Improve Your Impromptu Speaking

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

We all know the feeling of being asked to speak, or feeling like we should speak when we aren’t really expecting to. The boss suddenly wants your opinion in a big meeting, a colleague asks you to kick off a client dinner with a toast. You’re giving a prepared speech at a conference but then you have to take audience questions after. Some people have no problem addressing a crowd off-the-cuff.

For most of us though, it’s nerve wracking and incredibly hard to get right. There’s so much advice out there on how to give great presentations, but not nearly as much on how to talk well when we’re put on the spot.

Enter Matt Abrahams. He’s a lecturer at Stanford University and the host of the Think Fast Talk Smart podcast. He has a new book called Think Faster, Talk Smarter, and an HBR article titled “How to Shine When You’re Put On the Spot.” Hi Matt.

MATT ABRAHAMS: Hey Alison, it’s great to be with you.

ALISON BEARD: To start, can you give us a sense of just how important the ability to speak spontaneously is for leaders and managers? As I said, I think we focus a lot on public speaking and presentation skills, and practice those, but we don’t spend as much time on impromptu comments.

MATT ABRAHAMS: Absolutely. Spontaneous speaking is prevalent everywhere in our personal and professional lives, and as you said, most of us, if we spend any time working on our communication, it’s in a planned sense, when we’re writing our agendas for our meetings, or thinking about our slides and our structure for our presentations. But the reality is we are asked all the time to speak on the spot, answering questions, giving feedback, making small talk, we really do need to spend some time focusing on this type of communication.

ALISON BEARD: How did you get interested in this subject of spontaneous speaking?

MATT ABRAHAMS: So there are really three…