Communicate with Mastery

5Tailoring Your Communication to Your Setting

Just as you'll think carefully about your specific audience before crafting your communication, you should also think carefully about the setting in which you'll operate. Your communication strategy will be very different if you are presenting on the TED stage than if you are leading a team meeting. In this chapter, we'll lead you through some considerations to set you up for success in meetings both in-person and virtual, when on the stage, when co-presenting, when fielding questions, and when using slides.

Meetings

To really make a meeting successful, what you do before and afterward is crucial. Many times, the real work will occur before you ever set foot in the conference room. Or the real impact may occur in the meeting that happens after the meeting. The logistics of the meeting, though they may seem secondary, do matter.

Before you even send out the invitation for the meeting, think about who needs to be there. Is everyone essential? Jeff Bezos once said that the ideal team size for a meeting is a “two-pizza team.” If the group can't be fed with two pizzas, it's too big. (Of course, you can't account for big appetites, or these days, if any of your colleagues are gluten-free. But we do what we can.)

Next, choose the location and the medium for the meeting. Will everyone be there in person? Will everyone be remote? Or—the most difficult but the most common situation—will the participants be joining from a number of locations? ...