A Generous Moderator

I think I’m a good moderator and I moderate a lot. If there’s not a designated moderator, I always volunteer because I think a good panel is always made better by a good moderator and a bad panel can be made good with a good moderator. A disastrous panel can only be avoided by a moderator who takes charge. I’ve seen bad and disastrous panels all too often as a member of the audience, and that’s bad enough. Being on the panel when it all goes wrong is more painful than almost anything I can describe.

This year, as a moderator myself and as someone moderated by others, I have been pondering the importance of generosity and flexibility in a moderator. Preparation seems an obvious good trait in a moderator. It’s good if the moderator remembers to write some questions down ahead of time, even better if she remembers to send them out to the people on the panel. Reading books of people on the panel so you know where they’re coming from is a third step that can be really useful, but takes a lot of time. I think this ends up helping with a lot of the misunderstanding that can happen on panels if the participants don’t know each other and make assumptions about experience or inexperience.

Flexibility and generosity are different from preparation, however, and I’m not sure how easily these skills are taught. I think Ellen Degeneres is a great talk show host because she has both of these qualities. You know when you go on her show that if she makes fun of you, it will be gently and kindly. You know that if you do something out of the blue, she will be able to roll with it, and won’t be stuck looking at her list of questions with her mouth wide open. Think of Ellen when you imagine a really good moderator.

A generous moderator will allow another member of the panel to ask a question if it works within the board guidelines of the panel. A generous moderator can rephrase questions from the audience in such a way that they are easier to answer and make more sense. A generous moderator compliments all of the panelists for their answers and feels no need to make insignificant corrections.

A flexible moderator can go with the flow and throw out all of the questions she painstakingly wrote down weeks before. A flexible moderator can figure out what to do when someone on the panel has been put on the panel for the wrong reason or is suffering some kind of mental breakdown on the panel itself. A flexible moderator can feel the audience’s response to certain comments, and steer the panel in a direction that the audience is more interested in than perhaps what was expected. A flexible moderator knows when someone has hit the motherlode in an answer and can let everyone else catch their breath as they process this response.