Finding Your Voice:
A Conversation on Leadership and Storytelling in Public Speaking
By Anmol Harjani
As Professional Speakers Celebration Day approaches on March 14, it’s a moment to reflect on the art and impact of public speaking. Beyond delivering information, professional speakers have the unique ability to inspire, challenge, and connect with audiences, skills that are increasingly essential in leadership and organizational communications.
We connected with Christine Szustaczek, MCM, APR, SCMP, FCPRS, Vice-President, Communications at the University of Toronto, whose career spans leading communications teams at top universities, running her own consultancy, and advising executives on messaging that resonates. Christine shared insights on how public speaking has shaped her career, elevated her expertise, and amplified her ability to engage audiences, whether in large forums or intimate settings.
From honing presentation skills to balancing authority with authenticity, Christine emphasizes that impactful communication is more than just sharing knowledge, it’s about crafting stories that stick, spark new ideas, and build meaningful connections. Here’s a closer look at her perspective on what makes a speaker truly influential when leading teams and engaging audiences.
Public speaking plays a huge role in leadership communications. How has it shaped your career and influence over the years?
Public speaking has helped me in three ways. First, it has deepened my subject matter expertise. Any teacher will tell you that if you really want to grasp a concept, try explaining it to someone else. You’ll quickly realize how hard that is to do if you don’t know the topic well enough. I also have learned a lot from the dialogue that’s been sparked by presentations I’ve made. The audience will often share perspectives that are different from my own, which adds to my knowledge.
Secondly, it’s honed my presentation skills, including my ability to get an idea across, be persuasive and connect with an audience. These are important skills if you aspire to be a trusted advisor to the C-Suite or a Board of Directors, if you want to make a business case to get approval or funding for some element of your work, and to help you manage teams.
Finally, public speaking provides visibility and creates opportunities for connection and networking. It’s a highly effective manner to build your profile and establish your personal brand.
What separates an informative speaker from a truly impactful communicator?
An informative speaker effectively broadcasts their message, disseminates important knowledge and is authoritative, meaning they undoubtedly have excellent advice or ideas to share (otherwise they wouldn’t be considered informative).
Impactful speakers are sticky! They touch you emotionally, get you to reconsider a long-held opinion, and make an impression on you to the point where days after you hear from them, you are still replaying their words and churning them over in your mind. Impactful speakers spark new ideas in your own thinking. They engage both the head and the heart.
An impactful speaker also designs their presentation around the interests, needs and existing knowledge base of the audience and may engage their audience by using any number of techniques such as story, analogy, imagery, humour, dissonance, or relatability. These can make the content that they’re sharing attention-grabbing, memorable, relatable and trusted.
In executive communications, how do you balance clarity, authority, and authenticity when addressing large audiences?
The three attributes work well together. Authenticity is a result of your presentation’s ability to be credible, realistic and tangible. If your talk meets these thresholds, it should, by default, be clear to the audience. Authority relates to your level of expertise on a particular topic. You demonstrate it not just by sharing theoretical knowledge, but by talking about lived experience or real-world examples from your career and the key insights that you learned from them. That reinforces your authenticity too. Authority also comes from being comfortable in front of a crowd. If you appear excessively nervous or unsure, then your audience may doubt what you’re saying.
Being clear, authoritative and authentic starts with good planning. Storyboard your talk by thinking about your over-arching goal, objectives (or your pre-set targets for success), and the key takeaways you want your audience to internalize. Think about the narrative arc of your presentation, the specific examples you’re going to share and any techniques you want to use to help get your ideas across. Sketch out your plan before you start writing or creating presentation aids. That will help you create a memorable talk that’s clear, authoritative and uniquely you.
Can you share a moment where storytelling or speaking changed the outcome of a conversation or initiative?
I remember having a planning discussion about an upcoming employee town hall with the executive leader who would be speaking. The standard approach had been to treat these events like a ‘state of the union’ address where the presentation unveiled accomplishments, was backed by data and proof points, and then would further make the case by sharing why these efforts mattered to employees or how they improved people’s well-being or work environment in some material way, before opening up the floor to questions.
The problem with that approach is that it assumed that everyone has the required context to fully understand the discussion, that people would accept decisions that had been made without their involvement, that the audience didn’t have valid ideas of their own, that information was enough to persuade and that the subject matter or person delivering the talk were so important that people would automatically believe and support what was being shared.
