BAK’s Guide for CEOs and their conferences

This is written for CEOs and other executive managers, but everyone's welcome to read on. 

Chances are, you as CEO have two roles at your company’s conference. You’re responsible for making sure your organization’s business plan goals are supported by every aspect of the conference, and you have an on-stage and off-stage leadership role to play.

It doesn’t matter if the conference is internal and brings together 200 department heads, your 400 most senior executives, all your sales reps or just those who met quota, your partners if you run a professional services firm, every employee in your company, your branch managers, or a carefully selected group of people you want to turn into internal viral marketers of your business strategy.

Nor does it matter if your conference is external/internal, with your top 150 customers' purchasing managers, or 300 CEOs from your biggest customers, or prospective employees and dozens of their university teachers, or a mix and match group of diversified stakeholders ranging from bankers to suppliers to regulators, with some customers and prospects tossed in.

Let’s assume you’ve hired me to run your conference, whether its internal only or internal-external, and given me the authority to be frank and open. Here’s what I’d tell you. First, a quick look at nine points, and then more depth for each of them is on another page.

1/ Put a professional communicator in charge – your conference is, overall, a corporate communications vehicle – a giant newsletter / brochure / web site / annual report with live people. Public Relations or Corporate Communications (or whatever you call us) management should be in charge. Various other departments can have their own sessions at the conference, of course.

2/ Craft your invitation list, making sure the people you need to attend to meet strategic goals are there. This may mean you’re personally working the phones to build up the audience.

3/ Show leadership in your conference participation – an amazing number of CEOs and executives don’t, seeming to hide during the conference.

4/ Rehearse – it’ll make you look better, it forces everyone else to rehearse, too, plus it will make life easier for everyone else when you finish your part on time.

5/ Extend the conference outside of the conference hall – there are probably lots of important people who could not attend, for many reasons, so make sure they hear about the highlights of the list of action items.

6/ Don’t go to dinner with your troops, unless…

Having the CEO at an informal dinner often stifles conversation, and intrudes on the free exchange of information. CEOs simply intimidate, even if they don’t think so.

But, if you plan this dinner to be an information exchange, you’re golden.

7/ Consciously decide how visible you should be, between opening and closing. This involves strategy and planning.

8/ Showcase your management team. You’ve built your team carefully, so show off the experts you’ve developed.

9/ Make sure your public relations chief follows BAK’s Guidelines for Conference Runners, too, or can explain why not.

Lets look at these in more detail

In the second and third paragraph above, I mention internal conferences, and external/internal, but I never say "external" by itself.

That’s because there is no such thing as an "external" conference. The people who run your conference, your insiders, are the most important people at that conference. They need to get ready, they need to know everything about your products and services, they need to know which clients are really important, which are OK, and even which you should get rid of because they cost you money. Your employees are the people you put in front of your external stakeholders, and if they are not perfect, you suffer. The act of running the conference is a management development tool, making them better employees.

1/ Put a professional communicator in charge
The best conferences I’ve ever been at were at Northern Telecom and Intergraph, and in all cases, there was public relations broad-based communications expertise overseeing everything. Sometimes PR had formal control. Other times, it was informal, but with veto power. But PR was always there, directing.

Public relations people are the communicators in your firm with the broadest knowledge. Put them in charge, and make "discipline" managers, the vice-presidents of Marketing, Sales, Product Development, Operations and so in, responsible for the strategy and the accuracy of the content of their portion of the conference. But they need to get their work check marked by professionals communicators before they go on-stage.

TRUE STORY
Northern Telecom, announcing The Digital World at Walt Disney World in Florida. Knock down fight between PR and Marketing upper vice-presidents over who was in charge. We won. Director level pr and marketing management made peace, marketing concentrated on running demos and creating technical and management presentations, working flat out up to curtain raising, and would not have had the time to organize meals, entertainment, media relations, and even travel arrangements.

They couldn’t have pulled it off, but PR could, and did.

2/ Craft your invitation list
Ask yourself who are the 20, or 12, or 65 people who, if they obtained information at your conference, could make the biggest changes to their behaviour, who could take the most decide actions, to your benefit. Then make sure these people attend your conference.

• you’re personally working the phones to build up the audience
• you write personalized letters of invitation
• you call the bosses of the people you want to attend, asking them to extend their approval for the time and the expenses
• you talk to your sales reps, and your regional managers, to make sure you’re inviting people from a distance
• you create a special VIP event for the most important attendees. "Dear Jim. I’d like to invite you to a private breakfast I’m having for the CEOs and presidents of about a dozen of our biggest customers at 7:30, before the opening of our annual Actions 2001 conference."
• You review the invitation list, before it goes out, stroking off troublemakers and adding winners.

