The Online Meetings Handbook: The New Rules for Personal and Team Success

By Gary Genard

Learn the 'New Rules' for personal and team success in virtual meetings and video conferences . . .

Are you struggling to boost your confidence, skills, and influence in online meetings? Here is the book you've been waiting for. Gary Genard, author of the award-winning Fearless Speaking and How to Give a Speech presents "the new rules" for speaking successfully in the virtual world.

A professional actor and one of America's leading speech coaches, Dr. Genard offers easy-to-learn skills for individuals and teams to excel in the virtual environment. The Online Meetings Handbook offers powerful and proven techniques. You'll learn how to:

• Look and sound at your best in online meetings.

• Make remote sessions and conferences more enjoyable and productive.

• Improve your personal and team presentation skills online.

• Effortlessly project greater power and presence on video.

• Use this "trick" to speak more clearly and concisely.

• Become more personable and likable in front of a webcam.

• Develop a warmer and more powerful voice.

• Calm your nerves prior to or at the start of a meeting.

• Boost your credibility and charisma.

• Help your team stay energized in the face of Zoom fatigue.

• Discover how your company can stay ahead of the competition.

• And much more!

Gary Genard can make anyone a more confident and dynamic communicator—and has been doing so for the past two decades. Now, he helps you and your team bring the same skills of effective performance to the virtual environment. Use this groundbreaking book to thrive in the virtual world, where online meetings are more important than ever.

Remote meetings and video conferences are a new vital part of our jobs these days. If you need better skills to stand out—if you want to reach the next level of credibility and influence—you need this book! We're all online now . . . and there's been no time to develop the 'virtual persona' you need to excel.

Until now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780979631498

Gary Genard

Gary Genard is one of America's leading speech coaches. As an actor and communications professor, he created The Genard Method to bring theater-based techniques to business leaders and other professionals with a need to influence audiences. Dr. Genard consults for corporations, governments, trade associations, the United Nations, both houses of Congress, and executives and leadership teams worldwide. He is the author of Fearless Speaking: Beat Your Anxiety, Build Your Confidence, Change Your Life and the weekly blog Speak for Success! In 2016 for the third consecutive year, Global Gurus ranked him as #11 on its list of the World's Top 30 Communication Professionals. You can find him at GenardMethod.com and follow him on Twitter @GaryGenard.

Book preview

Fatigue

Introduction

The Key to Succeeding in Online Meetings

How good are you at selling your ideas online?

What about selling yourself and your company?

When you speak professionally, you have just one task: to communicate effectively with listeners who matter. If you’re finding that’s more of a challenge in video conferences, you’re not alone.

The Online Meetings Handbook is a manual for connecting with and influencing others in the virtual environment.Whatever your job is, right now that goal is as important as anything else you achieve.

The question becomes, then: Are you and your team performing at 100% of your capabilities in online meetings? If not, this book is for you.

Your company has probably been using virtual technology for some time. After all, PictureTel Corp., known for its early video conferencing technology, produced significant sales starting in 1987.¹

But Covid-19 changed the rules, seemingly overnight—and we found ourselves on a rocket ship bound for the virtual universe. Interacting largely or completely online hasn’t only brought challenges and opportunities. It has actually changed the way we do business.

Suddenly, the world has been reduced to the size of a small screen. To command that screen and positively influence others, you need a new virtual persona. And there’s been no time or training to help you develop one.

That’s what this book is all about. It offers specific performance-based techniques you won’t find anywhere else, backed up by my two decades of helping people speak to influence. These approaches will a) help you look and sound at your virtual best, b) improve your presentation skills and on-camera effectiveness, and c) strengthen your overall online presence.

These approaches work equally well for you as an individual and for your team. They had better do so—because the need to succeed in online meetings is truly virtually the same for you and your colleagues and customers.

This is the way we communicate now.

Are you ready to speak at your best by learning the new rules?

1

Get Good at Online Meetings … Right Away!

Online business meetings have become a way of life. So, you’d better get good at video conferences … right away!

There has certainly been a learning curve in terms of the virtual, screen-based platforms we’re now performing on. Online meetings and conferences have become the lifeblood of many of our businesses. And that has resulted in scrambling, hits-and-misses for individuals and teams, and generally having to adjust our thinking and expectations.

But aside from technology, what about the performance aspects of all of this? That should be front and center in all of our minds in our efforts to become more effective online communicators.

Why Your Video Skills Matter Now

If the shutdowns we’re all experiencing had been short-lived, this wouldn’t be as important a matter as it actually is. We would have experienced some awkwardness in adapting on the fly, then returned to our normal way of doing business.

But that’s not what’s happening. It isn’t just team meetings and brainstorming sessions that are on our agendas now. It’s pitches and sales presentations, webinars, gaining buy-in for our plans within our organization, and disseminating ideas across companies and industries. It’s international panels and conferences. It is, in fact, all kinds of communication among small or large groups. The virtual stage is now a more essential space than ever. And we’d better learn how to use it to our advantage and those we speak to.

Interestingly, there’s actually a huge and unseen advantage to improving our skills in front of a webcam. It’s one that I think hasn’t been recognized sufficiently: when we rehearse now, we’re preparing in the actual venue we’ll be speaking in.

That we actually means you, and your next online meeting.

The venue now isn’t your company’s conference room or your customer’s facility. It’s your webcam and cyberspace. Rehearsing (and improving your skills) in your office or home never had that advantage before, since you’d eventually be speaking in another location. But now, any improvement in your online communication skills gets fed directly into the finished product: your performance in a virtual meeting. What you see and hear when you record your practice for a video conference, for instance, is exactly what your fellow participants will experience.

That’s why you need to get really good at it. Below is one way in particular you can do that.

How to Prepare and Practice an Online Presentation

One powerful tool you can use is the screen-recording feature of your platform. In Zoom (the software I use), screen recording is effortless; and it’s just as valuable as videotaping in face-to-face interactions. Come to think of it, face-to-face is an appropriate term for video-based meetings as well.

Here is how I suggest you put your talks together to go from good to great as an online presenter. Start speaking out loud as early in the process as possible. Don’t spend too much time in the literary realm by writing notes then editing and polishing them.

As soon as your purpose for this presentation is clear in your mind, start speaking what you might actually say, because the oral arena is where you’ll be strutting your stuff. Importantly, only write down what sounds right in terms of how you want to reach your listeners at this point.

By the time you’ve assembled your first draft, you’ll be very close to the speech you want to make to this audience. That’s a much better outcome than some rough notes that may or may not be on the mark when you actually start talking about them.

At this point, it’s time to practice and record yourself in front of your webcam. As I mentioned above, when you watch yourself afterwards you’ll see and hear exactly what everyone else will be experiencing. You couldn’t buy that level of accuracy before now unless you had planned for a video meeting in the first place.

Think of it as a silver lining in this age of enforced video conferencing.

2

The Best ‘Tips and Tricks’ for Starting a Meeting

How can you provide high energy if it’s your team’s sixth video conference of the day? Here are the best tips and tricks for starting an online meeting.

The show must go on.

How many times have you heard those words? According to the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, that’s a phrase used to convey the idea that an event or activity must continue even if there are problems or difficulties, with or without regard to actual show business.²

Video conferences