Town Hall Meeting - Essential Elements of the Live Event
The objective of a Town Hall Meeting is to solicit audience input in a way that promotes audience connection with, and confidence in, the leader's ability to cohesively tie that input into a meaningful result. Enabling audience members to connect with leaders and to develop confidence in them is a direct function of the way the meeting itself is organized and managed. There five critical elements that are essential to doing this.
Effective Town Hall Meetings all share 5 Essential Elements that create the structure for successful, personal and effective interaction. These elements must be well understood and well rehearsed by the leaders of the meeting to ensure lively interaction in a way that assures attendees feel their contribution is wanted, that it is valued, and that they have been heard.
Essential Element #1 - Welcoming and inviting interaction
Making it easy for audience members to ask questions and to do so in a way that is unintimidating is essential in a Town Hall Meeting. While nearly all audience members will have opinions or information they could present to the leaders of a meeting, only a few will develop the confidence they need to actually provide it. An essential element of success is to offer modes of communication that allow even the most timid of audience members to offer ideas.
Essential Element #2 - Thoughtful rather than scripted interaction
While it is important for leaders to consider the topics of a Town Hall Meeting prior to its start and to develop a direction for a discussion, it is equally important for leaders to be able to accept and value input provided by the audience in the meeting itself. This essential element of a Town Hall Meeting is best done in steps:
- Listening to questions or comments
- Pausing and contemplating them; asking clarifying questions
- Repeating the question in a way that puts it in the context of the meeting
- Providing a connection to the question/comment in a response that aligns with the overall direction and message the leader wants to convey.
Essential Element #3 - Reflective and inclusive communication
A Town Hall Meeting is an invitation to communicate and the attendees often value the interaction of other attendees as much as remarks made by the meeting leaders.
The manner in which a leader handles audience interaction can serve either to amplify the audience message or the leader's message. Choosing how to reply to audience input determines this outcome.
By reflecting back to the audience the input a Town Hall leader receives, the leader makes the input partially their own. This is a powerful tool because when reflecting input by rephrasing it and restating it, a leader can include themselves and other audience members in the line of thinking. For example, if an audience member makes statements about being concerned with losing a job, a leader can reflect this concern by including others in the audience and perhaps themselves in the same concern. In doing so, the leader sets the stage for additional interaction on the topic that the leader can then direct.
Essential Element #4 - Connections and Synergy
Town Hall Meetings need a leader to assert the direction of the meeting. This means a leader must maintain the direction of the communication. For example, if improving efficiency and innovation is a key direction the leader wants to follow, then when taking comments and audience input, the leader must endeavor to tie each interaction with this direction.
It is the leader's role to maintain direction and create a sense of synergy from audience comments. Absent the leader's direction and aggregation of comments, a Town Hall Meeting will diverge into multiple directions and de-energize the audience. But, a leader that can aggregate and emphasize point after point will find an energy develop within the audience for the direction the leader sets.
A leader can maintain directional movement in the Town Hall by asking for additional comments along a track of thinking. "Do we have any more comments or ideas about how we can foster innovation?" is a way of setting the stage for aggregating ideas on this topic, for example. Alternatively, if an audience member gets off a track a leader wants follow, the leader, after thoughtfully listening to the comment, should define whether the comment might be better addressed in a separate manner (for example in a tweet, a website blog posting, or in a separate forum altogether). This then frees the leader to resume the direction of the discussion.
In all cases, however, a leader must either thoughtfully consider the audience comments and then aggregate them into the direction of discussion or define the comment as outside the scope of discussion. In this way, a leader maintains the meeting control and direction of conversation.
Essential Element #5 - Cohesion of Ideas
Many leaders consider this Essential Element a "wrap-up" task, which is exactly wrong. Cohesively connecting and aggregating ideas, questions and comments should take place from the very beginning of a Town Hall Meeting. Subtle direction at the start should become more defined when audience input is added. Note that direction does not mean conclusion. Starting a Town Hall Meeting with conclusions in mind is also wrong and can become a disaster. Instead, the conclusions come from the meeting as part of the process of aggregating and cohesively linking audience input. Cohesion is a powerful and motivating force and one that generally delights an audience.
Audience members at a Town Hall Meeting are rewarded by the experience of attending when their comments, thoughts and questions are brought together by the meeting leader into one or more cohesive solutions or ideas. This is the leader's responsibility as the host. Importantly, it represents an opportunity for the leader to create a positive audience response to the meeting solutions and ideas, which in-turn reflect well upon the leader.
When audience members leave a Town Hall Meeting feeling their opinions were heard and the leader or leaders of the meeting established directions, ideas and solutions that cohesively tie to those opinions, the Town Hall Meeting is a success.
Essential Element #6 - Creating Energy
The result of a Town Hall Meeting when each of the first Five Essential Elements are properly integrated into the meeting is Energy. This is the sixth Essential Element of a Great Town Hall Meeting. Energy creates a sense of kinetic movement, commitment, and personal involvement with the meeting content and its leader or leaders. Energy creates calls to action.
Beginning your plan for a Town Hall Meeting with the end in mind is key. So, when you begin planning your meeting, whether it is Virtual or In-Person, you should begin with the idea of how to create energy. When you start this way, you are beginning with the idea of creating calls to action which take Energy to accomplish. The enduring connection with the meeting and its content is what a Town Hall Meeting is all about and it can be summed up in the 6th Essential Element of a Great Town Hall Meeting - Energy.
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