TRUE STORY
Acklands Limited was in trouble and had a new President, several new senior managers, and me. We ran conferences in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa tied to our own buying trade show (manufacturers put on displays for our store managers and purchasing agents). We invited the CEOS of our biggest customers and suppliers, our bankers, our nearest members of the board of directors, and the local mayor, member of theprovincialgovernment,andfederal elected politician, all to make the point that we were strong, powerful, and going to survive.

3/ Show leadership
Employees, customers, shareholders, and prospects are willing to give up their time to your conference only if they feel they are going to get value, and they are important to you. At one end of the spectrum, they can feel insulted if you don’t show up. At the other end of the spectrum, they crave the demonstration of leadership that will help reassure them in their dealings with your organization.

This means you must be the first person, and the last person, on stage. You are the leader, so lead.

What if you hate this? Learn three minutes of lines, go out on the stage at the very first, and say about 100 words thanking outsiders for attending and pointing out the importance of insiders attending, and then say "We’re here today to talk about change. So I’m pleased to introduce Bill Snodgrass, or executive vice-president of corporate planning, our ‘King "of Change,’ and your master of ceremonies for the next two days.

TRUE STORIES
CNCP Telecommunications
We had a very shy president, and a very gregarious executive vp. The events, held in several cities, were internal town hall meetings, where employees got to ask prewritten questions about the past, present and future of the company.

The president thanked people for coming (he actually thought only a few employees would want to hear his comments) and then sat on a chair on stage, while the exec. vp opened the envelope and read out the questions. The president was the only one who could answer, but we were able to minimize his exposure, while getting the questions answered.

Manufacturing company
CEO is scared silly of standing in front of his employees. He's shaken up the company, fired a lot of people, and knows that he's actively disliked by many. Yet he knows he needs a sales meeting of staff and distributors, so he hires a professional comedian to act as master of ceremonies. The comedian manages to keep the conference upbeat, and by making fun of the CEO, humanizes him, too. At the closing reception, employees come up to the CEO and congratulate him on the quality of the meeting.

4/ Rehearse
Most of us have been at some speech, presentation or address where the speaker had not rehearsed, and we cringed as we listened to the flubs and flaws. There’s no benefit in making your audience embarrassed for you.

More positively, rehearsing will make you look more professional, and you’ll avoid stumbling

When you rehearse, especially along with everyone else in a mandatory "everyone attends the run-through" kind of event, it forces everyone else to rehearse, too, making everyone’s presentation better.

Rehearsing sets up the conference timing. At a conference, food service runs like clockwork, and it doesn’t help if the CEO eats up 15 or 20 minutes of the next speaker’s time, throwing off everyone else's eating of lunch. Reheasing sets up your timing, too. The pace, the delivery, the pause before a punch line, only work if your material is practised and perfect. Rehersing is good enough for comedians and actors who are on stage every day, so it should be good enough for executives, too.

Rehearsing copes with stumbles, too. Too many stumbles and the content of what you say takes second place to the sloppy delivery. And, when you take the conference out of the room via videotape to people unable to attend, those stutters, pauses, ums and ahs, stand out even more.

TRUE STORIES
Un-named company
Here’s a paraphrase from the start of an executive vice-president’s own departmental presentation, about 11:30 one morning. (His name is beside "11:00" on the printed program) "Last year we had a problem with timing, when the president’s remarks at the end of the morning ran overtime, into lunch and throwing off the afternoon schedule. We moved him to the opening slot this morning, but it didn’t fix the problem. Therefore, the question and answer session scheduled for after my talk will be moved to tomorrow afternoon."

It wouldn’t have happened if the president had rehearsed. The question and answer period is often the most important part of the program.

5/ Extend the conference out of the room
I’ve never seen a conference where even a simple majority of the stakeholders who could take actions to the benefit of the organization were actually in the room.

For internal conferences, there are the families of the delegates who need to be enthusiastic and supportive of the breadwinners’ business involvement.

If you’ve got 800 people in the audience who could recommend the purchase of your products, chances are there’s another 1600 back at their offices who have to be convinced to approve the purchase orders.

What if you’re announcing new products and there are 87,000 current happy customers using your company’s products, and likely to buy something new from you? They’re not in the room, are they? But the conference is important to them. Steve Jobs at Apple is one of the best at using conferences to launch products, but there are other good examples of extending the reach.

