ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
In the political world, success often depends on being an inspirational public speaker, and we all know a good speech when we hear one.
JOHN F KENNEDY: Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum.” Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.
RONALD REGAN: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
BARACK OBAMA: And that means that when I said the fate of the republic rests on you, I wasn’t joking. But that shouldn’t make you fearful that should make you excited. It’s not often where you can move the arc of history.
ALISON BEARD: Now, your next conference talk or all-staff presentation might not seem comparable to a presidential address, but our guest today says there’s a lot business leaders can learn from the most talented political speechmakers about how to effectively communicate, persuade, and captivate an audience.
Terry Szuplat was a speechwriter for President Obama and now teaches at American University. He’s also a keynote speaker and trainer and has helped many executives, including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, to hone their public speaking skills. He wrote the book Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience. Terry, thanks for being here.
TERRY SZUPLAT: Thanks so much for having me.
ALISON BEARD: First question, is public speaking really as an important a skill for business leaders to master as it is for politicians? Do we all really need to be good at this to succeed in the corporate world?
TERRY SZUPLAT: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think when you look back at some of the most successful business leaders of all time, they were great communicators. Steve Jobs is one. Spend a moment on LinkedIn and every day people are dissecting his speeches even now. A great product, a great service can only get you so far. You have to be able to get up and sell it with enthusiasm and energy. And so yeah, absolutely.
ALISON BEARD: And how much of being a great public speaker is natural talent versus practice? Is it even possible for someone who starts out afraid of public speaking or tentative or just not good at it to get to a Steve Jobs or Obama level with a lot of work?
TERRY SZUPLAT: I’m so glad you asked that because this is one of the phrases that kind of drives me insane. We hear it all the time, “Oh, that person is a naturally gifted speaker.” I don’t think anyone is a naturally gifted speaker. I think like any skill, it’s a skill that you can learn and you can improve upon and you can get better at it.
When Barack Obama was a young community organizer in Chicago in his twenties, he was giving a speech and he froze up. And as someone who wrote for him for years, I was stunned by this because we all remember that speech where he came out in 2004 and burst onto the national scene with a very memorable speech. I was fascinated, how do you go from being a 20-something year old who freezes up giving a speech to someone who can give a remarkable address like that? And he told me the story of how he worked to get better and he practiced and he trained and he worked hard on becoming a better communicator.
So this isn’t just something you’re born with. It isn’t something that some people are inherently better at. It takes practice. Steve Jobs practiced over and over and over again so that when he finally came out on the stage and he wasn’t saying it for the first time. And so you can get better. Even as someone who struggled with public speaking myself, you can practice, you can rehearse. You can make your presentations more effective and deal with any anxieties that you feel on the stage in the moment.
ALISON BEARD: When you start to work with an executive who wants to get better, what’s your first step?
TERRY SZUPLAT: One of the most important things is to get ourselves in the right mindset. I think the biggest thing that’s going on when people are anxious about public speaking, and I’ve had clients like this. I had a client once who had been extremely successful in finance, but all of a sudden found himself in a public-facing role for the first time in his life in his fifties, and he was very anxious about it.
One of the things I tried to talk him through was that he had a story to tell and a perspective to share that no one else in the world has. We all have our own stories, our own experiences, our own careers, and a lot of people make the mistake that they have to match somebody else. They have to match the other three people on the panel. But we should all sort of give the speech that only we can give, think deeply about what we bring to the situation, what we can say that no one else can say, the stories that we can bring from our own careers, our own experiences. That’s what makes us unique.
And I say that because it actually helps take some of the anxiety out of it, when you realize that no one else in the world can tell that story better than you. And when I ask my clients, “Okay, tell me the story of how you started the company or tell me the story of the biggest challenge you faced in your company,” all of a sudden their face lights up, they start telling stories that they’ve had inside them all along. And so giving them the space to just be who they are and not have to think that they have to match some unattainable ideal, I find is just a huge mind shift that puts people in a better spot to be able to go out and, again, give the presentation that only they can give.
ALISON BEARD: Thinking about those very personal things, like the sacred story or your unique voice or personality, how do you apply that when it’s not the big keynote address or retirement speech? When it’s the presentation at the all staff or the quarterly earnings call?
