Why Being a Great Speaker is a Must-Have for Senior Finance Leaders

– A Conversation with The Founders of The Leadership Speaking School

By Laura Penn, Ph.D. and Fredrik Hedlund

My own notes from the conversation...

If you want to have an impact as a senior finance leader you must be able to create followership, communicate complex messages in simple ways, and appear in front of audiences with ease. You also need to keep your calm when presenting to other senior leaders, executive management teams and boards of directors. Indeed, being a great speaker is a must-have in any senior finance leader’s toolbox and that’s why I’m pleased to share a two-part conversation between Dr. Laura Penn, world-class speaker coach and Founder of The Leadership Speaking School and Fredrik Hedlund, a seasoned CFO with over 20 years of experience and Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of The Leadership Speaking School.

Dr. Penn and Fredrik discuss why public speaking is a challenge for senior finance leaders. They bring the conversation to life by discussing Fredrik’s personal journey of improving himself as a speaker in his role as CFO.

In this first part of their conversation, they reveal why it’s essential for senior finance leaders to up-skill and become better speakers. They discuss how “old” tools like PowerPoint should be replaced with a new set of tools, which support today’s increasingly complex speaking demands.

Let’s “listen in” to what Dr. Penn and Fredrik have to say:

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Dr. Penn: Why is public speaking a problem for many senior finance leaders? 

Fredrik: The stakes are really high today, that's one of the problems. When we speak on stage or on camera, we reach a global audience very quickly. The other thought that I have is that public speaking isn't really taught and leaders like myself don't tend to spend a lot of time thinking about public speaking or rehearsing before we speak.

It's almost an afterthought. Also, many of us just don't know what great looks like. And we don't know how good we could become if we just put more emphasis on how we speak in front of audiences or on video conference calls.

Dr. Penn: That’s really interesting Fredrik. I find that with the work that I've done over the past 10 years, supporting leaders across the world to speak in public, I feel like a lot of these leaders are using old tools in the new world. The old tools for example, of PowerPoint slide dependency and speaking at a podium. 

We are living in a different time right now and we need to be elevating and rising, toggling ourselves up into the 21st-century toolbox for speaking, which is much more about connection and being authentic. The days of disconnecting and talking to the wall of your PowerPoint slides more than talking to the living audience in front of you are over. What do you think about that Fredrik?

Fredrik: Yes, PowerPoint is certainly really pervasive within the finance function and we have historically tended to rely on it for most of our speaking opportunities. The belief was that the more slides we had and the more information that we had jammed-in to those slides, the better. But as I have learned over time, when it comes to these old tools, less is more. Instead of an over-reliance on the slides, it should be about having an authentic conversation with the audience and engaging with them.

Dr. Penn: And why is that? What's changed in all these years that you've been involved in finance?

Fredrik: You know, I've seen videos of myself presenting with a really busy slide deck and I notice that I just don't appear as the best version of myself. I have participated in many conferences where nine out of 10 speakers rely on PowerPoints, looking at them while they speak and referring to them all the time. I lose interest in talks like that, so part of it is self-discovery. 

I also look at some of the leading speakers worldwide like the CEO's of Microsoft, Apple, Google and so forth. What I've seen is that over time, there's just less PowerPoint. There might be a picture or two, but I notice that it's mostly about the story that they're telling. I like that way of presenting.

Dr. Penn: True, if you look at the biggest tech brands out there and their leaders talking to audiences, we see these bare-bones stages and maybe one or two slides with a few words or an icon or two. This is the flavor of what these leaders are doing. Less is certainly becoming more. 

What are the benefits of becoming a better speaker?

Fredrik: One obvious benefit is the personal satisfaction and the feel-good factor after having done a good job. You’ve had that audience connection, and you get the feedback after your talk that it was really engaging. You’re told that it was clear and concise and that the audience learned something new. I think that the personal side is critical. But I also believe that it's about engagement in today's world of global and virtual teams. To be able to engage a global team as a global leader is really hard. But if you do it well, it’s going to help employee morale and retention of employees.   

It's also going to foster relationship-building and trust. Simply put, there are just so many benefits to being a good speaker today.

Another advantage of becoming a better speaker is career enhancement. I think that it is quite difficult to get a senior leadership position today if you are not a good speaker. This final idea is something that we have to reflect on as leaders. We have to understand that there is value in investing in how we communicate and how we show up in boardrooms, conference rooms, in front of our teams and on stage. 

