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Facing a Tough Room? Try One with Gang Members
February 05, 2007
By Holly Dolezalek
 Pamela Slim isn't scared of an audience. She's gone walking in the gang neighborhoods of the Bay Area and Oakland area of San Francisco to talk to gang members and try to get them involved with her martial arts program. Compared to that, she finds it easy to face an audience with a presentation.
Slim is an independent consultant based in Mesa, Ariz., who instructs potential entrepreneurs in the art of leaving their safe and secure jobs behind. She used to be a training and development manager at investment management firm Barclay’s in San Francisco, but followed her bliss in 1996 to be self-employed as an independent management consultant. (She maintains a blog about her experiences at www.escapefromcubiclenation.com.)
She's worked with corporations and presented all over the country, but she says she learned the most about engaging with an audience from approaching and talking to gang members.
"I noticed that at first, they were always trying to intimidate me with their body language and to deflect attention from themselves; I got the steely eyes, the aggressive stance, the inflated chests. They were trying to show they were strong and in control," Slim says. "Eventually I learned that that was just bravado, what they needed to do to survive on the street. Underneath they were like other teenagers: they were scared, intelligent, sensitive kids who had fallen into bad situations."
Gang members, boards of directors, executives—it's all the same to Slim, who has some advice for those about to present to a tough crowd.
Nonverbals, nonverbals, nonverbals. "I avoided being confrontational [with the kids] but I always made sure I had a strong, comfortable stance and never let my voice betray my fear, if I was afraid," Slim says. This same attention to body language came in handy in a workshop with some corporate executives. In a workshop with an executive team, Slim says, she saw the same kind of body language from those executives as she had seen in teenage gang members. Rather than conciliate or give in to the intimidation, Slim pointed out the resemblance, and after a pause, they laughed and stopped their posturing. "It was a risky move, but it worked to gain credibility and be direct," Slim says. "If I had been all humble and asked politely about it, they would have stomped all over me."
Slim says that in any presentation, in fact any interaction, body language is a great deal more important than what you say. Your audience judges you by whether you smile, are relaxed, and make eye contact, and if they don't like what they're seeing, they're not going to care what you're saying. People know that, and yet they still spend much more time preparing what they'll say and hardly any time just moving around the room and rehearsing the relaxed physical attitude that will make the message more acceptable to the audience.
Keep your message strong, clear, and simple. Rather than preach at the gang members about what they should be doing with their lives, Slim made it a point to ask questions instead, and to listen to what they were talking about. If the opportunity arose, she would bring up her martial arts program, but she made sure to establish first that she had the kids' interests in mind, and kept it simple, without preparing an elaborate speech about the program.
"Corporate folks can be especially vulnerable to the disease that plagues corporate communication, where people just don't have a clear sense of what they’re trying to say," Slim says. "Instead of knowing what their audience’s problems are—say, if you're presenting on a controversial new compensation plan—they go in with 152 PowerPoint slides and just try to jam all the information they have down the audience's throat. Smart presenters will research ahead of time, learn what the hot issues are, and to the extent it's possible, use the presentation to address the audience’s concerns."
Read your audience’s body language, too. The aggressive or relaxed postures of the gang members she spoke to told Slim what their intentions were, and also when she should just back off and when she could try to engage. She also made an effort to mirror their postures to suggest subtle engagement, although she took care not to be obvious about it.
In situations that are less potentially dangerous, it's easier to confront what you see and address it constructively, as Slim did with the executives in the first example.
"You don’t want to leave heaviness in a room or allow things to remain unsaid, unless they just don't like you and it won’t be constructive to address it," Slim says. "But if you're in a room where there are troublemakers, or folks who just aren’t open to your message, you can use that as a way to open the dialogue. You might just take note of where the body language—arms crossed, no eye contact, turning away—tells you there's resistance in the room, and then walk over to that part of the room. You're not challenging them, you're just getting closer so you can engage more successfully."
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