How to Run Better Meetings, Panels, and Presentations with Anthony Lee

Hey, Foresight listeners, thanks for tuning into our show. If you like what you hear and want a monthly roundup, a sneak peek into the insights from our Foresight Plus members-only events and more, sign up for our monthly newsletter. It's free and subscribing also gets you access to our quarterly Foresight whitepaper. This quarter's whitepaper is about rethinking entry-level work in the age of AI, produced in collaboration with Dr. Miranda Rodak from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business., an important topic for HR leadership and parents, students, and society as a whole. Link to subscribe in our show notes. Now on to today's episode. You're listening to Foresight, the weekly podcast about HR leadership and the future of work. We explore the ideas, trends, and the real stories reshaping how work gets done. I'm your co-host, Mark Edgar, a former consultant and coach, turned Chief People Officer on a mission to make work more human. And I'm Naomi Teitelman, former big firm consultant and HR executive, now striving to make work better one leader and one organization at a time. Every week, we chat with top experts and dive deep into the issues facing HR and business leaders today, from retention and engagement to AI, flexible work, culture, and leadership effectiveness, with ideas you can use right now to lead with confidence into the future of work. Welcome to Foresight, a podcast about HR leadership and the future of work. I'm one of your co-hosts, Naomi Teitelman, and I'm joined today by our next special guest, Anthony Lee from Heroic Voice Academy. I've had the privilege of working with Anthony in my capacity as panel moderator at the Transform conference in Vegas over the past 2 years. Anthony is a speaker coach extraordinaire and has taught me a thing or two about presenting more effectively to better engage my audience. I was actually, this is not a brag, but rather a testament to Anthony. I was actually approached this year after my panel by someone who was curious about how I prepared for it. So I figured let's bring Anthony to the show and share some of his wisdom and insights and tips because we all could use some of that. So welcome to Foresight, Anthony. It's great to have you here. How are you and where are you joining us from today? Thank you, Naomi. I've been looking forward to our conversation. Actually, I look forward to all of our conversations. And today I'm joining from Napa, California. Oh, I am so jealous. Napa is one of my favorite places, at least in this part of the world, in, in North America. So enjoy the wine and hopefully the weather is better there than it is here. It certainly is. All right. Well, before we get started, we like to start each episode with a check-in question. So my question for you today, Anthony, is what is the worst presentation you ever saw and what made it so bad? Naomi, I love this question. And if there's anyone to shine the spotlight on, I'm gonna shine it on myself because as a young engineer, early 20s, you know, I'm walking into rooms with folks in the audience that are twice my age. So credibility was something I worried about. In my preparation, I thought, just come in and be the smartest person in the room, have all the answers to all the technical questions, and you'll land the sale. And I went up there totally prepared. And what I did was an info dump, which I know today does not work. Fortunately though, I had a mentor and his name's Kirk. And one of the things he taught me was connection with the audience is greater than connection with your content. So he taught me all the tools on how to open, open in a way where you show the audience, You know what it's like to be in their world. You know the problems that they're having, you know, the emotions that they're having while going through their problems. And that's more important than any content I could bring to the stage is just show the audience you've done your homework. So yeah, it was me. I gave a very bad presentation and luckily they've improved each and every time I took, I took the stage. Amazing. And I love how you learned from that moment and it was really early on in your career and you share so much of that wisdom with the people that you coach. So thank you for that. Let's start with you. Tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to a career in presentation coaching. Well, as a young engineer, obviously I was coached well, and I became recognized for doing presentations. I became a go-to person for our company, and that led to me training all of my engineers when I rose to management level, how to present. And then it extended to the C-suite. Obviously they also need to be sharp as well. So I was tasked with getting them prepared for conferences, media interviews, panel presentations. So that was the beginning, and I did it for two-thirds of my career. That switched when there was one time, this is back in 2014, one of my friends invited me to coach for an event that he was part of. And that event happened to be TEDx Salt Lake City in 2014. Now I was a little bit unsure. I said, I know how to present in the technology industry. I have no idea how to get people on a TED stage ready for their presentations. And he said, I, I've seen your presenters present, just bring those into the room. And at the Saint Naomi, when this is previous to that event, my audience were technical people. A lot of my audience were, let's say reluctant students. They're not there because they want to be better presenters. They're