Speaker 1: How to moderate a panel like a pro. So you've been asked to moderate a panel, and you're wondering, oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into? Or you're thinking, well, how hard can it be, Kristen? I'm just going to talk to the panelists. We'll get together. It'll be a good time. No problem. I'm Kristen Arnold, and I am a professional panel moderator and a leading authority in moderating panel discussions. And if you want to moderate a panel like a pro, then you want to listen to this video, because we're going to find out how. Here's the reality. Most panel moderators are not pros. They might moderate a couple of panels a year. So I have taken all of the wisdom of all of my colleagues and professional panel moderators, and I've distilled them into some best practices. So let's dive right on in. So let's start with the very first step, which is about clarifying your starting conditions. You might be, if you are lucky, coming in at the front end with a meeting organizer as that meeting organizer is starting to conceptualize the panel. We have a video on how to organize a panel on that one. If you are lucky, that's awesome. But most of the time, you're not that lucky. You're coming in way after a lot of things have already been put in place. The room has already been set. The panelists have already been selected. The time frame, how much time. The promotional materials might already be written. So you might be working with a narrower scope than you would like. That's just the reality of it. So your first step is to get together with a meeting organizer and have a chit-chat about all the things that you need to know in order to moderate that panel discussion. In my book, Powerful Panels, we actually have a checklist of the things that you need to be chatting with with your meeting organizer. Things like, well, how long is the panel? Who are the panelists? What is the premise as well as the title? All of these things are going to help you make sure that you deliver so that the meeting organizer walks away from your panel discussion going, oh my gosh, I am so happy I hired Kristen to moderate that panel. That's what you want. All those questions. Step two is that you select, invite, and confirm the panelists. Now, the meeting organizer might have already selected. They may or may not have invited. But your job is to confirm those panelists. And there's a couple of times that you can meet with the panelists. Generally, the invitation should have a very comprehensive view about what's going to go on in the panel. So if you can input that, that would be awesome. But you might want to call each individually. Or you're going to bring them together on maybe a Zoom call and have a conversation. And maybe you might meet up right before the panel. Maybe you might want to meet up after the panel, too, and talk about how did it go. These are all opportunities for you to confirm that the panelists know what's going on. Now, here's the danger. The panelists will want to start talking about the content of the panel. And then they'll say during the panel, and we talked about this in our planning, which makes the audience go, what? I missed out? No, no, no, no. You don't want to do that. You want to make sure that they are equipped to understand what's going on in the panel and that you get information from them about what questions that you think the audience needs to have answered. So this is an opportunity for you to work with the panelists. Step three is that you prepare to moderate. Now, if you have been moderating panels for a very, very long time, you have your process, you have your methodology. And if you're moderating in a space that you're comfortable, your time to plan and prepare is much smaller than if you are new to moderating panels. So what I'm going to tell you in this piece of this video is there's a lot going on here. There's a lot. But the first couple of times, it might be a lot. But you're going to get used to it. There's like a cadence to this. First and foremost, you want to do your research. You're going to research the topic. You're going to research the panelists. You're going to research the audience. And you're going to gather up what are the areas of interest based on the premise of the panel and the promise that was given to the audience. You're going to take a look at the structure and the format, create an interesting format to deliver on the panel. Based on your research, you're going to have a better sense for what the audience needs to hear. And in that case, now you need to think about the agenda. Or some people call it the format, the structure, the run of show. You want to make sure that you're thinking about all of those factors that go into your panel. Then you're going to take a look at each segment of your agenda or your run of show and go, OK, so how are the introductions going to be done? Am I going to introduce the panelists? Are the panelists going to introduce themselves? Do they even need introductions? OK, so then what happens next? What happens next? What happens next? Are we going to have audience Q&A or not? How are we going to wrap this up? You want to be thinking through all of those different segments. A typical format has the introduction, and then there are moderator-curated questions. Now, those questions may come from all different areas. It comes from your research. It comes from talking to the panel organizer. It comes from talking to the panelists. It might even come from you talking to the audience members, maybe through some promotional channels, social media channels. You take all of that, and you crunch it up. You distill it into a list of questions. You always want to have twice as many questions than you think you're going to need and at least two questions for each panelist. So you've got your list of questions. So you've got your introductions, how you're going to kick it off. You're going to have your introductions. You're going to have your moderator-curated questions. Then you're going to have to think about, well, OK, are we going to do audience Q&A? Or is the audience going to be able to answer questions any time? Are we going to save them to the end? What are we going to do with our questions? Are we even going to have any audience Q&A? Or are we going to use technology to enable audience Q&A? There's all kinds of questions that you, or choices. They're not really questions. They're choices that you make. You're going to want to take a look at the logistics, like how's the room set up? How are the panelists going to be? What's