Break Away From the Podium to Connect with Your Audience

Like many top teaching institutions, Harvard Business School invests heavily in training faculty to become dynamic classroom presenters. Observing the best of them at work is like watching a master actor take command of the theater.

HBS professors rarely stand still, often sprinting from student to student to tease out insights on a case study. Their hands fly over a half-dozen blackboards that raise and lower for emphasis. There may be a podium in the room, but the teacher is not behind it for long.

Leaving the podium lectern behind, getting physically nearer your audience, is one key to making sure you're being listened to. In particular, you want to get within 12 feet of at least some of your audience, and the closer, the better.

Why 12 feet? It's biology. If someone is a dozen or more feet away from us, our automatic personal security system regards them as non threatening -- another way of saying they're far enough away not to be of interest, reports speechmeister Nick Morgan:

"Standing behind a podium means that you're almost guaranteed to be more than twelve feet from everyone. That means that no one is very interested in you, at the unconscious level," Morgan writes on HBR.org. "So one of the easiest ways to up the ante on your performance is to warm up the connections between you and your audience by leaving the podium and entering into carefully chosen audience member's personal space." Personal space is defined as between four and 12 feet.

"This choreography is a simple, easy way to enormously improve the connection you make with your audience, without even raising your voice."

Have a favorite speaking tip to engage your audience? Do share.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Lauren Murphy, CC 2.0