October 19, 2006 :: The sin of low expectations

Earlier this week, we had an offsite meeting at work. The entire department (about 30-40 people) was in a cramped up meeting room for a day and a half, enduring Powerpoint presentations so dry they would make your skin peel. As you can imagine, I had a hard time staying focused during this marathon of boredom. So when we had the chance to break off into small teams and do a team exercise, I jumped on it. We were in teams of five, and each team was required to have a presenter, a scribe and a timekeeper - standard meeting management theory. I volunteered to be the presenter, because I figured that getting up and talking, even for 5 minutes, would be more interesting than listening to someone else talk.

Given some written goals, our team's job was to come up with strategies to achieve them and some metrics to measure progress; standard corporate stuff. So it's not like I had a fascinating topic to discuss. But I got up, did my talk-through, and went about my business.

I must have left some kind of impression on my co-workers (and I use the term lightly, since I'm a sub-contractor and could be gone at any time). A steady stream of people came up to me later that day and the next day to tell me how impressed they were with my presentation and my public speaking ability. I have taken a public speaking class, but I am by no means any kind of orator. But I guess the bar is low around here. You would have thought I was the next Winston Churchill or something.

Now I have to figure out how to turn this to my advantage. Of course, my project manager left before any of these people made these comments, but I am hoping it will filter around to him at some point. My review is ongoing as we speak, so hopefully this will play well into a bonus or something, and not just more speaking assignments.

posted by Rainmayun at 2:20 PM -