The way a room is laid out can make a major difference in the effectiveness of a meeting and your presentation. When you are leading a small meeting and are using a round or rectangular table, position yourself opposite the entrance so that the participants are facing you and have their backs to latecomers and other interruptions. This is the “power position,” where you can visually control the whole room.
If you are a participant in a meeting, the power position for you is close to and facing the leader so that you are able to make eye contact with the most important person. In this position, you are also able to see the entire room and the entrance. Go to the meeting early so that you can be sure to get one of the best places—a place where you can have the greatest influence on the meeting organizer, usually the boss, and on the meeting participants themselves.
For medium-size meetings (made up of about 15–25 people), a horseshoe-shaped or box-shaped setting is ideal to ensure maximum group eye contact and relaxed interaction. This is one of my favorite layouts for a larger meeting as well, whenever possible. In every case, you want to be sitting at the “top of the curve.” You always want to be facing the entrance, either as the meeting leader or as a participant.
Whenever possible, arrange the chairs and tables so that people can see each other’s faces, rather than the back of someone’s head. It is quite amazing how quickly people warm up, relax, and become spontaneous and friendly when they can look around the room with a small turn of the head and see the faces of more than half of the other people in attendance.
Another layout you can use for large group presentations is the chevron style. This is where you lay out the chairs in a V shape with people seated at an angle, both to you and the stage, on the one side, and to the other participants, on the other. Although the participants cannot see all of the other attendees without twisting or turning, they have eye contact with a large number of people. They can see when other people smile, nod their heads, laugh, clap, or participate in any way. This has a multiplier effect, generating and increasing the participation of each of the other people.
The least effective layout when setting up chairs in a large meeting room is theater style. This is where the rows are straight across, with everyone facing forward and everyone not in the front row looking at the back of the head of the person in front of them. This layout is unavoidable for large meetings, but it is not the best choice if you want everyone to relax, communicate, and participate emotionally and intellectually in the meeting.
There is no such thing as too much preparation when it comes to putting on a large meeting. Too much is at stake. Too many people’s feelings and opinions can be affected. Go to the room early and walk all around the room while it is still empty. If there is anything that you are not happy with, insist that it be changed immediately. Don’t be afraid to speak up.
When I give seminars, I want the front row of chairs to be so close that I can reach out from the edge of the stage and touch a person in the front row. For some reason, hotels will often put a twenty-to thirty-foot gap between the stage and the first row of participants. This makes it much harder for speakers to develop rapport and trust with the audience. I call it the “talk across the street” way of setting up the room.
Whenever I come into a room and see this setup, I immediately insist that the hotel find as many people as necessary to take the chairs from the back rows and bring them forward to create rows in the front. Of course, the hotel people always resist. They do not want to change anything or make any additional efforts. Your job is to insist that it be done correctly, exactly as you requested when you booked the room.
Here is an important point: When you book the room, sit with the organizers and draw out a diagram on paper to indicate exactly where you want the chairs and tables to be relative to the stage. Remember, the people who set up the room do not necessarily speak English. Nor do they particularly care whether or not the room setup is consistent with the contractual arrangements. They often come in overnight to set up the room and are gone by the time you arrive. This is neither right nor wrong; it is just the way it is.
With regard to rooms that have windows that are open to the outside, there are some special notes. First of all, the windows should be curtained or shaded in some way so that people cannot look outside to see other people and cars going by. Be sure that they do not have big windows with a beautiful view, attractive features, or hotel activities going on to the sides or behind you. This kind of distraction can ruin your presentation because you will usually lose the attention of your audience.
On one occasion, I was one of four speakers giving a seminar at a Florida hotel. The meeting room was beautiful in every respect except one: the location. The hotel had an Olympic-size pool and the meeting room jutted out partially as if hovering over the pool. The stage for the speaker was in front of a window that directly overlooked the swimming pool beyond. They had opened the curtains so that the room was flooded with light on all sides, making it difficult to see the speaker’s face. But the worst part of all was that there was a large beauty contest being conducted at this hotel on this very weekend. At least fifty of the contestants were playing and splashing in the water on both sides of this meeting room and behind the speaker, virtually all wearing skimpy bathing suits and big beauty contest smiles.
The conference speakers gave their presentations competing against this attractive backdrop of beauty contestants splashing in the pool. They might as well have stayed in their rooms and spoken to themselves. No one was paying any attention to them. Before I got up to speak, I asked the hotel staff to close the curtains on three sides, which they did. For the first time, the speaker had the entire attention of the audience. I never forgot that experience.