re:Showing Respect

I refer to your Thumbs Up Down page in the Spring 2005 issue of micenz.net. I’m the ‘lady with the plane to catch’ and thought I should respond to your comments about showing respect. As someone who heads a rapidly growing and highly respected membership association which offers world class conferences within New Zealand, I attended the recent CINZ conference in Queenstown hoping to learn from the industry ‘experts’. I naively thought if these people can’t get it right there can’t be much hope for the rest of us. While I found the event to be well organised from an event perspective, I was disappointed with the lack of any direction or notable reference to the overall conference theme of `Moving Mountains’ – it seemed to be an opportunity lost for an industry with acknowledged problems. I could live with this.

However the crunch came at the last session…

Having sat through two days of tacky, bad-taste jokes from an unprofessional MC who ‘ummed’ his way through the conference, I was appalled that the final session, which was absolutely excellent, was marred by the same MC not managing the question component at the end. The speaker had finished within the time allotted and had allowed time for questions. The audience seemed really keen to ask questions with many a raised hand showing, but was hardly given a chance as the conference host, who was sitting in the front row, decided to have an almost exclusive Q&A session of his own. Thiscould have been easily managed if the MC who was sitting beside the host had been facing the audience instead of sitting with his back to it. After about the seventh question in a row from the conference host (many had little relevance to the speaker’s presentation), having gone twenty minutes over time, and with still no facilitation or intervention from the MC... I decided I could suffer it no longer. I rose to my feet, politely thanked the speaker for a wonderful presentation and left to catch my plane. Had the session been professionally managed I would not have needed to take such action. You talk about showing respect. Great choice of words! When CINZ conferences start showing respect for their speakers and audiences I might consider risking attending another one, but in the meantime I’ll continue learning from the real experts – professional MCs and respected international events.

Yours sincerely,
Beverley Main
Chief Executive
Human Resources Institute of New Zealand