there because their manager said they had to be there. But oh my gosh, the TED presenters, none of them were technical, but each of them had a vision for the future they were passionate about. It was the easiest training I've ever done because they had a why and they knew that their voice powered that vision. And it just opened my eyes to, well, who else can I train? So that expanded me to look at serving folks in HR, in the— right now, the AI industry, in healthcare. So that's why— those are the major inflection points in my journey. First, that TED AI event, and now just working with folks, really designing visions of the future. Amazing. I love that journey, and I didn't know about you starting out as an engineer. So, you know, it just goes to show that Careers can be really, you know, really squiggly, right? And you end up finding your passion and you find your niche and you find where you love to add value to the world. And I think that's so important, especially in this ever-evolving world of AI. So let's get back to how I met you. Some of our listeners may be interested in getting on internal or external panels or improving their panelist or moderator skills. So what's one tip you would give a moderator and one tip you would give a panelist to give a more engaging experience for the audience? Well, as a moderator, and you did this very well, and we thank you for being so open to learning a new framework. Audience connection. That's the one thing I learned early on, and that's one thing I teach moderators is their first 3 minutes should be focused on one thing: audience connection. You want to connect the audience to the topic that's going to be discussed and connect the audience to the panelists who will be sharing their nuggets of wisdom. So what that means is when opening, and let's start with what doesn't work, Naomi, let's dive right in and we'll have our panelists introduce themselves. That's horrible because— they don't know. No, right? That, that tells me the moderator did not prepare. They don't know their panelists. They're introducing essentially strangers who they met for the first time. Whereas what we talked about, Naomi, and what you did was Can you get to a point where you know your panelists well enough so that it feels like you're introducing the audience to one of your friends? And when you do that, it's so much richer than reading a resume. When you were up there, you knew your panelists, you knew a lot because you prepped with them. You knew a little bit about who they are as people, and it felt that way that I was being introduced to one of your friends. The other thing I love that you did was you connected audience members to the importance of the topic. Why is— and your topic was efficiency trap. Why is this topic so timely and relevant today? And that's what you did. You set that up so that the audience lean into learning more about the topic, lean into and trusted by extension the credibility and the words that would be shared by your panelists. Final thing you did well, and this is something I, I see a lot on YouTube, but I also see it a lot at conferences when the moderator makes a bold promise. When you are able to say to the audience, and I, I've heard this described as an audience contract, by the end of our session today, you will walk away with. So if a moderator can nail that first 3 minutes, everything else is easy. And I just want to be very clear. You're saying that I did that well, but it was all you who provided that framework and coaching. So I wouldn't have done it that way. I probably would have turned it over to the panelists to introduce themselves, right? Because we all, we all don't appreciate the real role that a moderator plays in these things. And we'll talk about it in a minute after I get your tips for, for our panelists, but we'll talk a little bit about panels that go well and not well and why that happens. But first, can you give a tip for our, our aspiring panelists who may be listening. Yeah, and this is something that I've just realized recently. So I've been working in two parallel types of events. The first one, obviously, is in the HR world, where the panelists are great at bringing lessons to the stage. There's lots of information. And then I've also been working a lot of film festivals, where these are professional storytellers, and they bring lots of great stories to the stage. But in each of these worlds, there's a blind spot. So for the HR professionals, they bring lessons and where they need to have focus or more emphasis are the stories that bring these lessons to life. On the other hand, the professional storytellers, they're great at storytelling, but distilling it to the lessons is their challenge. So where I put this all together is there is something called an engagement loop. Where you create specifically for the audience 3 experiences. There's a call to think, which is teaching a lesson, a call to feel, which is a story, more specifically the emotional experience of someone going through the problem and solving the problem. And the final thing is a key takeaway. When you do the first 2 things well, there's a nugget of wisdom And success for the panelists would be imparting wisdom in the form of this nugget of wisdom so that it's easy to remember, it's easy to apply. The audience feels good that they can replicate the journey that was shared in the story, duplicate the best practice that was shared by the panelist. Great. And so we've all, like I alluded to, seen and been on panels that have gone really well and maybe not so well. So you have