What happens when someone else writes your speech?
If you’re a world leader or a top executive with a team of professional speechwriters who know how to write in your voice, this probably works out pretty well for you. The speech goes through numerous drafts, and you’re very familiar with the content before you stand up in front of the cameras.
But let’s say you’re not a world leader. Let’s say you’re a manager who has to give a seven-minute report to the board of directors in two weeks.
You have strong ideas about what should be in this presentation, so you sit down and start planning. Then you get an email from your boss, who, as it turns out, also has strong ideas. Your colleague across the hall wants to make sure you highlight the new initiative she rolled out, and the compliance team sends you three slides they want you to include to go over new regulations (“we already did the work for you!”).
If you include everything everyone wants you to, what is the result?
First, your seven-minute presentation balloons to twice its size. You can’t fit it all in. Second, you’ve lost ownership of the material. The slides the compliance team helpfully provided are dense with jargon you don’t understand. The initiative your colleague launched deserves a section on the agenda all its own. And your boss has his own presentation in this meeting, but wants you to set up his section in yours.
When this happens, we feel squeezed. It’s impossible to make all these people happy, but often we feel we don’t have a choice. Plus, in the rush of our busy lives, it can feel easier in the moment to cobble our presentation together from what everyone else threw our way than to start from scratch. You’re the center of many competing priorities, and that makes it pretty much impossible to show up with a cohesive message you believe in. When the day comes, your presentation to the board is long, disjointed, and contains very little of the content you thought was important to share.
It can be tough to push back on people who want you to include their material in your presentation, I get that. Especially when they’re your boss. But I encourage you to take two important actions:
- Know exactly what this presentation is supposed to do. Does the board need to be informed, persuaded, reassured, motivated? (If you choose “informed,” you’re going to have to get super-specific about what they need to know and why.)
- Take the time limit seriously. The amount of time a speaker is allotted reflects the importance the audience places on their content. Trying to fit fifteen minutes of information into a seven minute slot leads to rushing, not being clear about what actually matters, and potentially annoying the other speakers and the people in the meeting. (The time limit can also help you negotiate with the folks who want to shoehorn their material into your section!)
There’s a final point I want to make here. From a purely “is this enjoyable to listen to” perspective, it’s really hard to care about a presenter who is saying words that are not their own. It’s clear to an audience when a speaker has adopted someone else’s content—they stumble over phrases that they would never have chosen, can’t figure out how to transition smoothly between points, and almost never practice enough to seem truly present.
It’s worth the effort to create and own your content, and to resist those who would “help out” with their edits, suggestions, and slides. You will be more integrated with your presentation, and your message will have a greater impact on the people listening.
