In my last post, I talked about the importance of determining what kind of persona you wished to put forward as a speaker (or indeed as an executive, or consultant, or employee – doesn’t everyone need a personal brand?). If you don’t take proactive steps to create an interesting persona for your thought leadership, the default one that develops around you may or may not be optimal.

If we think about that persona from the perspective of the audience, then we can also ask what is optimal for the audience to experience?  What kind of persona do they want from a speaker?  And while we don’t have direct evidence, since no one has thought to research this fascinating topic directly, we do have a fair amount of indirect evidence.  We know what audiences rate highly and what sort of comments they regularly make about speakers good and bad.  So, we can get a sense of what audiences are looking for at a high level.  And that seems to be three traits, or success factors, primarily.

First, audiences want their speakers to demonstrate empathy.  At the simplest level, this means demonstrating that you, the speaker, understand the audience’s problems.  Over the years, I have seen some speakers achieve success with a combative or antagonistic relationship to their audiences, but it’s a very limited number and a very difficult line to take.

One speaker I recall loved to establish a gladiatorial relationship with the audience, in effect challenging them to ask them a question he couldn’t answer or to take him on by arguing with his basic ideas.  I never saw him bested in argument, by the way.  He was that confident and quick on his feet.  But I sometimes saw his audiences go away angry and frustrated, so I would say the approach failed as often as it worked.  At its best, the approach led to lively debates.  But it is very difficult for most audiences to debate a topic they are thinking about hard for the first time, when the speaker has made it a matter of his professional career.  It’s a lopsided debate, not a fair one — and audiences know that.

Better to put your efforts into understanding the audience, its problems, issues, hopes, and dreams, in order to demonstrate your empathy.

Second, the audience wants the speaker to be truly expert. The whole point in having you up on the stage is for you to teach or demonstrate or reveal something about a topic that the audience in front of you doesn’t understand as deeply as you do.  The neuroscience clearly shows that the act of learning something new creates a happy brain awash in the right kind of chemicals.  It is key that the learning be neither too rudimentary nor too complicated.  The pleasure comes for the audience when the speaker hits the ‘Goldilocks’ spot of just complicated enough to engage us but not so recondite as to confuse us.

Getting that exactly right is what makes creating a winning speech challenging.  Many speakers are afraid that the audience will ask them something they don’t know the answer to, and so they over-prepare and overwhelm their audiences with too much information.  And the opposite can happen too – a speaker can fail to get below the surface of a topic the audience knows well.  The result wastes everyone’s time.

Knowing your audience is of course the key — and understanding that you need to deliver a different kind of speech to your fellow experts or to beginners.  One size does not fit all.  It’s up to you to research the audience and get the level of difficulty right!

Finally, audiences want a touch of humor or wit from their speakers.  In the professional speaking world, the pressure to be funny has grown surprisingly in the past several years.  The pandemic aside, the call for humorous speakers has been growing over the past 5 years at least.

Don’t make the mistake that some speakers have by trying to turn themselves into standup comics.  Typically, what you’ll end up with is neither a great expert speech nor a really funny one.  That’s not what audiences are looking for.  Rather, they are looking for flashes of humor or wit to enliven what is otherwise a serious occasion.  If you try too hard to be funny, you diminish your audience’s sense of your expertise.  Leave the non-stop humor to the stand-ups.  They work incredibly hard to deliver up 10 or 20 minutes of hilarious material and deserve a rapturous reception when they succeed.  But don’t try to give us rocket science for laughs.  Your speech will fall between two stools, as the saying goes, and satisfy neither expectation.

Thinking about your persona as a unique mix of empathy, expertise, and wit will allow you to find the right approach for your subject matter and for your audiences.  I can’t wait to hear what you come up with!