a really interesting way of thinking about panels. And bear with us, audience, if you're not interested in being on a panel, this does then foray into how to think about your team and how you come across as a unified team. So stay with us. Share with us a little bit about your analogy to a jazz band. Yeah, so many of us hopefully have grown up and sometime in our childhood watched the Disney movie Snow White. And inside of Snow White, there's a particular song that many of us are familiar with, "Someday My Prince Will Come." Now, it's not that song, but there is a variation of that song that was created by Miles Davis. And if you haven't heard it, look it up on YouTube and listen because it serves as a great template for a great panel. So Miles Davis is the jazz band leader. He plays the role that a moderator plays. He opens the set, he sets the tone, he sets the tempo, he sets the mood. And that's what a panelist does. But when I was listening to his song, one of the things that stood out was he set up each of his lead musicians for an opening solo, right? So once he was done, lead— the first lead musician played his instrument and use the tempo and the tone that Miles had set. Now, for a moderator, what this looks like is in the prep sessions, making sure that they can shine the spotlight on each panelist and give them a question they love to answer, right? Because that's the first time the audience hears the panelist's voice. So if the moderator sets the panelists up for a great opening question, you know they're gonna kill it, right? It's gonna be great content. They're going to be passionate about talking with it. There's a good story behind it. There's a good takeaway behind it. So in— as a moderator, make sure that you set each, each panelist up with a question they love to answer. Now, obviously the question has to be relevant to the topic, so it is a collaboration. And Naomi, I'd love for you to share your insight. You did this for each of your panelists. How was that when bringing each of your panelists to a question they would love to answer. Yeah, it was really great. So, so conversely to like introduce yourself to the audience, asking a question that was uniquely tailored to what they're really proud of, what their superpower is, what their impact is, really gave them the stage to warm up and kind of have the spotlight on them for a story that really resonates with the audience. So it was a fantastic way to kind of set up the 30 minutes in my case to really highlight and spotlight what the panelists were each proud of. Had to do a little bit of work to make sure that there wasn't duplication in the question because that's another sign of a not so great panel is asking one question and asking each panelist answer the same question, right? So I wanted to make sure not to do that, but it's, it's an approach that now I take into meetings and I'd love to hear your thoughts like, okay, so we've talked about panels and presenting. I hope everyone's kind of. Listening for a kind of the parallel to what they experience in the workplace because it's very, very relevant. And so why don't you share a little bit about that? Yeah, in meetings. So think about it in meetings, and this is something that is common. So if you're doing this now, don't worry about it. We'll give you something to do instead. So in meetings, typically there is partial listening, right? I'm listening for the current speaker to finish so that I get to share what's next. And in really well-run meetings, in high-performing teams, what everybody brings into the room are active listening skills. And what that does is it helps everyone build upon everything that's been shared. So you acknowledge what the contributions have been made and you build upon that. In the world of improv, we call that the yes and. But really, in meetings, if you can actively listen, and there's 3 ways or 3 pathways you can use to advance the conversation. So number 1, obviously, is advance. Based on something that was shared, listen and see how you could advance the idea. The second thing you can do is connect. Are you able to connect what was just shared to a present-day obstacle or for a situation that we had in the past where now we have a tool that can be replicated or even contrast, right? You can contrast what was just shared with an idea that you have in mind. But these 3 items show conversational leadership. You listen well, you are able to build upon the conversation, and the meeting actually turns out to be something that is worth replaying. It's the type of conversations that good panelists have on stage. And I would say that if this happens in meetings, you know, across the globe, meetings would be so much more productive. So much more productive. We actually recently had a podcast guest talk about your best meeting ever, and this would foray very well into that conversation. So when someone is presenting either on a conference stage, in a town hall, meeting, at a board presentation, or even in a team meeting, what are the different voices they should consider tapping into? Oh, well, I'm gonna start with the 3. We talked about the engagement loop with call to think, call to feel, call to act. So for the call to think, there's a, a couple of voices that are really good here. The ones that have come to mind are teacher, right? A good teacher curates information, teaches just a segment that the audience can easily absorb. Another voice that's really good to is trusted advisor, where you're taking the audience through a set of choices in front of them and giving them the ability