I was recently flipping around on TV and while going through the dead zone of five government channels (two CSPANs and three local - thank you Comcast!), I came across a recorded luncheon by and for “woman of color.” Being an evaluation geek I couldn’t help but watch. Failing both the criteria to be a woman of color, I will say I was pleasantly surprised that the event was very positive, without even a whiff of white-male bashing.

The gist of this is an organization was holding some sort of luncheon/awards banquet and that the various recipients each had to come up to the podium to speak for a few minutes. The meeting had a theme centered on mentorship. As each woman came up, a slip of paper was drawn which contained a question she had to speak to immediately. These were along the lines of, “Talk about one of your mentors,” “Describe how mentoring can be a painful process,” and “How do we develop the next generation of mentors?”

Rather than evaluate individual speakers, let’s evaluate the format itself.

The positive:

• I liked the idea they had a theme they wanted the folks to walk away with and they got a bunch of mini-speeches out of it from different angles, rather than some keynote speaker going on for forty minutes.
  
• If everyone got the same question (e.g. “Tell about your mentor,”) then the answers would have turned formulaic fast (e.g. “Well, my mentor so and so was so wonderful, so caring, so blah blah blah.”) Mixing up the questions avoided that.

The negative:

• Frankly many of the speakers struggled trying to speak for three minutes extemporaneously. Some were nervous to the point of incoherency. For the record, there was one pretty good and one phenomenal speaker in the half hour I caught of this. And for the record, I’ve botched my share of Table Topics. But I signed up for that as a Toastmaster and wasn’t on TV.
  

Making a bunch of inexperienced/nervous speakers talk for three minutes impromptu like this is asking for problems. Throw in a large audience of your peers (I’d guess around a hundred) and being under hot lights and being taped and things get worse.

There is a hybrid solution that gives the positives of this format without the negative. These women struck me as hard workers, so I believe had they been told the particular subject they were to speak at least a week ahead of time then they would have practiced the hell out of their remarks and done much better. Practice is a great way to avoid nervousness, especially for inexperienced speakers. When you’re corralling speakers like this, you should give them the benefit of time and preparation so they do their best. Especially when the TV cameras are rolling!