Owen Thomas James

When Guy Goma turned up at the BBC in 2006 for a job interview in IT support, he found himself live on BBC News 24 ten minutes later being introduced as a technology expert.

He was not a technology expert, and he had not been briefed. He answered the questions anyway, with growing conviction, while the presenter carried on, unaware of the mix-up.

It remains one of the great mistaken-identity moments of live television. It's also a better lesson in communication than most media training. Goma had nothing to hide behind, so what the audience heard was a real person.

Now picture an all-staff call. A senior figure stands up, unfolds a script they didn't write, and begins to read. Nobody has ever stopped them in the office afterwards to say 'that changed my mind'.

So, what is it about speaking naturally that engages people?

The tests

I spent six years reading other people's words live on the radio, so I have some skin in this. Reading someone else's words isn't the problem. It's what newsreaders do, and it's what speechwriters, comms teams and agencies like ours do for leaders every day. The problem is when the speaker simply reads them out and sounds completely detached.

Goma got away with it because he passed two tests:

1. The voice is unmistakably his own. You can hear a human being talking to another human being. He doesn't perform, he simply takes an interest in what he's asked and answers candidly. I know what I sound like when I'm genuinely interested. Just ask me about a lost Shakespearean artefact.

2. He shows personality. Even as the initial shock set in, he told the presenter, with admirable honesty, that he hadn't been expecting the question. That gave her something to work with. There was nothing in his answers designed to protect himself, impress a panel or tick a box.

Most corporate speech fails both tests.

The tells

There are three obvious signs that tell you a speech is lacking any form of personality.

1. The register shift. The moment a leader starts reading, their voice changes. It might go higher, flatter, more formal or forced. If the opening remark sounded like them and the next sentence didn't, that's your first tell.

2. No breaths. Real speech is uneven and often pauses mid-sentence when a clause runs long. Committee prose is evenly spaced and overworked, so it comes out in perfect, lifeless blocks.

3. Words nobody says aloud. If you wouldn't say it to a colleague at the coffee machine when asked about your weekend, it won't sound like you from a stage or in front of a team. "Leverage", "notwithstanding", "furthermore" – these filler words all read like they were written by a machine, not a person.

If you bore yourself, you'll definitely bore an audience.

It reminds me of one of my early newsreading shifts. I inherited a morning bulletin from the overnight desk, whose sleep-deprived author had copied the wording from that day's Times front page. Read as written, it would have had me telling the nation that Boris Johnson was in 'the last chance saloon' after the Downing Street parties and an apology to the Queen. I've often wondered what it would be like to be a cowboy in a Western, but I wasn't about to announce that fantasy on air, so I changed it to the more human-sounding 'has been warned' instead.

The trick

If you need to speak to people, whether in a broadcast interview, on a podcast or through a speech, read it out loud first. If you bore yourself, you'll definitely bore an audience. Then read the first two paragraphs to another person and watch their face. If they smile politely, or have nothing to say, change the words.

You're not trying to sound like the next Shakespeare with 'intellectual' words you'd never normally use. You're trying to sound like you. Guy Goma had no choice. You do.

Right, I'll hand you back to the studio now.