to make a good decision based on what's in front of them. So the call to think would be teacher or trusted advisor. The call to feel, that one's easy, storyteller, right? It's, it's not just a head experience, it's a heart experience. So when you can go up there and tell a story about a protagonist who has a set of emotions as they're struggling and their journey to having the opposite set of emotions when they succeed. So when you are able to articulate the emotional experience as a storyteller, it shows your emotional intelligence, it shows your EQ, it makes the audience feel like, while the, the person in front of the stage, they know what's going on in my head and in my heart. And that's a level of trust that I want more speakers to have. So storyteller is a second voice. The third one, call to act, right? There's a couple of voices that are very powerful here. The voice of a leader, obviously, is tell us exactly what to do. Now, that's assuming that you've earned trust with the first two voices. So call to leader, when there is a clear, specific next step to take. What is that next step? The final voice is, and this is something we hear from a lot of the most famous speeches in history, Martin Luther King comes to mind. It's the voice of a changemaker, right? When the changemaker can articulate the desire for change with the urgency of now, then the audience can give themselves permission to be all in. They're all raising their hands, wanting to help fulfill this vision for the future. So those are the voices that are most effective in each of these engagement areas. Great. And so again, I don't think this is only relevant to, you know, you as a CEO on stage presenting in front of a town hall, et cetera. I've really been playing with these different voices in everyday meetings, right? And we don't You don't need the high pressure that, like, I have to be a changemaker in every meeting. But just thinking about what you want as an outcome from that meeting and what voice you need to tap into more and/or pull out of your team members in order to make that meeting achieve those outcomes, I think is really, really interesting. Naomi, there was a conversation I had on a coaching call, and what you said is spot on. So we have an HR professional and she's preparing for a keynote. And obviously she's doing this engagement loop. But one of the things that we're doing in her workouts is for her to mentally know what voice am I going to use next, just so that she can lock in. I'm going to start with telling a story. So she gets herself ready, primed to deliver a story. Then she's going to go into teaching mode. And that's teacher voice. And then at the very end of that segment, there is one of the fundamentals that she wants the audience to lock in and take action on. So that would be the leader voice. So before, and this is in the transition, slide has just come up, and before opening her mouth, she knows what voice she's gonna use because that's the voice that the audience is going to best receive the material. So yeah, you're exactly right. Know the voice. And, you know, as a presenter, know which voice is appropriate. Naomi, if I can just share one more story, and this is highly relatable. We've all had people hit us up to sell us something, right? And that is a voice where they think they're a leader. They're gonna say, Buy my product. But that's before they've earned any trust. They know that they didn't open with a contributor voice, like relating to the person. They didn't use a storytelling voice. They didn't use the trusted advisor voice. They, they went straight to the call to action. Buy this from me because everybody else sucks. Yeah. Right. That, that doesn't work. So no. Yeah. Knowing what voices to use, highly, highly relevant and important. Yes, I love that. And so you mentioned the gym, which some of our listeners may be scratching their head. What does he mean by gym? We're talking about presenting. I know I need to go to the gym, but is this something different? So why is it important to rehearse presentations as a team before going in, particularly to high-stakes meetings? And maybe you could just talk a little bit about what a gym workout looks like, and maybe we can use like a board meeting as an example. Yeah, yeah. For board meeting, essentially the board meetings that go well, you have a leadership team that supports the same vision. They're on the same page and they communicate as one team. I call that synchronized communications. And that only happens if they did work beforehand. So what I recommend, and there's different versions of the GIMM, but if you were preparing for a board meeting, there would be a private leadership team who meets together to do a workout. And inside of this workout, this is where they are all taking the stage, giving a portion of the presentation, and each of the other team members are carefully listening so that they can give feedback. Now, this requires that there is trust amongst the team leaders. When I come in, what if that trust isn't in existence, I come in as the person who listens and then gives feedback. But eventually I want all of the team leaders or all of the organization leaders to replace me so that they can listen well and they know how to give feedback. And feedback, Naomi, is— so one person goes, but all the rest of the team should be listening for 3 things. What went well? That's gonna be tricky because everyone wants to focus on where someone messed up. But what went well allows the entire group to identify a best practice, something that they want to