the backdrop? Make sure the panelists know what kind of chairs are going to be in. Think about the logistics. You might actually even be able to influence how that's going to be. Figure out how you want to be. Do you want to be behind a lectern? Or do you want to be out in the audience, kind of like Oprah? I'm dating myself, aren't I? Oprah's not even on talk shows anymore. But are you out in the audience? Or are you sitting on a couch with the panelists? These are all choices that you make. Is there going to be a slideshow? If there's going to be a slideshow, are you going to allow the panelists to show a slide if they need? Or at the very minimum, I like having a slide that has all of the panelists, along with their name, their company name, maybe their social handle, so that people know, oh, that's that panelist. I get confused when I look at panelists. I'm like, so who's on first? Who's on second? That slide helps them know that information, who the panelists are. You're also going to want to ask your panel organizer, the meeting organizer, if there's anything that you can do to help promote the panel, to spread the word. Maybe they'd like you to shoot a little video talking about the panel, or do something, make a little write-up about how excited you are, a post on social media. See how you can help their promotional efforts. And then finally, in the planning and the preparation, you want to confirm with the panelists, yes, they're going to show up. Yes, they're comfortable with the process that you're going to use. And yes, you're going to deliver awesome value to the audience. So we've just covered three steps. First step is clarify the starting conditions, make sure you've got your good panelists, and that you have prepared. Before we go into the next two steps, I just want to check in with you. Have you learned something interesting so far? Something that you went, ooh, I hadn't thought about that before, or, ooh, that's a good reminder, Kristen. If you could just like this video and maybe subscribe to this channel, you'll find lots and lots of information here about how to moderate a panel like a pro. Step five is it's about time. We're going to moderate the panel. So you want to have a nice, strong start. Make sure that the panelists are there. Make sure they know where they're supposed to be sitting. Are they walking in all at the same time or as you're introducing them? You want to think through all of these things when you're planning in preparation. And when you're actually moderating the panel, you start strong. So now that you've gotten the opening sequence done, now you got to get the conversation going. We have a video on that about how to get people to start talking. It usually starts with you, yes, you, and that you don't let the panelists talk to you because you ask the question, they're going to answer it back to you and you need to not look them in the eye. You deflect and you look out into the audience. And what will happen is your panelists will talk to the audience or they'll talk to their fellow panelists. Either of those are better than them talking to you because if they start talking to you, now you're into a ping pong match where they talk to you, then you lob it to another person and then you lob it to another. That's boring. So you want to make sure that there's a conversational drumbeat in all of your planning and preparation conversation that you've had with your panelists that this is a conversation. So you got to get them talking, facilitate the conversation. You're going to be using the questions. Sometimes they're not going to be in order. You're going to use this question. Maybe this question got answered anyway, or maybe it's not relevant anymore. You're facilitating that conversation using those questions as starters. Now you also are going to ask probing questions to get more information where it's appropriate. Might not even be on your card or a pre-prepared question. But if you go, ooh, we need to learn more about that. That was interesting. If you think it's interesting and you're acting on behalf of the audience, chances are use your intuition and lean into that and probe deeper. Because remember, you're the instigator. It's one of your roles. You're also going to then move into audience Q&A if you are going to be doing audience Q&A. And I always suggest that you set up the ground rules of I'd like you to state your name, your organization, your question first, and any context, a sentence or two following that. And I apologize that if I cut you off and ask you what's your question, please start there. Don't take offense to it, which is awesome because if you ever heard people who like go, oh, thank you so much. I appreciate this panel. It's so awesome. You know, I'm so happy you're here. It's like you're wasting valuable audience Q&A time. You're wasting somebody else asking the ability to ask a really good question. So you're going to facilitate the audience Q&A and as a facilitator, you're going to intervene gracefully when things go a little sideways and they will go sideways every once in a while. We have another video on that one too. Finally, when you are moderating the panel, you conclude the session. You close it out and you close it. Either you can close it, the panelists can close it, or you can even have the audience close a session. I think like I'm saying this a lot, but we have a video on that too. We have a plethora of resources on this YouTube channel as well as on my website, powerfulpanels.com. Finally, as a panel moderator, you are going to want to follow up. The panel is over. You've concluded the session. Maybe people are still talking. That's awesome. That's a sign of an awesome panel discussion. But don't forget that you as the panel moderator, think about what went well, what didn't go so well, and debrief the meeting organizer, debrief the panelists, and integrate those into some lessons learned. That's how you become a pro, is that you do some of that reflection and debriefing and critiquing of your performance. You'll also want to send a thank you note to the meeting organizer, maybe a thank you note to the panelists. Maybe if there was somebody in the audience who asked a pretty interesting question, this is a great way for you to network as well. So those are the five steps to moderating a panel like a pro. I hope you found some great ideas. And if you're looking to go a little bit deeper, I suggest you go to www.HowToModerateAPanel.com where you'll find access to my seven part free video series where we go deeper in all of these ideas.