks. The last person in the queue to speak often gets the short straw and an abbreviated time slot despite having prepared just as diligently as everyone else. Give them the chance to speak that they deserve.
Be clear with your speakers before the session that you’ll be sticking to time and agree with them a signal for when they are about to run over. Work out a ‘speed up’ signal if you must, but be clear on when each slot starts and finishes.
2) Introduce your speakers better by getting to know them
If you have any chance to do so, find your speakers before the session and have a chat. Ask them if there are any questions they particularly want to be asked at the end, and check if they have any complicated audio-visual requirements (more on this later).
Many conferences ask speakers to provide a short biography which is included in the conference program. Some people send in a couple of lines, others submit long, autobiographies – entirely reasonable for a written program but not the most engaging spoken introduction. However, you will likely be supplied with these bios for your introductory notes and if they are boring you should consider not using these as-is.
If the bio is well written and sounds good when you read it out – by all means do so. But if reading it out would send everyone to sleep, consider asking the speaker how they’d like to be introduced and try to make things engaging for the audience. You’re there to warm the audience up by engaging them and exciting them about the wisdom they are about to receive. If you’re in any doubt or you might offend someone, just read the text – but you can often do a better job if you put some time into making things more interesting.
Please don’t say ‘our next speaker needs no introduction.’ It’s so clichéd, and it’s a statement that’s invariably followed by the introduction which actually is needed. Unless you’re introducing the President, someone in the room doesn’t have a clue who the speaker is.
3) Prepare the room
Check the room out as soon as you arrive at the conference. Get to know the audiovisual people, learn how the microphones work and whether there’s patchy Wi-Fi at the lectern. What will happen if the internet goes down and you’re live-streaming the session? Will you carry on regardless, wait no longer than 5 minutes, or faff about for 80% of the session duration in a futile attempt to fix a technical problem you don’t understand?
It's really the speaker’s responsibility to check the audiovisual setup is working before they speak, but do your best to anticipate any issues. Check the microphones work, that you and the speaker can be heard at the back, and that any presentations are loaded in advance. People bringing in their own laptops often cause problems when their battery dies or their video connector plays up. Check in with people when you find them in advance and work closely with the audiovisual people. Buy them a coffee or something, they are your friend and lifeline.
4) Listen like a chair, not like an audience member
Whether you are bored by the inanity of your speaker’s droning, or starstruck by the brilliant genius enlightening everyone, it’s important to remember you have a job to do. If there will be questions at the end, take a couple of notes of things that were said so you remember what you were going to ask when fielding others’ questions. Keep that eagle eye on the clock and keep alert for any issues that may distract the audience or the speaker. If the room gets uncomfortably hot, ask someone to open the doors or turn the ventilation up. If the speaker sounds croaky, offer them a glass of water. It’s amazing how frequently chairpersons watch their session unravel in front of them and just sit there grinning.
5) Thank the speaker and prepare the ground for questions
At the end of the talk, lead the applause if no-one else starts clapping. In the following order:
Thank the speaker
Tell the audience how you’ll be taking questions and set ground rules
Say a few appreciative words about the talk
If you just say ‘thank you, any questions?’ – you’ll probably be met with an uncomfortable silence as audience members think about whether they want to ask anything. Giving them a bit of warning lets them have a few moments to think, both about their question, and how to fit it into the ground rules you give them (more on this shortly). It also allows you, if no-one does have any questions, to segue into your own starter questions that you’ve been preparing during the talk.
When asking your own questions, you are not there to show everyone how clever you are. It’s OK to be engaging and ask an interesting question but it’s not your role to get into a furious argument or debate. Let the audience have a chance to do that if that’s what’s required. It’s perfectly reasonable (and usually desirable) to ask a fairly easy question that allows the speaker to expand upon one of their points – it keeps the engagement and the mood in the right place.
