Best Speakers for a Room That's Had a Hard Year
A relentlessly upbeat session in front of people who watched colleagues leave in March will land as management not paying attention. Here's what works instead.
Best Speakers for a Room That's Had a Hard Year
If your organisation has been through redundancies, a restructure, a bad set of numbers or a genuinely rough twelve months, the speaker booking gets harder. Not because the options shrink, but because the wrong choice does real damage. A relentlessly upbeat motivational session in front of people who watched colleagues walk out in March will land as management not paying attention.
Here's what tends to work.
Start by naming what happened
Not from the stage necessarily, but definitely in the brief. The single most common mistake is booking a good speaker and telling them nothing, then hoping they read the room on the day.
Tell them what happened, how recently, and whether people are still angry about it. Good speakers use that to adjust everything: their opening, their examples, what they leave out. It stays confidential and it is the most useful thing you can give them.
Four types that work
Someone who has actually been through something. Not a motivational story, a real one. Audiences can tell the difference immediately, and a speaker who has genuinely lost something has permission to talk about recovery that a career motivator does not. Sam Bloom and Janine Shepherd both speak from serious injury and a long rebuild rather than from a framework. Rabia Siddique is the choice when the hard year involved institutional failure rather than misfortune, having taken action against her own army after a hostage rescue in Basra.
A coach or performance person. They talk about rebuilding after a loss as a technical problem rather than an emotional one. For a room that is tired of being told how to feel, that shift is a relief. Their material is about what you do next week, not how you should be feeling now. Wayne Bennett has spent four decades rebuilding sides after bad seasons. Sir Steve Hansen and Gilbert Enoka both worked inside a system that was retained after a public failure and won the next World Cup, which is a governance story as much as a sporting one.
A facilitator instead of a keynote. Sometimes the room needs to talk more than it needs to listen. If people have not had a chance to say anything about the year, an hour of facilitated conversation beats an hour of anyone on a stage. James O'Loghlin is the safe pair of hands here, and worth asking about Scott Dutton if there is unresolved conflict in the room, or Georgia Murch if the problem is that nobody has been telling anybody the truth.
Someone genuinely funny. Counterintuitive, but a good comedian who has been briefed properly gives people permission to laugh in a year where it has felt inappropriate. The key word is briefed. Comedy about the exact thing that hurt is a disaster. Ask us for the comedians who work corporate rooms regularly rather than picking from a festival lineup, because the calibration is completely different.
Where to put them
Not right after the bad news. If your agenda includes an operational update or a strategy reset that touches on the difficult stuff, put some distance between that and the speaker. Ten minutes and a coffee is not enough distance.
Closing usually beats opening for this kind of room. It sends people out with something rather than asking them to be receptive first thing.
One thing to decide before the day
Who catches whatever the session brings up. A good speaker on a hard year will produce conversations afterwards, and if nobody is ready for them, you have opened something and walked away.
Book someone who will acknowledge the year rather than talk over it. Brief them honestly. Then decide what happens on Monday.
