This year marks the fourth year I’ve coached speakers for the Canterbury Tech Summit.
Four years.
When we worked that out at the start of our latest group coaching session, my immediate response was pretty simple:
We must be doing something right.
But it also got me thinking about why Canterbury Tech continues to invest in coaching its speakers, and what I’ve learnt from being part of that process.
Because speaker coaching before a conference does more than help someone give a better presentation.
Done well, there’s a return for everyone involved.
It gives the conference a level of quality assurance
Getting selected to speak at a conference means you know your stuff.
You have expertise, an idea or an experience that the organisers believe is worth putting in front of their audience.
But knowing your stuff and communicating it well are two different things.
That’s particularly important at an event like a tech summit. You can have incredibly smart people with deep technical knowledge, but the audience still needs to be able to follow the thinking, understand why it matters and take something useful away from it.
That’s one of the things I like about Canterbury Tech investing in coaching before the Summit.
It gives them another level of quality assurance.
They’re not simply selecting speakers, giving them a time slot and hoping it all comes together on the day.
They’re investing in helping those speakers make the most of the opportunity.
It gives something back to the speakers
This is the other side of it, and I think it’s just as important.
Speaking at a conference takes work.
There’s the preparation, the practice and the time involved. You’re putting your expertise in front of a room full of people and attaching your name to what you say.
Yes, there are benefits.
You get exposure for yourself, your ideas and the work you do. You get an opportunity to become a better speaker.
But I’ve always thought coaching is another good way for an event organiser to say thank you.
You’ve been selected to speak, so let’s help you get better at it while you’re here.
That means the value doesn’t have to disappear when the conference finishes.
One of the simple frameworks I shared with the group this year, for example, was how I introduce myself.
There are three parts:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- How does it solve a problem?
It’s useful when you’re speaking on stage, but it’s certainly not limited to a conference presentation.
You can use the same thinking for a bio, a podcast introduction, a panel, an interview or any situation where you need people to quickly understand who you are and why what you do matters.
That’s the kind of return I want speakers to get from coaching.
Not just, “Here’s how to get through your presentation.”
Something they can continue using afterwards.
There’s something different about doing it as a group
The Canterbury Tech coaching is done with the speakers together, and there’s value in that too.
At the beginning of our latest session, I encouraged everyone to get to know each other and stay in touch.
There’s a practical reason for that.
I’m not going to be around every time somebody has a question, gets stuck on an idea or wants another opinion.
But there’s now a group of people going through the same process.
They can talk to each other.
They can learn from the questions other speakers ask.
They can hear feedback that might have been directed at somebody else and realise it applies to their own presentation too.
Speaker coaching doesn’t always have to be a coach sitting opposite one person telling them what to change.
Sometimes there’s real value in learning in the room together.
The audience has to be part of the thinking
There was another small moment in this year’s session that sums up something I think speakers can easily forget.
This was our first time doing the coaching online, and I told the group that if they started getting fatigued, put a hand up and we’d take a break.
I can charge along for two hours quite happily.
But I’m not the one who needs to retain the information.
They are.
It sounds obvious, but the same thing happens with presentations all the time.
We build them around what we want to say rather than what the audience needs in order to hear it.
A speaker can be completely comfortable with the amount of information they’re delivering because they live and breathe the subject.
The audience doesn’t.
Part of becoming a better speaker is learning to see your presentation from their side of the room.
Four years later, I still think the investment makes sense
After four years of working with Canterbury Tech speakers, the thing that stands out to me is that coaching isn’t only an investment in the presentation.
The conference gets speakers who have had an opportunity to think properly about what they’re going to say and how they’re going to communicate it.
The audience gets a better chance of understanding and remembering the ideas being shared.
And the speakers get development they can take into the next presentation, panel, podcast, meeting or conversation where they need to communicate their expertise.
Everybody gets something back.
For me, that’s the real value.
You’re not simply preparing somebody for a slot on the conference programme.
You’re helping an expert become better at communicating what they know.
And that skill lasts a lot longer than the presentation.
