How to Win Over a Room That Doesn’t Want to Believe You
From my conversation with Ivan Dabić on the CrockPit Podcast
Years ago, I walked into a conference room to present a behavioral assessment to ten IT professionals, and I could sense the tension before I said a single word.
At the time, I was the Director of Training and Development at Ocean Reef Club, a private community in South Florida with about 1,200 employees across 67 departments. Part of my job was running a behavioral assessment that I am certified in to help departments hire well and work through team dynamics. It is called the Predictive Index, or PI for short, and it is a fascinating tool. It was developed in the 1950s by a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ aviation psychology program, which had needed small teams that could work together extremely well under pressure. You answer two deceptively simple questions built from a list of adjectives and out comes a mapping of your drives across dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality.
When I ran the PI for the sales team, they were all in from the first minute. Of course they were! It’s a tool that tells people about people, and salespeople are people people. Easy room.
The IT team was a different story. Ten individuals, polite, quiet, not talking among themselves, all wearing the same skeptical expression. They had just taken a five-minute test, and now here comes a guy from HR to tell them everything about themselves and how they should work together.
You can imagine how that landed.
The questions they asked were pure gold.
Once I started presenting, they weren’t leaning in. They weren’t nodding. They were analyzing everything. My words, my tells, whether I was exaggerating anything. And then the questions came:
How can two questions produce all of this data? How much of this is rooted in scientific research? How long has this tool been around? How many studies exist? Can you provide case studies?
Not one of those questions was hostile. Every single one was a request for data.
That’s the thing about analytical audiences that many presenters overlook. These are specialists. These are craftsmen. These are people whose entire job is to go in and build things or break them apart and rebuild them. It’s not that they distrust you personally. They distrust claims that haven’t been opened up in front of them. And when analytical audiences signal that kind of distrust, most presenters make one of two mistakes: they dumb the material down, which is insulting, or they push harder on enthusiasm, which reads as salesmanship and makes everything worse.
There’s a third option: give them everything under the hood.
What I actually did.
I set aside my normal flow and spent the first thirty minutes on the tool itself. The research behind it. The history. The methodology. What it measures, how it should be used, and where its limits are.
I told them plainly: completing this assessment does not put you in a box. You are not four dots on a piece of paper. This is a layer. It’s one piece of you, and it’s useful because it helps you identify part of your style, recognize the styles of the people around you, and meet each other in the middle.
Naming the limits of your own tool feels risky, but with an analytical audience, admitting what your model can’t do is precisely what earns you the right to talk about what it can do. A claim with boundaries is a claim they can trust. A claim without boundaries is just marketing.
The honest result (and why it was still a win).
Did I convert the whole room? No. By the end of the day, I’d say about half of them were still skeptical, and honestly, I was impressed with my fifty percent. It took follow-up sessions over the next few weeks to really drive things home.
But the big win for me in that first session was that from the halfway point of the session on, every single person in that room was open enough and willing enough to play along. They engaged with each other. They identified each other’s communication styles such as who leads, who follows, who’s precise, who’s patient, and who is definitely not patient. We got to the team dynamics, which was the entire point of the session.
As a presenter, remember that with a skeptical, analytical audience the goal is not applause. The goal is participation. You don’t need the room to love your framework by lunchtime. You need them to test it because analytical people who have stress-tested something themselves hold onto it far longer than people who cheered for it on day one.
If this is your room every week.
Maybe you present to engineers, developers, analysts, or scientists regularly. Maybe you do it in English as your second language, which doubles the pressure, because now you’re managing the room’s skepticism and your own. If so, take these with you:
- Listen to the request behind the question. “Where’s the research?” is not resistance. It’s the price of admission, and it’s a price you can pay.
- Show them under the hood before you show them the benefits. Background, method, evidence. With this audience, the boring part is the persuasive part.
- Name the limits before they find them. Nothing builds credibility with data people faster than telling them what your idea does not cover.
- Redefine winning. Half the room still skeptical but fully engaged beats a room full of polite nodding that changes nothing.
One more moment from the conversation.
I have to share the part of the episode that made me smile the most. Ivan told me the hardest thing for him in English is idiomatic expressions, and he gave me a Serbian example: “Doug is really good at keeping cold drinks in the fridge.” The figurative meaning is that someone is hospitable. That they have what people want, and they know the right moment to offer it.
I love that. Every language hides its culture inside expressions like these. In English, we get butterflies in our stomach when we’re nervous. In Chinese, you have a deer jumping in your heart. Same feeling, different animal! And if you’ve ever avoided an idiom in a meeting because you were afraid it wouldn’t land, the advice I gave Ivan applies to you, too:
Just start using it.
You’ll get it wrong somewhere, someone will smile, and you’ll have learned more from that one moment than from a hundred perfect sentences you never said out loud.
My thanks to Ivan Dabić and the CrockPit Podcast for the invitation. This one covers analytical audiences, AI and language learning, my southern accent, and a surprise appearance from my cat, whose name is, creatively, Cat.
Watch the Conversation Here: