How to deal with angry audiences

What do you do if your audience is hostile?  How do you handle the emotions, the disagreements, the fear involved in standing before a sea of upturned, angry faces?

The first thing to think about is that you've got a real, if perilous, opportunity.  The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.  Well, you've got the chance to change that audience from furious to happy, and only you can do it. 

The second thing to get clear on is that you have to deal with the obvious.  You can't ignore your audience's feelings.  That's so important, I'll say it again:  you can't ignore your audience's feelings.  In fact, only by acknowledging your audience's feelings and doing it right away can you begin to bridge the gap between you and them.

So, you say, 'You're angry.  And you have a right to be.  We missed our targets.  But we're sorry and we're angry too and we're not going to miss them again.  Here's what we plan to do differently starting right now....'

That's what you have to do:  acknowledge and validate the audience's feelings and face head on the problem that caused them.  This is what President Bush failed to do again and again, with the Iraq War, with the scandals, with the legislative impasses, apparently because he couldn't bear to admit he made a mistake.  Now the pundits regularly refer to his as a 'failed presidency'. 

Keep that in mind when you're tempted to do what most bureaucracies (and all the lawyers) want to do when something goes wrong:  stonewall.  And yet the studies show that doctors, for example, who commununicate their intentions, hopes, and failures to patients are far less likely to get sued than those who stonewall.  Funny thing about that:  if the lawyers were giving good advice, they would tell their clients not to stonewall.  But the human urge to deny mistakes and problems is very powerful. 

If you're going to win over an angry audience, that's the urge you have to fight.  You've got to come clean.