Try not to use clichés or parrot the same thank-you script; it looks disingenuous. I once saw a chair say to their first speaker of three-in-a-row “Thank you, thank you – what a fanTAStic talk! Really really interesting and we’re all so grateful.” So far, so good. For the second speaker, the chair said exactly the same thing, down to the stressing of the syllables. What had seemed genuine suddenly felt awkward and fake. It was even worse when they did the same thing again for the third speaker. I don’t like feeling embarrassed for the chair and the speaker as an audience member, I can’t imagine it was very nice for the last speaker waiting for their ‘plaudits.’
6) Maintain questioning discipline
If timekeeping is the most important bit, question discipline is the hardest bit. Sometimes a chair gets lucky, and the audience members asking questions do so appropriately and respectfully. At other times, you get a full spectrum of humanity’s flaws laid bare in the utter indecency of your questioners. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Some audience members, when given a microphone, will blather at length over-thanking the speaker; impose their thoughts on subjects tangential to the core topic; go over their own achievements; name-drop people they’ve met and places they’ve been; tell in-jokes that four people in the audience get; denigrate speakers and – worst of all – bore everyone half to death. It’s your job to contain and marshal this deplorable behaviour into something decent and proper. Sometimes that means being quite blunt, but hopefully that’s a last resort. Having ground rules, stating them clearly, and pointing out firmly yet politely the instant there is a transgression that crosses your lines, will hopefully keep your Q&A session running smoothly.
I was once in the audience for some panel discussion and Nick Robinson off the news was the chair. He told us that as men asked far more questions than women, he’d be preferring questions from women where possible. He was also very clear that he wasn’t interested in comments (rather than questions) from the audience. The rest of the audience, he said, paid to hear the speakers speak, not the audience. So he would be immediately moving on from anyone who gave a comment and didn’t ask a question.
Duly warned, the first questioner paid absolutely no attention to this and was cut off less than a second into his opening comment by Robinson, who told him if he didn’t get to his question he could sit down. The rest of the Q&A session ran brilliantly.
It’s quite amazing how persistent people will be in not listening to the clearest requests to not hog everyone’s time with their bloviating, even with a friendly audience. Here, Jeremy Clarkson points out 5 times that the questioner isn’t actually asking a question before swearing at them. You may have your work cut out for you in controlling your unruly question-asking audience.
Directness in the face of a questioner who is trying to take over the floor is not rude. The rudeness is all on their part, in their hijacking of everyone else’s time. You are doing everyone in the room a huge favour by keeping things under control. So set your ground rules with the audience, communicate them clearly, and be prepared to cut people off who cross the line. Be prepared to cut them off more than once, so the message is heard loud and clear.
This sounds quite unfriendly and confrontational, but it doesn’t need to be. Nick Robinson was pretty confrontational I thought, but it was effective. But setting rules kindly and firmly, and gently cutting in to remind people that there isn’t much time and to please ask their question, can work wonders.
7) Announce that you’re finishing on time, and bask in the appreciation of the audience and the speakers that you respected them enough to do so.
You won’t be first to lunch as you’ll be making small talk with audience members who want a chat, and the speaker. But it’ll be worth it.
Conclusion
These aren’t hard-and-fast rules. I’ve been in sessions with chairs who do absolutely none of the above, and things go brilliantly in every one of their sessions. An experienced chair will do much of the above without realising it, and I’ve certainly been in the audience of great sessions where there hasn’t been so much as a whisper about ground rules, preparation for the audiovisual system or anyone adding a personal flourish to their introduction for the speaker.
However, it’s clear to me from long and miserable experience that many chairs don’t see the role for what it is – a potentially demanding task which benefits from preparation, forethought, an ability to think on your feet and also to be flexible. Like the referee in a boxing match, you’re a key person who has a lot of authority, but if you do your job well, no-one even notices you’re there. Let the speakers shine, nudge the questioners to stick to the topic and release people on time, and you’ll be among the very best of conference chairs.