TERRY SZUPLAT: I’ve helped companies with their quarterly earnings call. And those can be very dry. When you look at the books filled with the greatest speeches in history, there aren’t many earnings calls in those speeches.
ALISON BEARD: No.
TERRY SZUPLAT: But even those are an opportunity to do what I think all great speakers have to do, again, whether you’re speaking to 5,000 people or 50 people or five people, you’ve got to tell a story – like all great stories, the basic lessons that we learn in school as kids, that stories have a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a clear end. There’s a narrative arc to them and there’s a clear takeaway.
And oftentimes on earnings calls it’s just loaded with numbers, loaded with data, and you get to the end of this 10-minute presentation and your head is spinning with so much data, you’ve lost the thread. You don’t know what’s the takeaway. What did that company want me to think about their earnings that quarter? So I think making sure that you’ve, and I write about this in the book, all the things you should do before you give a presentation, even a small one of sitting down, finding a quiet space and just thinking deeply about what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
One of the things that I talked about with President Obama once, I said, “You’re a very effective public speaker. What do you think makes someone an effective speaker?” And he said something that I agree with, which is effective public speakers are people who are sure of their core convictions.
And I think we see that a lot in the business world and in politics. The speaker has thought deeply about who they are, what they believe, what their values are, what they’re trying to achieve, what their goals are, and they can articulate them clearly because they’ve thought through them clearly.
I encourage people, if you have to give a presentation in a week, a month, or a few months to sit down with yourself, maybe with your team, if you have one, if you’re a business leader, and go through these 10 questions that I lay out, what you’re trying to achieve, what is my mission? What is my vision?
I mean, these are big questions. They’re a little scary for some people, but I think that’s why a lot of people don’t do it. It forces you to think deeply about who you are and what you’re trying to achieve. But that’s what great leaders do and that’s what great speakers do.
ALISON BEARD: So it sounds like you’re saying that when you’re working with people, you want to spend just as much time on the planning than you do on the writing and the delivery.
TERRY SZUPLAT: Absolutely. In fact, I spend far more time planning than we do on the writing. So here I am, I’m called a speechwriter, but I spend most of my time researching and thinking and planning and interviewing, getting to know the person, helping them get to know themselves better.
I had client once who had run a series of investment institutions and we were sitting around her table and I was getting ready to help her deliver a commencement speech and asked her a lot of these questions: Tell me about your upbringing. Tell me about why you do this work. Why did you get involved in business? What were the biggest challenges you had when you started your business? What have the biggest challenges that you’ve overcome as you run your business?
And at one point, she put her hand up, she said, “All right, this is starting to feel like a therapy session.” And I was thrilled. I said, “That’s exactly what this is. This is exactly, we’re thinking deeply about who you are, what you believe, and what you want to communicate so that you can be an authentic, sincere leader who connects with your audience on a human level and they don’t feel like they’re getting a policy briefing because that’s not what a speech is, that’s not what a presentation is.”
And so, yeah, I spend far more… I have something that I call the 50/25/25 rule, which is how to use your time to prepare. And I suggest that however much time you have to get ready, a week, a month, a few days, a few hours, just spend the first 50% of your time thinking, researching, writing down ideas. It takes the pressure off. You don’t have to start writing your presentation or producing your PowerPoint slide decks right away. Only then, once you have all your ideas, you can spend maybe 25% of your time writing and 25% of your time practicing, building, making sure you build in that time for practicing, which particularly in business I see a lot of leaders don’t do it, folks are busy, schedules are packed. But making sure you protect that and reserve that space for practicing is very important.
ALISON BEARD: So let’s talk about the writing process. First of all, how do you think about structure? We are all told to hook people from the start. What’s the best way to do that?
TERRY SZUPLAT: It all depends on the audience, the scenario, the setting, what you’re trying to achieve. But there’s, I mean, all sorts of ways to do it. The most important thing you need to do is hook them, grab them in some way so that they want to keep listening.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that speakers make is that they don’t think enough about that opening sentence, the opening words. Back at the White House, we’d spend a lot of time thinking about when the speaker comes out, in our case, it was the president, when you come out as a business leader, what are the very first words out of your mouth? Because that more than perhaps anything else in the speech is going to decide whether you connect with your audience or not.
