Welcome to the second video in the series of Powerful Panels: How to Moderate a Lively
and Informative Panel Discussion.
We're on the second video and today's topic is "What does a panel moderator do?"
It's a good question because you're being asked to moderate a panel, so let's start
there.
A panel moderator, your primary job is to help the audience get their needs met through
this panel format, whatever panel format you decide, but it's all about the audience and
when you keep that in mind as a panel moderator, you're going to be wildly successful regardless
what happens.
As long as you keep that in mind, you have a good, solid format and you follow that format.
The panel moderator has lots of different roles, different hats that you wear and you
need to be pretty good at multitasking all of these different roles that you're carrying
so that the audience gets their needs met through this format.
First and foremost, you are the champion for the audience.
You've got a good format, you've got good panelists, you're moderating the discussion-
it all needs to serve the audience.
Yes, you do want to make your panelists looks brilliant.
You don't want anybody to walk away feeling bad or feeling discouraged or looking bad,
but really, it's not the primary objective.
The primary objective is to serve the audience and when your audience's needs are not being
met, you need to step in.
So, you're the champion for the audience and usually you have a pretty good feel for that
because you've got this little voice in the back of your head going, "I'm not sure that
everybody's understanding this point," or "I'm not sure this is contributing to the
overall objective," and that's when you need to intervene on behalf of the audience.
You're also the facilitator.
You've designed an agenda.
You're guiding the process.
You are not the sage on the stage.
It is not about you looking brilliant.
It's about guiding the process, and to do that, you're a facilitator, you're a timekeeper.
you're keeping track of time because you do want to start on time but most importantly
you want to end on time.
You want to honor the panelists, you want to honor the audience, you want to make sure
that the audience gets their needs met-- that is a facilitator's point of view.
You're also a little bit of an instigator.
Panels that have complete agreement, you kind of get the dashboard dog effect, you know
those little bobble heads that are on the dashboard and they're not very interesting?
So, you need to be a little bit of an instigator and know what the issues are, know what the
hot buttons are, make sure that the panelists have differing points of view at the beginning.
So, there's a little bit of content curation that you need to do.
You need to be a little bit knowledgeable about the topic but frankly, it becomes a
little distracting if you know too much about the topic because then you're going to want
to weigh in and then who's facilitating the panel?
There has to be a little bit of a balance but you need to spice it up a little bit if
it's not getting spicy on its own.
You also are providing the energizer role.
Keeping it brisk and moving and fast paced and if you have a sense of humor, which hopefully
you do, you use your sense of humor to keep the energy up, up, up, up for 60, 90 minutes.
Make sure that there's lots of value, lots of content, lots of takeaways for the audience,
keeping it energizing and interesting.
You're also a logistician.
You are not the meeting planner and you are not the AV person, but you coordinate a lot
of those things and if there isn't a meeting planner or there isn't an AV person or nobody's
really paying attention to the room set, or some of the characteristics that make sure
that the audience is comfortable as well as the panelists are comfortable, you're comfortable,
people can hear you, people can hear the panelists, people can hear the fellow audience members,
that's all logistics and somebody needs to pay attention to those things.
That would be you.
You don't have to do it all, but you do need to be a bit of a logistician.
And lastly, as a panel moderator you really need to be neutral and objective.
Yes, you might have a lot of knowledge about the subject and maybe the meeting chair who
hired you, who brought you on, who asked you to moderate it was thinking, "Oh, well Kristin
knows a lot about this subject.
We'll have her moderate the panel."
They really don't want to hear from you.
They want to hear from the panel of experts, the panel of practitioners and they need you
to be neutral and objective because when you are not, then you might jump into the water
along with them.
You can contribute content, but contribute content as a fallback if there isn't anything
else being mentioned.
So, it's a real important point to keep in mind as you are wearing your moderator hat.
You've got a lot of different roles: you're the champion for the audience, you're the
facilitator, the timekeeper, the instigator, the energizer, the logistician.
You're doing an awful lot of stuff.
You don't need to be contributing content if you have fabulous, fabulous panelists and
a great process that you're following.
So, that's what a panel moderator does.
You help the audience get their needs met through the panel format, multitasking all
of these different roles.
That's video two.
I hope you enjoyed it and looking forward to video three which is the first step of
the process, which is about clarifying the starting conditions.
See you on the other side.