Dr. Penn: I agree, it's an investment in learning a life-skill that will elevate your leadership and your career. It's an investment in studying and up-skilling into evolving yourself. It's an investment in personal transformation. And I want to be clear here: There is a difference between taking a one-day workshop in public speaking versus investing in something that is much more advanced and that takes longer. It’s important to understand that public speaking is a skill that takes a lifetime to learn.

It's not something that you learn short-term or in a quick-fix scenario. It's not a transaction of “I'll take this workshop” or “I'll do this online video” to get better at speaking. That’s not going to work. It’s like saying that you want to learn how to play golf and you’ll just take a one-day workshop or watch an online video. Public speaking, like golf, is something that you need to practice over time.

Fredrik: What are some ways that finance leaders can do that? How do they become better and what action steps can they take?

Dr. Penn: Step number one of beginning the journey of transforming yourself into the best version of yourself as a speaker, is that you've got to work from the inside-out, not the outside-in. 

This is a mistake that I see everywhere, where people think they can just slip-in to these short-term workshops or conduct DIY solutions for themselves that they've put together by watching a YouTube video or by listening to a podcast. This type of information is “fast food learning”. It's designed to give you a few tips and techniques here and there and to motivate you, but it's not deep. It's superficial, moving from the outside-in instead of from the inside-out. You need to go deep in order to learn deep, and speaking is a learn-deep skill. That's the first thing you need to realize.

It starts with self-reflection, taking stock of your strengths and development needs in speaking and writing them down. Once you have done this, and your development needs are in front of you in black and white, you can do something about them, you can take action. For example, let's say that you identify that you're not very good at impromptu speaking. In fact, it’s an element that you feel incompetent in. Or maybe you are speaking very quickly and you don't know how to slow down, you can’t control your speed. 

What are the action steps here? Perhaps you could join Toastmasters and attend bi-monthly meetings to work on your impromptu speaking. Or if you're speaking too fast and you need to learn how to regulate speed, perhaps you're reading a paragraph a day to yourself and you're playing with speed. Or better yet, if you've got small children or nieces and nephews and you’re reading stories to them and playing with the modulation of your speed. The point is that you're practising consistently. 

Public speaking is a skill you need to work on all the time. I always say “stage-time, stage-time, stage-time.” The more time you spend speaking in front of audiences, manoeuvring through the leadership speaking toolbox, trying things out, failing and succeeding and learning from those mistakes and successes, the more you're doing that, the more you're developing yourself as a speaker.

This is a roadmap for what you need to be doing once you've identified what you need to be working on. And one last point is that in an ideal scenario, as you are doing these things, not only are you working on these things yourself, but you've got world-class support that is working alongside you, holding you up, supporting you on this journey that you’re on and leading you through the wide and wonderful world of effective speaking.

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My closing thoughts...

It all starts with making a choice to improve.

Raise your hand if you’re fully satisfied with your performance as a public speaker ?. I don’t see many hands… Don’t worry, you’re not alone, but as you can learn from Fredrik’s story, we can all improve and become good speakers.

You need to choose to do this though. It will take you outside of your comfort zone and will require a lot more work and preparation before you speak in front of audiences. However, as with anything in life that you want to improve, it doesn’t happen without doing the hard work for a longer time.

Next week, Dr. Penn and Fredrik continue their conversation and Fredrik dives deeper into his own personal journey, sharing the path he took to delivering a successful recent talk.

If you have any questions for Dr. Penn or Fredrik please post them in the comments. You can find more about them below.

That’s it for now and I hope you’ll tune in again next week for more on this conversation on how senior finance leaders can become great public speakers!

Dr. Laura Penn trains global leaders from the world’s most recognized companies, academic institutions, and not-for-profit organizations how to speak in public. As the Founder of The Leadership Speaking School, world-class speaker coach and three-time TEDx speaker, featured on TED.com, she supports leaders who are hungry for the skills that they need to vastly improve themselves as speakers. Based in Switzerland, she is disrupting the status quo for how we speak in front of audiences.

Fredrik Hedlund is the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of The Leadership Speaking School. He is a seasoned CFO with over 20 years of experience serving in senior global finance roles for companies such as GE and Nielsen. 

Links and Useful Resources:

Leadership Speaking Radio – https://LeadershipSpeakingRadio.buzzsprout.com

LinkedIn - linkedin.com/company/theleadershipspeakingschool

Website – https://www.theleadershipspeakingschool.com

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, COO (Chief Operating Officer), and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more 8,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company Maersk. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger on LinkedIn with 40.000+ followers.