A comedian walking on stage has roughly the same problem as a leader walking into a quarterly review. The room has not yet decided whether to trust them. People are half distracted, carrying their own priorities and quietly waiting to see whether this is worth their attention. The difference is that the comedian finds out within seconds whether it worked, as silence is immediate feedback.
That feedback loop is what makes stand-up such a useful lens on leadership communication skills. Traditional presentation training tends to focus on the speaker: posture, slides, voice, structure. Comedy flips the emphasis. Everything starts with the audience: what they need, what they already believe and what will make them lean in rather than reach for their phone.
Few people have tested this idea as thoroughly as Markus Seppälä. Senior Manager, Executive Compensation and Share Plans at Clariant, he has spent nearly ten years performing stand-up alongside an international HR career that runs through PwC, Ernst & Young, Syngenta and Johnson & Johnson. A three-time TEDx speaker, he has performed in four languages across four continents. His work focuses on translating what works on stage into techniques leaders can use in their very next meeting.
Why Good Ideas Are Not Enough
Most leaders are promoted for the quality of their thinking. Yet an idea only creates value once other people understand it, believe in it and act on it. A strategy that cannot be explained clearly stays on the slide deck, and a smart proposal delivered poorly often loses to an average one delivered well.
The cost of getting this wrong is measurable. Research surveying business leaders and knowledge workers found that teams lose around seven and a half hours a week, close to a full working day, to poor communication, and that one in five leaders had lost a deal because of it. Nearly all leaders in the same study said effective communication was essential to reaching their team goals. The bottleneck, in other words, is rarely a shortage of good ideas. It is the ability to carry those ideas into a room and make them land.
Why the Comedy Stage Is a Leadership Classroom
Good comedians are not just funny people. They are disciplined communicators who test material relentlessly, cut whatever does not land and pay close attention to how a room responds. Their three habits stand out.
They engage warmly and with confidence, even with a room full of strangers. They get their point across in a way that leaves people feeling good rather than lectured. And, most importantly, they put the needs of the other party first. A comedian who performs for themselves loses the room. A leader who communicates mainly for their own benefit loses something harder to win back: the willingness of colleagues to follow.
For HR leaders and executives, that last habit is the real lesson. Influence inside an organization is rarely about having the best argument. It is about whether people feel the conversation was designed with them in mind.
Lesson 1: Your First Impression Starts Before You Say a Word
In stand-up, the set begins the moment the comedian becomes visible. How they walk to the microphone, where they look and whether they seem glad to be there all shape the audience’s opinion before the first line is delivered.
Meetings work the same way. Colleagues read your arrival, energy and attention long before the first agenda item. A few practical moves make a noticeable difference:
- Arrive a few minutes early, in person or online, and greet people individually rather than waiting silently for the start.
- Decide in advance the tone you want to set, whether curious, decisive or open, and let your body language match it from the first moment.
- Remove friction. Have materials ready, your screen shared and your camera set before anyone has to wait for you.
None of this is about performance. It is about signaling that you have prepared for the people in the room, which is the first thing any audience wants to know.
Lesson 2: Design Interaction, Not Just Delivery
Watch a skilled comedian work the front row. They ask questions, react to the answers and build the next moment out of what the audience gives them. The set feels like a conversation, even though one person holds the microphone.
Many leaders do the opposite. They prepare content in detail and leave interaction to chance, ending with “Any questions?” and a long pause. Designing interaction means planning it with the same care as the content:
- Open with an easy question everyone can answer, so participation feels normal before the difficult topics arrive.
- Invite specific people with specific prompts instead of addressing the room as a whole.
- Treat responses as material. Referring back to what a colleague said earlier shows you were listening and makes the outcome feel shared.
Meaningful, active interaction is what turns a briefing into a decision people actually own.
Lesson 3: Avoid the Common Mistakes of Online Meetings
The virtual room behaves differently from a physical one. There is no shared energy to ride, reactions are muted and attention drops far faster. Yet many leaders still run online meetings as if they were in-person meetings with a camera attached. The most common mistakes are easy to spot:
- Opening with logistics or a long recap, which tells people it is safe to multitask.
- Speaking for long stretches without changing pace or format.
- Looking at your own image or slides instead of the camera, which removes eye contact entirely.
- Running out of time and ending abruptly, with no clear summary of what was agreed.
The fixes are simple. Open with why the meeting matters, change the format every few minutes, look at the lens when you make your key point and protect the final minutes for a deliberate close. For leaders of distributed teams, these small choices shape whether remote colleagues feel included or merely present.
Lesson 4: Craft Your Central Call to Action
Every strong comedy set builds toward a payoff. Every strong leadership message should, too. In a meeting, the payoff is the one thing you want people to think, feel or do afterwards.
Too often, that ask gets buried. It sits on slide fourteen, softened by caveats and competing with three other requests. A central call to action works when it is:
- Singular: one clear ask, not a list.
- Specific: who does what, and by when.
- Framed for the listener: why it matters to them, not only to you.
Test it the way comedians test material. Say it out loud in one sentence. If it does not land in one sentence, it will not land in the meeting.
Influence Before, During and After the Meeting
Taken together, these techniques describe influence as a cycle rather than a single moment. Before the meeting, preparation and first impressions decide whether people arrive open. During it, designed interaction decides whether they engage. After it, a clear call to action decides whether anything actually changes.
Comedians understand this instinctively. They review every set, keep what worked and rewrite what did not. Leaders rarely give their own communication the same disciplined review, but doing so is one of the most practical ways to build influence at work.
From the Stage to the Table
Markus Seppälä will bring these techniques to Horizon Summit 2026 in his keynote, “Leadership Lessons from the Comedy Club” at Horizon Summit on11th November. The keynote will explore how lessons from comedy can translate into more engaging, human-centred leadership. Because sometimes, the most effective way to lead is to make people feel understood, not just instructed.