I was able to help the leader take a step back using story, and more specifically, analogy. I asked my executive if they’ve ever been to a cocktail party or networking event, where there was a highly successful couple in the room, who hijacked or dominated everyone’s conversations, bragged about their own accomplishments, or over-shared about all the wonderful successes of their kids inside and outside the classroom. We noted that we’d both had this same unpleasant experience and agreed that it was rude and annoying. I pointed out that my executive was at risk of coming across as this same couple at our town hall if all they did was share the institution’s accomplishments and in so doing infer the brilliance of the leadership team. The story stopped them in their tracks and got their attention in a way that no amount of advising about best practices for town halls ever could. The story made them drop their intellectual guard and use of only rational thinking and logic to evaluate the matter. Using a relatable example, it helped them immediately imagine what the experience would be like for the audience and how it would make them feel. It got them to see the event from a different perspective. We changed our approach and decided to disseminate important information via digital channels and aimed to make this large gathering about engaging people in dialogue, consultation and idea-sharing after they’d been primed with information.
What skills do communications professionals often overlook when preparing leaders for speaking opportunities?
In any coaching I’m doing, I try to convey that humility and vulnerability make a leader relatable, approachable and likeable and that being humble and vulnerable don’t undermine authority or mean that a leader must bear their soul. Humility is about respecting your audience’s intelligence and admitting what you don’t know. Vulnerability can be simply sharing what aspects of the business keep you up at night or letting people see a tiny bit of the person behind the polished exterior.
Along those lines, tell your leader to “be yourself”. We all do best when we play to our strengths. Take the time to get to know your leader’s preferences, attributes and style so you can consider how to take them into account in their speaking engagements. Observe and listen to their talks. Build a trusted and respected relationship that gives you permission and an invitation to be candid with feedback, always delivered in a generative spirit that aims to help them be their best.
From a truly practical standpoint, make sure to stress the need for your leader to be prepared. Take the time to research who else might be speaking alongside, before or after them, and who’s in the audience, so you can anticipate and share the questions that you suspect they’ll need to answer in real-time.
How can emerging communicators build confidence and credibility as speakers earlier in their careers?
There are many ways to build confidence. Try to find opportunities to present formally to peers in the workplace. For example, if you attend a workshop or conference, ask your leader if you can share some of your key learnings with others who didn’t attend, or volunteer to take a turn hosting a team scrum. No matter the opportunity, treat it seriously and put in the effort. You can also learn a lot through observation and self-study. Watch recorded presentations such as TED talks and listen to radio or podcast interviews with a critical ear. Dissect what people did well and what you think they did wrong when they appeared to struggle. Read articles on the topic. Consider joining a group like toastmasters. Like with any skill, practice builds confidence.
Credibility can be gained through third party validation. Apply to speak at conferences in your sector, your region or your discipline. If you don’t feel you have enough authority, ask a more senior leader if you can partner with them on a presentation, so they mentor you as you share the stage together. Even if you deliver just one small aspect of the talk, your name will be on the agenda. That’s a great stepping stone. Making a presentation that’s backed by a professional association or getting on the roster of a well-known conference endorses your credibility.
Always ask for audience feedback. Not only will it help you learn how to be better and build your confidence, but you’ll also be able to demonstrate your credibility when applying to speak at other conferences in the future.
What does powerful storytelling look like in leadership today?
Stories enable strategy to be understood on a personal level. They can help people imagine a desired future for an organization or its efforts by painting a picture of what success looks like. They can also help warn of possible risks and dangers that might result if certain actions aren’t taken. They help get people’s attention and see these pitfalls for themselves without a presenter sounding offensive, belligerent or negative.
Stories are also powerful when they’re trusted. Trust is formed when stories are relatable, believable and rooted in shared values. These factors emphasize what the presenter and audience have in common.
Powerful stories are also engaging, which can come from sharing something that’s unexpected. People crave to be able to see the playing field from the leader’s perspective even if they don’t necessarily agree, so consider sharing stories that provide a behind the scenes peek into factors that went into decision making.
The most powerful stories are also not an end in themselves. Rather, they’re a jumping off point that gets people to think about other times they’ve experienced something related or get them to imagine what might happen next. The power isn’t in the original story. It’s in the reaction and in the new ideas that are generated by the listeners themselves.
Anmol Harjani is a Client Servicing Manager working with a remote company and a recent graduate of York University’s Public Relations and Communications program. She is especially interested in strategic communications, social media behaviour, and how PR practitioners adapt within a rapidly evolving digital landscape. She currently serves as the Communications Co-Chair on the CPRS Toronto Board.
