Facing forwards
Last weekend, I had to make a speech at the wedding of one of my best friends (who is also a reader of this blog - hi Mike!). All things considered, it went pretty well - I was happy with what I wrote and the way I delivered it. But the night before the wedding, I had an anxiety dream about giving the speech, featuring me standing on a stage, microphone in hand, unable to remember what I wanted to say having forgotten my notes, whilst people were walking out in front of my eyes. I woke up feeling unbelievably relieved that the wedding and the speech had yet to take place, and spent most of the day frantically checking that my notecards were where I’d put them, for fear of losing them in real life and risking the dream coming true.
Public speaking is many people’s kryptonite. Somehow, people that are perfectly comfortable (and good at) communicating one on one, or in a small group, are filled with terror at the thought of getting up in front of a crowd. However, as leaders, I think it’s a key skill for us to master. Being at the top means there will be times when you need to represent the organisation publicly, and in those moments, we want to be able to show off all the amazing things our company and the people within it do as effectively as we can.
I feel relatively comfortable with public speaking - I’m not terrible at it, and, anxiety dream aside, I didn’t spend days worrying about having to give my speech at last weekend’s wedding. And yet, speaking in public on behalf of my organisation makes me feel much more fearful. There is something about the weight of representing a wider group of people that, for me, turns the pressure dial up. At least with a wedding speech, the only person you’re going to embarrass is yourself (and possibly the person that’s getting married, depending on its contents). You also know that you’re speaking in front of a home crowd at a wedding - I’ve sat through many objectively bad speeches over my years of wedding-going, and the audience will still laugh and applaud in the obligatory places, because they’re completely and utterly with the speaker. Most groups you speak in front of in a leadership context have much less investment in making you feel good about yourself than a wedding crowd, who will be weeping the moment the bride’s softly spoken father takes the microphone and starts mumbling stories about some not-that-funny things his little girl did when she was small.
So what’s the deal with this fear? What are we scared is going to happen? My anxieties about public speaking in a leadership context tend to fall into two categories. The first could be loosely described as ‘making a fool of myself’: I worry an unreasonable amount about tripping over on my way to or back from or whilst on the stage. I worry about dropping the mic, or the mic cutting out, or the mic having feedback that makes everyone cover their ears in horror. I worry about my shoe falling off like Meryl Streep’s did at the Oscars that time but without Colin Firth to slip it back on for me. The chances of these things happening are relatively small - and if one of them did happen in front of a bunch of people you don’t know, it wouldn’t feel great, but ultimately no one would die and everyone would quickly forget about it and move on with their lives. These kind of anxieties are the kind I try and tune out - there’s nothing useful that can come from dwelling on them too long because they are fundamentally about things you can’t control (although if you need inspiration on what to do if you fall over in public, this Sex and the City clip is my go to).
But I think the real thing that scares me is judgement. Public speaking is just one of many leadership skills - some leaders may not be great at it, but might possess many other important qualities in spades. However, the clue is in the name - it’s public. It’s the point where the world can judge whether you look and sound like a leader - whether you speak clearly and confidently or forget your words, whether you get tangled up in a difficult question or give a pithy answer, whether what you say makes everyone in the room get excited about your organisation or leaves them nodding politely and checking their watches. It’s where all the stereotypes that we hold about leaders come to the fore, where we start to measure ourselves against an ideal image of what a leader should be: strong, confident, with a power stance and a loud voice, saying compelling things in a way that makes everyone listening think ‘wow - I want that person to be our leader’.
Learning how to communicate compellingly as a leader is undoubtedly important - on a macro scale, we can think about Joe Biden’s debate performance earlier this year and the strong sense that this was not the standard of presentation and communication that was needed from the leader of one of the world’s biggest countries. But, for the majority of us who aren’t the President of the United States, I think this is an example where being good enough is OK. Yes there will be people for whom speaking in public is their strong suit, but, in the majority of cases, as long as you’re able to do it relatively convincingly, that will serve you just fine, given that speaking in front of large groups of people is likely to take up a relatively small percentage of your time. And, like so many things in leadership, public speaking is a skill not an innate talent and, if you want to get better at it, there are many many courses, consultants and techniques that you can engage with in order to improve.
In organisations where you have joint leadership (a common practice in the arts), you often find that there’s one person within the leadership team that becomes the figurehead - the person that gives an interview to the press, the person that stands up to introduce things, the person that gives a speech at an event. If this arrangement suits everybody - great. But sometimes, it doesn’t - sometimes, this can make the quieter partner feel less like a leader, because in public, they’re not viewed as one. Personally, I also think a diversity of public facing voices is a great thing and, in its way, is quietly radical, reflecting the many different facets and viewpoints of the people who make the organisation what it is. But for those for whom the forward facing stuff doesn’t come naturally, we have to face down our fear of exposure, our fear of putting ourselves out there and making a mistake, or coming across as less than the leader we want to be. The work of setting aside what other people think of us is, for most, a lifelong endeavour - we shouldn’t let it get in the way of our ability to stand up and talk about the organisation that we love and care about, even if we have to suffer through a few anxiety dreams along the way.