The ability to speak well in public – whether giving a sales pitch to a customer, presenting at a Board Meeting, or speaking to a large group of employees – is an essential leadership skill.
- Public speaking is fundamental for effective executive communication as a way to lead a group or team into taking some desired action.
- For better or worse, most leaders are evaluated by their ability to speak in public.
To be a strong public speaker requires practice and keeping in mind some simple Do’s and Don’ts.
Do’s
- Focus on the End Result: As a leader, the purpose of public speaking is to inform, teach or remind your audience to do something that will help them do their jobs better and drive your company to success. Eloquent speeches, no matter how insightful or entertaining, are useless unless they lead to changed thoughts and changed actions. As such, the focal point of any speech needs to be on the end result: what do I want my audience to do? And a call to action needs to be the last point in any speech or presentation.
Pre-planning
As managers, we need to encourage each of our employees to keep us informed about what is really going on in our companies, both the good and the bad. We need to be kept in the loop about the larger issues, possible challenges, and problems that our employees are facing.
I have previously written about the fundamentals of communication: 
Driving continuous improvement throughout our organizations is fundamental to short and long-term business success.
A fundamental task of a leader is to train and develop his or her team.
To do our best in business, we need to be as smart as we can be.
When General Dwight D. Eisenhower was first elected President in 1952, then President Harry S. Truman remarked:
With all the meetings, E-Mails, objectives and communications in a typical company, staying organized is a never-ending task.
