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Delivering Your Speech

B etween the kickball games, brownie bake-offs, and scavenger hunts, DoSomething—an organization that encourages young people to create community volunteer campaigns—reserves every Wednesday morning for staff “innovation meetings.”¹ A mix of fun, high pressure, and “out-of-the-box” thinking, these innovation meetings are the place where employees make formal presentations that identify and recommend solutions to work challenges. Presentations focus on everything from marketing strategies to new Web site designs.

¹ The chapter opener is crafted from Lorch (2015) and www.dosomething.org.

Any employee can sign up to present at a Wednesday innovation meeting. Presentations follow a standard format, consisting of PowerPoint slides with graphs, recommendations, and plenty of humor. It’s well understood that speakers must be engaging, upbeat, and persuasive. DoSomething employees like to have fun while pursuing great ideas.

Employees know it will take time to prepare a speech that will have a powerful impact on the staff. After composing a presentation, staff members will meet with other coworkers to rehearse and get feedback. As a DoSomething employee, Julie Lorch (2015) observed:

Presenters practice ahead of time and refine their ideas. They try to predict potential criticism and how certain individuals will react, and come up with explanations ahead of time. By the time Wednesday morning rolls around, presenters are really well prepared—and they have to be. (p. 26)

During their presentation practice, speakers learn whether they are talking too fast or too slow. Their coworkers will point out when their posture slumps or when their hands are in their pockets. Presenters earn high praise during practice when they maintain eye contact and avoid reading from their notes. Employees also discover that rehearsal combats their nervousness about presenting at the meeting. This time devoted to practice and feedback translates into engaging and thought-provoking presentations, and the whole process is, as Lorch describes, “a crash course in public speaking.”

DoSomething employees are fortunate to have a leader who values public speaking. CEO Aria Finger is known to be an energetic and confident speaker who is “the master of long intentional pauses” that keep audiences attentive to her messages (Lorch, 2015, p. 29). She inspires employees by practicing and developing her own public-speaking skills right along with them.

Innovation meeting presentations help DoSomething remain a leader in supporting social causes. The organization has reached over 4 million teens and young adults who organize social action projects related to homelessness, bullying, drug use, and a variety of other issues.

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DoSomething employees understand an essential requirement for improving their public-speaking skills: practice pays off. Given the considerable time you put into each step of the speech preparation process—thinking about your audience and specific speech purpose, investigating or researching your topic, and carefully composing the presentation—your speech will fall flat if you don’t practice. That’s why steps 4 and 5—rehearse and revise—are important elements of your speech preparation. Only through rehearsing and revising can you get a sense of how to improve both your speech’s content and your verbal and nonverbal skills in delivering it. (See Table 15.1 for the Five Steps in Speech Preparation.) Such practice is key to engaging your audience during your speech delivery. In this chapter, you’ll learn: