100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People

84. People Want You to Control the Room

At one point in my career I managed a team of ten instructors. They were all different, and all of them were excellent teachers. Two instructors, however, consistently got rave reviews—consistently better reviews than all the others. I began to wonder why. After observing most of the instructors, the quick answer came to me. The two especially good and popular instructors had the best control of the room. They projected authority and confidence, and they purposely took actions that established and maintained their control of the room. They were teaching multiple-day classes, and having control of the room was critical to the ongoing success of the class. The students (most of them designers and programmers) ...