The Importance of Skill in Public Speaking

Contents


  1. Professionals realize that their success often depends on the presentations they give.
    1. Subscribers to the Harvard Business Review rated the "ability to communicate" as the most important characteristic of the promotable executive, rating it higher than ambition, education, and capacity for hard work. (42 (January-February, 1964): 14)
    2. In 1978, the Engineering College of Colorado State University surveyed graduates from the preceding 8 years, and asked them which communication courses were most important for engineers; public speaking, discussion, and basic technical communication were ranked the highest above a senior engineering design course.
    3. Both undergraduate and graduate Business school alumni from the University of Minnesota placed oral communication at the top of a list of skills relevant to job success.
    4. J. P. Wright, On a Clear Day you can See General Motors (New York: Avon, 1979), p. 96.

        5. As an executive rose in management, he had to rely less on his technical training and more on his ability to sell his ideas and programs to the next level of management. When I was just an engineer somewhere down the line working on a technical problem, everything affecting me was in my grasp. All I had to do was solve this particular problem, and I was doing my job. But now, as head of advanced engineering, I have to anticipate and predict product trends and then sell my programs for capitalizing on those trends.

    5. Newly promoted executives chose courses in business communication as the best preparation for a career in management more often than any other courses.
    6. Research shows that the average executive spends 75 to 80 percent of most of his working days communicating--about 45 minutes of every hour.


  2. But although it's important, public speaking is often the weak element in a professional's arsenal.
    1. On almost every list of what people fear most, public speaking is number one.
    2. Jerry Traver, professor of Speech Commication at the University of Richmond, in a speech to the Chicago Chapter of the International Association of Business Communication, March 11, 1981, cites 4 problems with corporate speaking programs:
      1. Wasted effort--speeches without a purpose
      2. Failure to measure results
      3. Poor speakers.

          4. Speakers who have not reached the minimum level of competence needed to get a message over. Speakers who destroy your best efforts. Speakers who insist on bad jokes, dull charts, unintelligible language, and perhaps worst of all speakers who read the manuscript for the first time on the way to the airport.

      4. An ill-prepared communications office.

          5. It is true that anyone can write a speech in the same sense it is true that anyone can perform surgery. I am capable of removing the appendix of a volunteer from this audience. I assure you I would accomplish the job eventually. But I would leave a horrible scar on the corpse. We have too many butchered speeches resulting from situations where either no professional skill was available or where the status of the writer was too low to make sound advice stick.

      5. The competent professional does not always make for a competent speaker.
        1. historian Carl Becker in Traver speech

            2. Left to themselves,...facts do not speak; left to themselves, they do not exist, not really, since for all practical purposes there is no fact until someone affirms it.

        2. An efficient, thorough professional may be able to cite facts or details or lists, but that's not how persuasion works.
      6. We persuade people when we appeal to them as human beings--with emotions, desires and thoughts like all other human beings, not when we view them as faceless "bosses" or "employees" or "clients."
        1. Public speaking, more than any other media, humanizes your message; it puts a face on the corporation.
          1. Traver Speech, Indiana Bell

              2. Gerda Fogle of Indiana Bell insists she doesn't need polished orators speaking for her company. She wants speakers who simply have a grasp of the fundamentals of public speaking combined with first-hand knowledge of the company and an honest conviction of the soundness of company policy. These speakers will become the company for skeptical listeners. They will add a dimension of credibility with voice and action that words alone could never have.

          2. Traver Speech, Monsanto

              3. John Hanley of Monsanto uses himself as a means of humanizing the chemical company in his speeches. He gains credibility by citing facts drawn from his own experience, he expressly states that he cares, and he puts his character on the line for his convictions.

          3. H. M. Boettinger, Moving Mountains, or the Art of Letting Others See Things Your Way (New York: Collier, 1969), p. 6.

              4. The people who have the power and responsibility to say yes or no want a chance to consider and question the proposal in the flesh. Documents merely set up a meeting and record what the meeting decided. Anyone serious about an idea welcomes the chance to present it himself--in person.

          4. People persuade people. It's a human enterprise. Computers don't persuade. Lists don't persuade. Details don't persuade. People persuade.


  3. Listen to what Thomas Sheridan in his book, Lectures on Eloquence (Lecture VII, p. 121) said about the importance of effective public speaking.
    1. In such a situation of things, the rule by which all public speakers are to guide themselves is obvious and easy. Let each, in the first place, avoid all imitation of others; let him give up all pretensions to art, for it is certain that it is better to have none, than not enough; and no man has enough, who has not arrived at such a perfection of art, as wholly to conceal his art--a thing not to be compassed but by the united endeavors of the best instruction, perfect patterns, and constant practice. Let him forget that he ever learned to read; at least, let him wholly forget his reading tones. Let him speak entirely from his feelings, and they will find much truer signs to manifest themselves by than he could find for them. Let him always have in view what the chief end of speaking is, and he will see the necessity of the means proposed to answer the end. The chief end of all public speakers is to persuade; it is above all things necessary, that the speaker should at least appear himself to believe what he utters; but this can never be the case, where there are any evident marks of affectation or art.
    2. On the contrary, when a man delivers himself in his usual manner, and with the same tones and gesture that he is accustomed to use, when he speaks from his heart, however awkward that may be, however ill-regulated the tones, he will still have the advantage of being thought sincere; which of all others is the most necessary article towards securing attention and belief, as affectation of any kind is the surest way to destroy both.


  4. Maybe you think you don't have what it takes to be a good speaker. Well, read this description of a person who did look like much, but said a lot. Can you guess who the speaker is?
    1. One man in the audience gave this account [of the speech]: "When the speaker rose, I was greatly disappointed. He was tall, tall--oh, how tall--and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were ill-fitting, badly wrinkled--as though they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head with stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean headstalk, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture I saw that they were very large. He began in a low tone of voice--as if he were used to speaking outdoors, and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said Mr. Cheerman, instead of Mr. Chairman, and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself:
    2. "'Old fellow, you won't do; it's all very well for the wild West, but this will never go down in New York.'
    3. "But pretty soon he began to get into his subject; he straightened up. made regular and graceful gestures; his face lighted as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man. In the close parts of his arguments, you could hear the gentle sizzle of the gas burners. When he reached a climax the thunders of applause were terrific."
    4. "It was a great speech. When I came out of the hall my face was glowing with excitement and my frame all a-quiver; a friend with eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, 'He's the greatest man since St. Paul.'"

      5. Who do you think the speaker was?

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This page was last modified on Thursday, January 16, 2003.
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The speaker was Abraham Lincoln giving his Campaign Address at the Cooper Union Institute in New York. "Years later, Noah Brooks, a California newspaper man who became a Washington correspondent and a friend of Lincoln, gave the report of a man who had been in the audience that night."
Go back to the story of Lincoln.