One communications manager I know is creating a video of the highlights of his company’s national management meeting presentations, cutting six hours of tape down to 15 minutes. Then department managers will use this video to explain to their managers and staff the goals, plans, and programs of the company for the next year.

TRUE STORY
International Association of Business Communicators
This group gave me a media pass for its $1800 Next Wave conference, gambling that I’d write good things about the conference in BAK’s Report and on the Compuserve Public Relations and Marketing Forum. I liked much about the conference, and many more than the 200 conference attendees can read about it at the Next Wave page.

6/ Don’t go to dinner with your troops -- unless you plan it
Poorly managed conferences end up with groups standing around at the end of the day, trying to figure out what to do about dinner. If you, as CEO, join in, three things will happen.

You'll look unprepared, and your smart employees will be wondering why you are not better organized, out with your best clients.

You’ll stifle conversation and the exchange of information, which is, in fact, the main benefit of attending conferences. But they’ll hold their tongues, out of fear, or respect, or both.

And you’ll generally put a wet blanket on the dinner.

On the other hand, if you plan this right, it’s a wonderful chance to honor winners (however you define winners -- big customers, top reps, managers from far away, bankers who finance your firm, ...) by inviting them to dinner with you. It is a prime opportunity to see the interplay between your managers and other stakeholders when you, for instance, ask your ten top sales reps to each bring a key client to dinner.

When the conference is away from head office, it’s a great opportunity to make your field staff feel important and much less isolated, by inviting them, perhaps with spouses, to dinner. Ask them to pick the place, and you are even better off.

TRUE STORIES
I remember feeling sorry for a dozen or so people at a couple of pushed-together tables in a Pat & Mario’s, where the president sat at the end of the table, his suit jacket hanging on the back of his chair, shouting stories and quips down the table at his employees.

At Northern Telecom in my day, every conference included a carefully planned and coordinated dinner with a mix of employees, customers and other stakeholders, based on the idea that the business day was not over until mid-evening.

7/ Consciously decide how visible you should be
You need to assess how your staff and the rest of your stakeholders think of you, and use these opinions to determine how much you participate between opening and closing the conference. This involves strategy and planning. Some CEOs are scary, they put a damper on discussion, and they make everyone nervous. Other CEOs pull the best out of people, set the standard as innovators and leaders and idea generators, pulling everyone else up to ever higher levels of performance. If you make your people nervous, stay in the background. If you make everyone think more freely, be in the thick of things. If you are a new CEO, think about this for a while. If you are an outsider learning the industry, stay in the background except for your keynote address. If you know your field, be out there.

TRUE STORY
An international association held a conference where the chairman of the association spoke for under five minutes, total, before the entire audience, at breakfast the first day. Other than this, he also presented, just like any other speaker, to about a quarter of the delegates, at one of the breakout sessions. In between he was invisible, and he never gacve a 'state of the union" talk, even though most of the audience looked up to him as chairman of their association.

And at the end, he was invisible, partly because there was no ending to the conference. It just dribbled off, with delegates asking "Is there a lunch? "I don't think so, let me check." "No, there's nothing on the program…"

8/ Showcase your management team
You’ve built this team carefully, so show off the experts you’ve developed. According to my First Principles of Corporate Communications, (Read them here) senior and upper middle management are your most important employee communications audience. So tell them they are important, by putting them onstage. And show the people who report to these executives that their departments full of employees are important enough to be led by executives qualified to represent the firm in front of conference audiences.

And finally, show the outside stakeholders -- shareholders, customers, prospect, suppliers, et al -- that your company has depth, and everyone does not have to come to you for a decision.

TRUE STORY
At Acklands, during our turnaround, we discovered a number of long term managers who were actually pretty good, but had been held down for too long. By offering them a chance to go on stage and promote their parts of the company to all the sales managers and reps, we were able to demonstrate:

• good employees had no need to fear getting fired
• new senior management appreciated institutional memory
• hard work does get rewarded
• to our on-stage employees that it was time to get seriously down to work, and that we trusted them to do a good job.

9/ Make sure your public relations chief follows BAK’s Guidelines for Conference Runners
You as CEO are responsible for strategy, but tactics matter, too. My guidelines for the Public Relations chiefs with overall responsibility for the conference – the "producers and directors" in movie terms -- have tactics they need to employ to make the conference sing. Things like Buzz Central. It’s explained in the PR Chiefs guidelines I'll be producing shortly.

BAK's Report - Brian A. Kilgore, Toronto, Canada  416 - 879 - 5771
BrianKilgore@BrianKilgore.com