Public speaking and leadership are inherently related. In fact, author and former presidential speechwriter James Humes once said, “The art of communication is the language of leadership.”
And Humes had a point. There’s a reason why so many of the best leaders are also the best public speakers. There are even people like Steve Jobs, whose well-documented flaws and weaknesses were outweighed by his visionary genius and his ability to deliver a great keynote.
And so with that in mind, in this week’s article, we’re going to take a closer look at how public speaking and leadership are related to each other.
One of the most important things for business leaders to do is to challenge the status quo. After all, it’s this which will determine whether their companies stand out from the competition. We mentioned Steve Jobs before, and he was arguably the master of challenging the status quo. Henry Ford is another great example. Public speakers learn to challenge the status quo through their talks, where they often present groundbreaking new ideas or make statements and predictions that shake up their industry.
At its heart, leadership is all about providing the conditions in which people can thrive and do their best work. They need to be able to bring various people with different ideas together into a single team that can work towards a common goal. Public speakers get plenty of practice at bringing people together through their engagements, where they need to use their words to bring an audience on-side and unite them for the purpose of sharing information.
Public speaking is the world’s most common phobia, ahead of fears such as death, spiders and heights. This has led to the jokey remark that if you’re at a funeral, most people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. Leaders need to be fearless if they want to be successful, and they also need to be fearless if they want to sleep at night instead of dwelling on the potential for things to go wrong. Public speaking can help here because it forces people to confront and overcome their fears every time they take to the stage.
A good leader leads from the heart, and a good public speaker speaks from the heart. Following your heart allows you to be a more well-rounded person as your work and your personal passions are in line with each other, and it also allows your leadership (and your speeches) to be more impactful. By leading and speaking from the heart, your words and your actions will carry the kind of conviction that can’t be faked.
Building on the last point, emotional intelligence allows leaders to better understand their people and to understand the emotions that drive them to achieve. Public speakers get plenty of practice at tapping into emotional intelligence through the storytelling that they use to get their points across, and they also get to learn from the many people that they meet along the way.
One of the more important challenges for today’s leaders is to be able to share information with people so that they can make more informed decisions. Entrepreneurs and CEOs need to be able to understand all sorts of disparate types of information and to then pass this on to the relevant people. Public speaking can help with this because it gives you plenty of practice at sharing information.
For leaders to assemble and manage teams that will stand the test of time, they need to listen to people’s needs and find ways to address them. This can be even more of a challenge in a multicultural world because the more diverse your team is, the more diverse their needs will be. Leaders can benefit from public speaking experience here because they’ll be used to adapting their speeches based on who they’re talking to.
As a leader, you never know when someone’s going to come to you with a burning question that needs answering, and the questions that you’ll get asked can range so much in subject matter that they can often be difficult to answer. It’s a lot like hosting a Q&A session at a conference, when speakers are tasked with responding to whatever questions the audience throws at them. As with many things, practice makes perfect.
For leaders to bring out the best in their employees, they need to inspire people to push themselves and to bring their A-game to their work. Different leaders achieve this in different ways, but the important thing to note is that the companies with the best cultures tend to be those with leaders who inspire their employees. Public speakers have a natural advantage here because they’re already used to inspiring people. It’s one of the reasons why they take to the stage in the first place.
Our modern world is so fast-paced that it’s no longer possible for a single person to have all of the answers. That’s why the best leaders are continuously learning, whether they’re taking online courses or bringing in consultants with specialist expertise. Public speakers have an edge at this because they’re also constantly learning, even if only by listening to the lessons that other speakers have to offer at the events that they attend.
Now that you know a few of our thoughts on how public speaking and leadership are related, we want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on what we’ve talked about today?
As always, be sure to let us know what you think in the comments so that we can keep the discussion going, and feel free to follow us on your favorite social networking sites for more. We’ll see you next week for another article!
Popular Categories