It’s surprising how often people present in pairs on stage, or set up panels, or group shows of one kind or another.  It’s also surprising how often people miss some simple ways to make the experience more engaging and more delightful for the audience and themselves.  All too often, everyone just does their own thing – serial presentations, rather than taking advantage of the fun that adding more people offers.  Following are some quick tips for looking like pros who do joint presenting all the time. 

1. The audience cares about how you relate to one another, so show them.  As soon as you get more than one person on stage, you have the potential for drama, and the audience wants to know, how do these people feel about each other?  What’s their relationship?  Let’s see some banter, or at the very least, some by-talk.  Tell us what you two, or more, have in common, or do together, or feel about each other, and if at all possible, make it fun.  

2.  Introduce each other; don’t introduce yourselves.  Come on, everyone knows it’s hard to introduce yourself. It’s much, much easier for someone else to talk about how great you are.  And much more believable.  And yet how many panels have you seen where the host asks everyone to begin by introducing themselves?  Lazy, poor form, and hard work for the audience to get through.  If you’re leading a panel discussion, either introduce everyone, or get people to introduce each other.  Having to start by talking about oneself makes most people uncomfortable; why start out uncomfortably?

3.  Appoint an MC; preferably one who is comfortable playing the role.  The MC should think of herself as the audience’s advocate, helping them through the day, putting learning together, summarizing, analyzing, doing the hard work of making sense of what the audience is hearing.

4.  Look interested when a colleague is speaking.  This is a particular pet peeve of mine.  If someone else on your team is talking, pay attention.  Look interested.  In fact, look like it’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever heard.  It’s the height of arrogance and un-team-like behavior to do something distracting when another teammate is presenting.  Don’t do it.  Ever.  Look interested – and be ready to help if something goes wrong. 

5.  If you’re presenting something technical, or a demo, be prepared for things to go wrong, and get help.   Demos are the Devil’s children.  When they go well – a rare occurrence – they’re quite impressive.  But usually Satan is in the room and something goes wrong.  Then it’s important to have a Plan B, a co-presenter to talk through things, and support from the team.  The best approach is always to be real.  Don’t think of it as an error, but rather an opportunity.  Explain what’s going on, don’t try to hide it. 

6.  Rehearse the hand-offs and transitions.  Rehearse them again.  All too often, people rehearse their own stuff and forget about the handoffs.  And that’s where the problems and awkwardness therefore inevitably show up.  It’s harder than it looks!  Practice handoffs!  If you’re under-rehearsed, and you will be, then consider talking yourself and your audience through it out loud, rather than trying to make it look cool.  In other words, say something like, “We’re almost done here, and now Francis is going to come on stage and talk about next steps.”  That approach has the added benefit of cuing Francis in case he’s lost somewhere in the script.

7.  Don’t hog the limelight.  But do stand up to speak.  If you’re presenting as a team, give everyone a chance to shine.  Don’t let one superstar do all the talking.  That’s not teamwork.  But do stand up to speak; the tallest person in the room commands the attention and authority, so if everyone is sitting, it’s a simple way for the speaker to be the center of attention while he is speaking. 

Finally, mix things up.  Don’t do all the panels the same way or have an endless series of 20-minute talks just because you want to imitate the TEDx format.  Variety is extremely helpful for an audience to remember more of the information coming at them during the day because variety is interesting.  Always remember that sitting in a hotel meeting room is like a sensory deprivation chamber – typically there are no windows, there’s a background roar from the A/C system, the lighting is bad, and there’s little for an audience to do except sit.  Every way that you manage to change that experience up will be wonderful and invigorating for the audience.