Executive Speeches – Start Strong

Here’s a very simple, but critically important piece of advice for any executive about to give a speech or make a presentation: you live or die by how you start. Every good speech coach will tell you that audiences make a thumbs-up/thumbs-down judgment about a speaker, and his or her topic, during the first few spoken sentences. Despite this fact of life, far too many executives start off poorly.

Here are some ways to avoid “death by indifference.”

TALK ABOUT PEOPLE

In high school I was lucky enough to have an inspiring teacher whose wonderful lessons in good writing stayed with me. Early on, he would mark my boring essays with three letters “T” “A” “P”-which stood for “Talk About People.” That advice on how to liven up prose goes double for speeches or presentations. People like to hear about people, that is, they want to hear about specific human beings. So the chances are extremely good that ANY audience will pay attention if you start with a well-told story about an interesting actual person. The best human being to use may be you, yourself. But if you’re reluctant, or the audience somehow doesn’t seem suited to a first-person story, don’t worry. The key is to start your speech with the kind of evocative details about a specific person that draws people in. They make audiences pay attention.

Politicians know the importance of talking about people better than anyone. Think about the most memorable speech you’ve heard this election year. The chances are good it was filled with little stories about people the candidate had met on the campaign trail.

DON’T START WITH A JOKE

This may run counter to what you’ve heard about how to give a good speech, but the fact is that starting off with a joke is very, very risky. Andrew Gilman, president of CommCore Consulting Group (www.commcoreconsulting.com), who has spent years coaching corporate CEOs, summed up the risks well: “Telling a joke can be like throwing a football pass,” Gilman says. “Three things can happen and two aren’t good.”
You may get a laugh, but you may get stone silence, which will get you off to a shaky start. Worse, you may inadvertently offend some listeners and lose the audience completely. So don’t begin with a joke, especially when you’re addressing an audience you don’t know very well.

FIND A NEWS HOOK

I once had the pleasure of hearing comic Mort Sahl do an hour of hilarious material based on stories he had found in that morning’s edition of the New York Times. Not every speaker can grab an audience like Sahl did, but you can learn from his craft. To get off to a good start, mention a newspaper article the audience has almost surely seen or has easy access to. The ones members of the audience who have read the article will be drawn into the speech. The ones who haven’t seen the item will pick up the paper or go online later and be reminded of what you had to say.

In addition, opening your speech by linking it to something in the news gives a whole new level of credibility to what you are about to say.

A good start doesn’t guarantee a good speech, but a bad start almost always guarantees poor one.