The most important speech?

From our new guest blogger, Melissa Dark, CEO of Melissa Dark & Associates, Australia

It is fast approaching, that time when CEOs must make some of the most critical speeches of their career, speeches that can be reputation building – and reputation destroying. Yep, it’s staff Christmas party season again.

In my experience there are three particular ways CEOs can get it wrong:

1. They try to out-funny the professional comedian who's been hired as MC for the night. Why do usually dour accountants/lawyers suddenly think they’re Stephen Fry when they get up to the microphone after a couple of drinks? At best, it falls flat, at worst they end up embarrassing or offending half the audience.
2. They think they’re at an AGM, droning on about margins and competitors and sales targets. There’s a very important thing they need to remember in these instances and that’s: it’s a PARTY. Speeches like that and they won’t be on anyone’s guest lists for festive gatherings ever.
3. They wuss out and do a bland, ‘thanks for all your hard work’ speech that no one believes and hardly anyone listens to. ‘Tis the season to be sincere guys, and if you can’t genuinely say thanks, then don’t say anything at all. Oh, and wussing out also encompasses speeches that avoid mentioning the elephant in the room. If you’ve had some terrible compensation issue that’s the hot topic of conversation at every table, then pretending it never happened is dumb.   

So what causes so many car-crash speeches at these events? I think it is not the three or four glasses of Australian shiraz prior to taking the stage as you might think, but something even more basic.

Preparation.

At any other time of year, if a CEO was getting up to talk to a few hundred employees, they would at least have a think beforehand about what they were going to say. In fact, they might even have speech notes and (God forbid) PowerPoint slides prepared.

Now I’m not suggesting that we ever go down the PowerPoint-at-a-party route, but as good internal communicators it is our responsibility that our leadership represents employees and the organisation admirably no matter what the occasion. So taking some time out to work on some speaking notes with your CEO is time well spent. (You might even like to pop a few notes on a little card for inside his/her jacket pocket/handbag.)

What’s your worst CEO Christmas party speech story? How do you go about briefing your leaders to do a good job at this critical but underestimated task?