Sometimes it can be as simple as, and you’re going to laugh when I say this, saying hello enthusiastically. I know every time I say this, people laugh. I am stunned that more speakers don’t do this. They walk out, they rustle their papers, and they start ticking through a long list of acknowledgements. There is nothing interesting or engaging or inspiring about that.
Now imagine someone who comes out with a little pep in their step and they look at the audience and here’s a crazy idea they smile and they say hello, good morning, good afternoon. Just they’re human. I’m stunned that more people don’t do it. It’s one of the simplest, easy ways to just connect with your audience.
ALISON BEARD: It’s how all pastors greet their congregations, right?
TERRY SZUPLAT: Yes. Think about when you’re at church or synagogue or temple, at mosque, what do they do? They greet you. And the greatest thing about that is I think one of the mistakes a lot of speakers make is they go too far in this direction. They do this awful thing, “Good morning everybody. How are you doing today?” Now all of a sudden, you’ve put your audience on the spot. You’re asking them to somehow give you something, which raises the bar. And then if they don’t do it, if they don’t say good morning back to you, or if they don’t, then know all of a sudden it’s awkward. So you’re 20 seconds out and all of a sudden things have gone off the rails. So I don’t encourage people to try to get their audience to respond like that. They will do it naturally if you come out and greet your audience.
There’s all sorts… I mean, one of the most… Again, another really effective way to do it, a lot of leaders find themselves in situations where we haven’t been introduced. So we actually have to introduce ourselves to the audience. And one of the most effective ways to do that is in one sentence say who you are, and that takes work.
In one sentence, how would you like the audience to perceive you? A lot of situations we get to decide that. It’s a little scary, but it’s also an incredible opportunity. You see this at a lot of congressional hearings. One of the great examples was when Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, testified before Congress, and she had this great opening where she said, “Good morning, my name is Frances Haugen. I joined Facebook because I believe it could connect people and make the world a better place.” But I’m here today because I believe it’s doing, I’m paraphrasing, great damage to our country.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah.
TERRY SZUPLAT: In one or two sentences, she told you who she is, what she does, why she cares, why she’s there today. I mean…
ALISON BEARD: It’s a good opportunity to communicate that sort of sacred story. Why are you the person who’s telling this story? Yeah.
TERRY SZUPLAT: Yes.
ALISON BEARD: And so what needs to happen in the middle of the speech for it to be effective?
TERRY SZUPLAT: So you’ve got your opening to me is your chance to establish some sort of emotional human connection with your audience, right. Then yeah, you get to the sort of meat of your presentation, the middle. I mean and to me that’s really where the heavy work is done, that’s where you’re persuading, that’s where you’re making your case, that’s where you’re really trying to bring your audience along to help them see your point of view.
And I think there are various… Again, there’s no one way to do this because no one presentation, but I think one of the most important things that we can do, especially in the business world, is I think we have to beware of the danger of data, specifically too much data. And I think another big mistake that a lot of speakers make is we load our audiences up, which is way too many numbers, way too many facts and figures.
The audience typically doesn’t have the script in front of them. So all they can do is listen. All they can do is process. It’s an auditory experience. And most people are not taking notes. So you hit them with 30 numbers, 30 statistics, you’re just overwhelming your audience.
And there’s all sorts of research, and when you do this too many numbers can actually make people less likely to donate to your organization or volunteer for your organization or become an employee or apply. I think we have to be really careful of not overloading our audiences.
And the other flip side of that is, okay, well, if not numbers, then what? I think it comes back to human stories. Again, lots of research that I include in the book shows that when you tell someone a human story about another human being, they perk up, they listen. They’re more likely to join an organization, partner, volunteer. A lot of this happens in the middle of the speech where you’re slowly bringing your audience to your point of view.
ALISON BEARD: And that’s important for people to remember, even when it is that presentation to the team about the latest sales number, you want to bring in a story about a customer or the mission and vision of the sales organization and how you’re achieving it.
TERRY SZUPLAT: I’m so glad you said that because I get this a lot in a lot of the workshops I do or the training sessions. I work with a lot of corporate communication teams or corporate speech writers, and they say, “Well, our industry, our sector, they want the numbers. They want the data.” And right, I’m not saying no numbers ever, no data ever. Of course, you need to show your investors the return on their investment that they’re going to get. You need to show a potential partner how your product or your service is going to make their business more profitable, more efficient, what have you.
