Episode #403: Why Did Josh Shapiro’s Convention Speech Fall Flat?

Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Tennessee, was regarded by many as certain to be Kamala Harris’s pick for the role of Vice President, as part of her campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Ultimately, she chose Tim Walz. The six-minute speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention then, was a good opportunity for Shapiro to position his own future credentials for a run for the Presidency. Barack Obama used his 2004 keynote spot to catapult himself into the limelight, as a relatively unknown eight year Senator from Illinois.

Therefore, I was expecting a very good speech from Shapiro, but I was disappointed. To me, it seemed to fall flat. This evaluation has nothing to do with political affiliation, because as an Aussie, I have no right to take part in the coming election. I am just using his talk by way of analysis of what works and what doesn’t and as a guide for business people who give speeches.

Now we have to be careful of expert evaluations. I was watching a video from an American guy who was also evaluating the Convention speeches. He started with “I am a speech coach” and he then made a fatal error, which for me at least, indicated he was a fraud or at least a total dud, as far as being a speech coach is concerned.

What did he say? He mis-quoted the famous research from Professor Albert Mehrabian on key factors when presenting. The dubious speech coach started telling everyone that what was being said was 7% of the impact, 38% was based on the voice and 55% on how they appeared. That is total crap and if you ever have that quoted to you, run far from that person, because they are clueless and dangerous. Mehrabian’s research had a critical caveat on when those numbers apply. He said that when what we say is incongruent with the way we say it, the audience gets distracted. They subsequently focus on how we sound and how we look, as opposed to what is the content of our talk. However, if we are congruent, then the audience pays attention to our message and is not distracted, so voice quality and how we dress become less important.

Rant over and back to Shapiro and what went wrong. I am not just comparing him against the absolute, so let me include some other prominent speakers who were also considered for the role of Vice President by Harris. I looked at Gretchen Whitmer and Mark Kelly’s speeches. For me, I thought Kelly was wooden in his delivery and not able to really connect and engage his audience, so he is out as a model.

Whitmer was the star in my evaluation. Shapiro was talking at us, whereas Whitmer was speaking with us. Shapiro used only one volume control throughout his six minutes – strident. Whitmer used modulation and had variety in how she got her message across. Sometimes soft, sometimes strong, and always engaging.
In business talks, we want this facility to vary our delivery so that it isn’t all soft or all strong, but mixed together and re-formed in the right way, at the right moments. Remember Mehrabian – we need congruency between the content and the delivery. A strong emphasis on a word lifts its appeal, as does an audibly whispered version and we should use both.

Whitmer employed personal stories and examples we could to relate to in order to make her point. Shapiro was mainly just using powerful motivational exhortations. I wondered whether the organisers had allocated different roles to each of the speakers, but I doubt that was the case. Each of these high-profile speakers would have worked on their speeches in isolation to best reflect what they wanted.

Being told what to think by the speaker is not as effective as providing context, evidence and laying out some alternate ideas. Constant and rigorous admonitions are hard for an audience to handle because it tires them out. You could tell from the applause that the audience was struggling. During Whitmer’s speech they were energised and the difference was quite stark, I thought.

So when we are giving business talks, we should definitely be including relevant stories wherever we can. If we can make these personal stories, that is the best because audiences will identify more strongly in those cases. We are looking for points of agreement and commonality with the speaker and we need more information about them to be able to do that. Just telling an audience what they need to do isn’t going to provide that personal connection. Also, audiences don’t remember statistics as well as they remember stories. In business, we have tons of stories to draw on, but often we don’t go looking hard enough to find them. We have plenty of numbers, but let’s go find the stories we can wrap them in.

We can’t be lecturing the audience on how they should think about an issue. We need to lay out information and insight and guide the audience to agree with the stance we have arrived at based on the context and our experience with the issue.

Whitmer used humour well to create a better personal connection with the audience, whereas Shapirio was deadly serious from woe to go. Whitmer was relaxed and smiling and Shapiro looked taut and ardent.

In business, we need to look for ways to help our audience relax. Smiling is good, but somewhat difficult, when you are feeling nervous. Humour is also not an easy one either and that is why it is generally left to the professionals – comedians and politicians. Nevertheless, we can at least try to appear we are relaxed and happy to have the audience listen to us. Just a calm vibe is enough to help an audience relax.
So we can take away some lessons from Shapiro and Whitmer and inject the learnings into our own talks.