Question

Gloria Zhang is 29 years old and is a Project Manager in Refits & Refurbishments, a local company based in Singapore. The company specialises in leasing and renovating office and shop space to corporate and retail clients.

One of her clients is DSB Banking, a German Bank, which is opening its first office and branch in Singapore in three months. The bank’s main activities are in the areas of Foreign Exchange and Money Market Trading and the provision of Investment Services and advice to high net-worth clients. DSB has agreed to lease two floors in a new prestigious office tower. Gloria has been assigned to help the bank renovate the space.

Gloria had her first meeting with the client yesterday from 2pm to 3pm. The meeting was arranged a week ago and the client specifically mentioned that they were busy and could afford only one hour for the meeting.

Gloria noted the client’s request but was busy the whole week and did not give much thought to the meeting. The client was expecting her to send them an agenda which she did not do.

Nonetheless, three representatives from DSB Banking, attended the meeting:

• Mr. Klaus Schmidt, 45 years old, a German who would be the CEO for the Singapore Operations
• Mr. Kenneth Wong, 40 years old, Senior Manager of Client Liaison Services in Germany
• Mr Raymond Li, 33 years old, Senior Manager of Procurement in Germany

This is Gloria’s first big project for a large international bank. She was nervous before the meeting and the introductions were awkward. Gloria just said “Hello” to them and did not shake their hands. Mr Klaus went up to Gloria, shook her hand and gave her a warm hug. Gloria shrugged at this gesture because she was not used to it.

They took a seat and Mr Klaus asked for the plan for the meeting. Gloria told him there was no specific plan. She said she would start with a presentation of the plans and ideas that her department had for the DSB renovation, in terms of layout, furniture, decor, associated costings and the timeline proposed for the project. Mr Klaus nodded his head and Gloria started her presentation.

Gloria’s presentation did not go well. During the presentation, Gloria kept reading from her slides and stumbled many times during the presentation. She did not maintain eye contact with the audience.   Halfway through the presentation, her laptop crashed. She quickly got her colleague to set up another laptop for her. She searched frantically for her USB stick and remembered that she had left it at home in the rush. She suggested that her client take a five-minute break while she got things sorted out. Her colleague helped her load an earlier draft version of the presentation, which included a different decor which had been rejected by the client before.

During the presentation, the client showed a lot of negative nonverbal communication which Gloria did not notice as she was so preoccupied with getting her act together. Both Kenneth and Mr. Schmidt were shaking their heads, frowning, and looking at each other in a puzzled way and their watches from time to time, Raymond had his arms crossed, was leaning back in his chair, and yawned at least three times.   They were all silently saying, ‘what is going on here!’

Added to these issues associated with negative nonverbal communication, Gloria’s mobile phone, which had a cheesy pop tune as its ring tone, rang halfway through the second part of the presentation, and the air conditioning in the room was turned on too high making the room very uncomfortable. Two members of the office team had a short-heated argument right outside the door to the meeting room that was clearly audible inside the room and a major distraction.

Before Gloria could finish her presentation, her colleague walked into the meeting room to ask her to sign an invoice for another client. Kenneth started tapping his foot on the ground. He told Gloria that they had another meeting to attend and asked her to move on to the project costing, the proposed timeline and to show them the draft contract. The draft version of the presentation which Gloria was using did not have the costings and proposed timeline. Gloria had also not prepared the draft contract. As soon as Gloria signalled that she had finished and asked if anyone had any questions, Kenneth stood up and said angrily, ‘Sorry Gloria but Mr. Schmidt and I need to rush off to another meeting’. They left the room almost instantly.

Gloria sat down in one of the empty chairs, hunched over the boardroom table, put her face in her open palms and sobbed ‘what a disaster, what have I done’.

Q3. Gloria was unable to maintain her audience’s attention during the presentation. Identify FOUR reasons for this. For each reason identified, suggest what Gloria could have done to better engage her audience.

Answer 1

Gloria missed out on this golden opportunity to entice some potential clients due to dearth in effective communication. Let's look at some of them, and also the ways in which she could've avoided the same:

• Reading from the slides: When you're presenting in front of your clients, you must hardly look at the presentation. And if at all you are, it should be for referring key points and not reading out the slides. The clients could've just read it, but where Gloria went wrong was in the interpretation part. Like, interpreting what's in the slide rather than reading the same which can be done by anyone. When she just read, the listeners get bored after a point of time and they lose attentiveness which exactly happened in this case.
• Lack of eye contact:  A strong eye contact means that the presenter is confident and the natural atmosphere of the room changes.Eye contact sets a precedent for an intuitive presentation with beaming confidence. Clients would have been impressed by her demeanor, and this has a lot of say in their choice of accepting the proposal or not. A better engagement would have been possible by eye contact, if not continuous, partial eye contact would have been welcome too. Constantly avoiding eye contact exposes that Gloria is timid.
• Making the clients wait: DSB authorities have already mentioned regarding their tight schedule for the day, so it was Gloria's burden to ensure that the presentation draft, laptop, USB, etc should have been ready well in advance, leaving out no time to waste. Gloria should've avoided the halt, rather she could've had a casual business talk with the clients while her colleague was fixing the laptop. In this way, Gloria would have had their attention as well, and the time passing wouldn't have been felt.
• Let them ask questions after every alternative slide: When Gloria knows that things are going down, she should've immediately improvised and opened up for questions even though there was no need for one. This should've been done just to ignite the engagement in the room, and suck out the mundane ambience present. Tapping on the floor is a body gesture suggesting us a lack of engagement from Kenneth.

Hope this helps. Do hit the thumbs up. Cheers!