The mistake though is that people go too far in that direction. So it’s a hundred percent numbers. And I think as you said, there’s always a story to tell. You can tell the story of why you chose to be in this sector, why you love your work. You could tell the story of a customer, you could tell the story of a partner, and you want to tell the story of a customer whose life is better and changed.
So we talk about great stories and great speeches having a clear beginning, middle, and end. Well, that tracks not coincidentally to the three elements of any great pitch or presentation, which is problem, solution, change. You want to lay out the problem you’re trying to fix. You want to offer your solution, your product, your company, your service, and you need to show the difference it’s going to make in the life of that consumer or that company. And if you do those three things, you’re on track for an effective, persuasive presentation. You don’t do those things, why should anyone buy your product?
ALISON BEARD: When it comes to the ending, what is the best way to leave people doing the thing you’re asking them to do or thinking the way you want them to think or wanting to hear more from you?
TERRY SZUPLAT: The ending is the wrap up. This is not the time for you to be introducing new concepts. If the beginning is sort of the emotional connection that you establish, the human connection with your audience, making them want to listen to your middle, the ending is just a way to, again, bring it back to the emotional connection so they actually want to go out there.
So you can do all sorts of things. You can do a recap. I mean, that’s common. You don’t have to recite every single point. If you have five points to your presentation, you don’t have to recite every single and you can quickly tick through them. But to me, I think the best thing an ending can do is, again, leave the audience with a sense of empowerment and vision and hope.
To me, there is only one way to end any sort of speech, any presentation of any kind. You have to end with hope. So you’ve got to give your audience hope that whatever your vision is, whatever your solution is can actually be achieved. You have to paint a picture of the future where it’s actually working. Otherwise, why is your team going to work extra hours? Why are they going to put in the extra work? Why are they going to do everything it takes to launch that new service, that new product?
There’s a great neuroscientist out of London called Tali Sharot. She and others have spent years studying how we all as humans think about the present and the future. And they find that we tend to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening in our lives and our careers and underestimate the likelihood of bad things happening. And she and others call it the optimism bias.
And she has this beautiful phrase that she says that she thinks biologically, chemically in our brain where hardwired for hope. I just absolutely love that because I think if you accept the fact that most of the people in your audience are hardwired for hope, they want the future to be better, they want the product to work, then if you as a speaker, if you can tap into that hope, it’s one of the most powerful things you can give your audience. They can go back to their desk, go back to work, and pull out all the stops and do the things you’re asking of them.
ALISON BEARD: One point you make that is near and dear to my heart is that people should use simple conversational language even when you’re talking to a really intelligent audience of peers or your bosses. So why is that so important?
TERRY SZUPLAT: It’s so important because, here’s the brilliant, crazy, radical idea, if people can’t understand you, they can’t do what you want. How’s that for boiling it down?
ALISON BEARD: Perfect. Very simple. Very conversational.
TERRY SZUPLAT: Yeah, right? There you go. When we get up and stand in front of a group of people in business, anywhere in our lives, we’re doing that because we’re asking to do something, to think differently, to act differently, to do more, to work harder, what have you. They’re not going to do that if they don’t understand what we’re saying. If we are just falling back on all these buzzwords and jargon and corporate speak, the sort of word salad that we’ve convinced ourselves means something, then they won’t do what you want to do.
I had someone say to me once, they said, “Well, if 90% of my audience understands me, I consider that a success.” And I was like, “Absolutely no, I consider that an abject failure because that means 10% of your audience didn’t understand what you were saying. And among that 10% might’ve been your next investor, your next donor, your next partner, your next customer. So why would you leave 10% of your audience out in the dark? Think of how many deals you’re missing, how many partnerships you’re missing when people can’t understand you.”
So yeah, I call it the barbecue rule also, which is that imagine if you were at a barbecue with your family and your friends and they asked you what you do for a living. You wouldn’t just bombard them with jargon and buzzwords and things like synergies and leveraging innovations and catalyzing outcomes and leveraging innovation, yet those are the kind of phrases we hear all the time, particularly in business. You would just talk to your family and friends in a more human conversational way. And so I lay out ways that we can all do that, especially in business.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. What’s your view on including jokes?