replicate from that speaker, but maybe adopt as one of the other speakers on in that board meeting. So always start with what went well so that you can capture a best practice. Then you shift to what didn't go well. And this is for the purpose of, you know, not taking things personally, but identifying what are the things that we can remove or refine. And that gets us ready to, you know, have our best version ready for the stage. And the last part, and this is something not many leaders do, but I always want someone to end in a creative state. So the third part is what are the creative options we can use for our next run-through or for our next presentation? And what that taps us into is not anything corrective but creative. What are some new perspectives that we can play with? What are some new stories that we can introduce? So always ending on a creative state is the best way to end. And when an executive team has this framework, best practices, things that can be refined or removed, and then creative options. It tends to be an environment where everybody has this growth mindset, and we look forward to run-throughs rather than running away from run-throughs. Yes, as I tended to run away from run-throughs. And, you know, when I first came to your gym, it was awkward because I came into a virtual room where I didn't know anybody on the call., and I was being very, very vulnerable, right? I was sharing my, you know, my presentation and asking for those 3 things. But the way you run them is just so disarming, especially ending on the creative options, because I took that back and played around with my presentation. And sometimes I took elements, sometimes I was like, no, that makes it too long, but what can I capture from here that will like bring in that sentiment? So it's so helpful. And I really don't think teams do this enough, you know, in board meetings and for town hall presentations, for investor meetings, for team meetings where there's multiple leaders who really need to show a united front. And really like then coming back to your, your previous points about the different voices, like how can you integrate those voices in a way that's very deliberate, that again achieves the outcome that you want to achieve? Absolutely. And it's easy now. I mean, not easy. It's simple. Yes. Just get in the gym. But you also need that ecosystem, right? Yeah. There's not only the, you know, what you do in the gym, but are you able to set aside time for the gym? Yeah. Do you know what— why it's important? Do you have your executive assistant block off that time and ferociously protect that time slot so that you have the time, your team has the time to adequately prepare? Yeah, yes, it goes such a long way. So most of our listeners are HR professionals. So what's one application of your framework you think most relevant to the role of an HR leader today? Yeah, I go back to that role of listening. There's a lot said in front of you. And when you're not tied to a piece of paper on what you want to say next, there's so much information that is coming at you. So, Basically put yourself, you know, in the audience. Listen to everything that's being shared to you, both verbally and nonverbally. And when you do that, again, what we talked about early on, what can you do to acknowledge what's being shared with you so that you can advance, connect, contrast the conversation? You always want to build that trusted relationship so that the conversation continues, it feels like a collaboration. It doesn't feel like an interrogation, for example. So that's my nugget of wisdom. Fantastic. Thank you for that. So we are getting near the end of our time together, which I know you tell me to never say at the end of our panels, but I'm saying it here because I always do. Before we go, how can our listeners find out more about the great work that you're doing? Yeah, look me up on LinkedIn. Anthony Lee, and my handle is Heroic Voice. So look me up on LinkedIn if you ever want to join a gym session. We have Open Gym Thursdays every Thursday at 12 Pacific time. So jump in, jump in. I always bring a micro-training to every week, and you'll get a chance to practice a portion of your presentation or do the exercise we had in mind, and you'll get great coaching feedback from me and from my team. Thank you so much, Anthony. It's been such a delight to have you on the show. Hopefully our listeners got a ton of nuggets out of that one. Whether you wanna be on a stage or just more effective in your meetings, there's lots and lots of insights that are baked into this episode. So please feel free to go back and re-listen to it, share it with your friends. Really, really relevant stuff today. Before we go, we love to end on a feel good. So Anthony, what are you feeling good about today? Oh, I'd say every time I get to speak with a conference producer and just share with them or listen to their vision— what's your vision for the audience? They're always locked in to, you know, an exceptional audience experience. Obviously, I did Transform last week. I did a film festival this week. I'm working at an author's festival. But just today's really top-notch conference producers, they're locked in to audience experience. And my invitation to everyone is lock yourself into audience experience. If you do that, you'll take the stage with a level of preparation that's above and beyond. Thank you so much, Anthony, for being a great guest on our show today. And until next time, everyone, take care. Yeah. Thanks for listening to Foresight. 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