Tales from the city: Presentation interrupted - Women's Agenda

Tales from the city: Presentation interrupted

The Power Playbook’s Rose Herceg reports from whichever city she finds herself in about the stories she sees in boardrooms, business lunches and dinners across Australia (and sometimes the world). In each post, Rose offers a ‘power play do-over’ – her advice on how a certain business situation could have been handled differently.

Thursday 2pm.

80 Bridge St, Sydney, Australia

Design company and a development company

A presentation to talk designs for a new city skyscraper.

Woman gets up to unveil the work (drum roll moment).

Before anyone can react, man questions wisdom of building a skyscraper in the first place.

He hijacks the entire meeting.

Temperature in the room drops 10 degrees.

Tension in the room awful.

The woman presenting retreats and sits down. Defeated.

(if the woman presenting could rewind the clock, and have this moment again..)

The woman presenting did not need to retreat. Instead, she could have noted the interruption, and returned the attention of the room to her presentation with a subtle but stern comment like: “That’s a valid opinion but this isn’t the meeting for that discussion. What you’re raising is the entire MasterPlan and that isn’t our brief.

We were briefed to come up with designs and here they are. So let’s focus on that”

An elegant way out. And very powerful too.

Next week we sit in on a fancy corporate dinner…

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