TERRY SZUPLAT: Many, many times a client has come to me and said, “I need a joke. I need to open with a joke.” And my answer typically is, “No, you do not.” You are not a stand-up comedian. No one expects you to be. You do not need to open with a joke, a canned joke. No one wants to hear a priest or rabbi, minister walk into a bar. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.
What I think people are getting at is that you don’t need a joke, you just need some humor. You just need some humanity. You can use humor and humanity to open your speech in a way that connects with your audience, maybe gets them to chuckle, brings a little levity, but it’s not “joke.”
You know, a little bit of self-deprecation goes a long way. And many of us are parents, many of our spouses, our kids are always keeping us in line and taking us down a notch. These are things we can all relate to. I lay out some of those ways in the book.
One of the writers on our team who did a lot of the comedy writing for President Obama said something to me once that I thought was really powerful. And he said, “Humor is a tool to remind us of the things that we share and to delight your audience in a way that surprises them around shared connections.” So you think about the times you chuckle, the times you laugh, that’s what’s going on. You’re chuckling because yeah, they’re saying something you know to be true.
ALISON BEARD: You also make the point that any great speech will be fully written out, even if you’re not using a teleprompter. So why not notes or bullet points so that you’re speaking more naturally?
TERRY SZUPLAT: Right. So I have no problem with people, and I do this myself. By the time you get to the podium, sure, you might boil your speech, your presentation down to an outline, a few key points on the back of an envelope, something like that. What I’m getting at when I say we have to write it out is I think until we… There’s an old saying, if you haven’t written it out, you haven’t thought it out. And it’s really easy to get up there in front of a group and just sort of talk. Many of us can talk.
The hard thing is until you’ve written your speech out, you haven’t thought through your arguments. I’ve seen this many times where I’ll be sitting around with a CEO and they bring in the team of advisors and “Okay, today we’re going to talk about what we want to get done in this presentation.” And everybody has a thought and everybody has ideas. They’re great ideas. But then as the writer, I go back and I try to write it down and realize, oh, point one didn’t really lead to point two and it didn’t really set up point three. When you’re just talking it out loud, you don’t necessarily see that.
So number one, writing it out forces you to confront the logic and the errors in your own arguments. Two, it’s a great way for your organization to see what your real priorities are. If you haven’t written it down, you haven’t thought through your priorities clearly.
And I would just say sometimes writing it down can be a forcing mechanism. It can help you and your team come to a conclusion. I’ve seen this many times where a policy or a product isn’t fully rolled out, but meanwhile, everyone’s writing the script to roll it out. And that process of writing the words down helps you understand better what your pitch is.
And I’d say, finally, you have to practice. Great speakers practice, presidents practice, great CEOs practice. And you can’t practice if you don’t have some sort of script to work on. I really believe in this deeply. I’ve seen CEOs who don’t have a written script and every time they practice it, it comes out completely different. And so then they practice five times, it’s five different speeches, and then no one knows what’s going to happen when they actually get up to speak for real. By the time you get to the podium, you may not read it word for word, but I still think there’s tremendous value in writing out your presentations word for word.
ALISON BEARD: So how does all of this apply in more on-the-spot speaking situations that are still high stakes, like a job interview, for example?
TERRY SZUPLAT: Yes. Actually did a LinkedIn post about this recently in lead up to the presidential debates because a debate really is a job interview. And I think a lot of the same lessons of a great presentation apply to an interview. In this case, your audience is maybe one person or two or three people, depending on how many people are interviewing you. And I think the process that I’ve described to you today is very much the same. Spending a lot of time researching, knowing the history and the background and the vision and the values of your audience, the organization that you’re seeking to join. Telling stories that only you can tell about your experiences. Not giving generic answers, but telling stories about, again, with every answer having three parts, a problem, a solution, and an end. A problem that you faced in your old job, of the solution that you offered and the change in the result that it delivered, how it improved your organization.
So much of what I describe in the book can work for a job interview as well. You know, smiling, saying hello, ending with hope, the hope that you’re going to be able to work together and what you can bring that organization. These lessons work whether you’re speaking to a thousand people or one person.
ALISON BEARD: Well, thank you so much for your time today. I learned a lot.
TERRY SZUPLAT: Thank you so much for having me.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Terry Szuplat, a former speech writer for President Obama and author of the book Say It Well: Find Your Voice, Speak Your Mind, Inspire Any Audience.
And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
