How to Make a Great Farewell Speech

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By Paul Carroll, Toastmasters International

When your boss is moving on to a new organization or retiring, you may find that you are asked to give a speech at a leaving do. This is an opportunity to celebrate someone’s career and have a bit of fun at their expense. The challenge is getting the balance right, as well as overcoming any nerves you may feel as you prepare to speak in front of your colleagues.

Image: Yay Images

Let me share some tips on putting together a farewell speech for your boss.

Overall structure

It is good to use a 3-part structure:

• Begin with something about your association with your boss (this sets the tone of the occasion and why you’ve been asked to speak).
• Then cover three points of importance. The first may be serious or reflective, but make sure that at least the last one is humorous or light-hearted. For a short speech, you’ll need just three anecdotes to illustrate three aspects or periods of your boss’s career, or three characteristics they’re known for, two proud achievements, and something that fell flat (you get the idea). For a longer speech, you could make the stories longer or add another anecdote to each section.
• End with a toast that summarizes your farewell.

Gathering material for your speech

As you know your boss well, you’ll have plenty of experience to draw on. Set a timer and give yourself five minutes to jot down as many ideas as you can come up with. Don’t examine them. Not yet. If it comes into your head, it goes on the list. Just the idea, mind, not lots of detail.

For example, you might remember a time when the two of you were stuck because of a visa foul-up and spent ages talking to officials. Write down Airport/Visa and move on. The idea is that by introducing a little time pressure, you’ll come up with many examples in 5 minutes. You can then review and decide which are best for the occasion.

Then, ask colleagues (or even clients and suppliers particularly if they’ll be at the leaving party) who know your boss to suggest the most memorable occasion they can think of. You’ll know which to incorporate when you review the overall balance of your speech.

Putting your stories together

Many businesses organize teambuilding events. If your usually dignified boss was left dangling on a zip-wire (remember Boris Johnson promoting the London Olympics?) and shouting for help, there are likely to be some humorous aspects to exploit.

This can be developed into a longer story with much lead-up to the key moment, or it can be summarized in one short sentence.

How do you decide which details to include?

Consider TV dramas. Shows about police, lawyers, or doctors don’t show the routine elements of the job. There was never an entire episode of Line of Duty where a witness sat at a table covered in mugshots and looked through them, trying to find the shooter!

No, you see a few moments of the witness with the pictures, maybe with a clock on the wall to establish it’s been a long time. Then the “Aha! Got him!” moment.

The point is that you’ll need a bit of shorthand and cut things down to a few elements which establish the context, followed by the revealing part you want to remind your audience about.

For example, I have used a story reminding everyone of that time leaflets had been printed to send to clients about “market volatility”. My boss, then a quiet fresh-faced graduate trainee (with English as a third language), pointed out that “volatility” was misspelled (on the front cover no less). As I had to with my story, you’ll need to decide which details to add, and which ones to leave out. Which adds to the build-up? Which adds humor?

After some time had passed, I thought it was hilarious that nobody had read the front cover and that my now boss (who rarely spoke up back then) pointed it out. Correcting a spelling error “in his third language” was the icing on the cake whenever I retold this story.

Going back to the zipline story, if you have time for more than a one-liner, a longer version, you can build in the nerve-pumping at the beginning, the dignity preserved or lost, how long it took, the eventual arrival of the rescue, and the epithets muttered by the boss about not having away-weekends in the future.

The bigger picture

It is worth considering what a leaving event is for. It’s not something the business sells to customers. It’s not a profit center. It’s a cost. If they want to lavish money on the staff who are attending, they could add it to a year-end bonus and let you decide how you want to spend it. However, that won’t achieve what a group celebration achieves: the bonding of a group. When you appeal to your audience’s emotions by talking about a common experience, then you bring everyone together.

Of course, leaving is about saying farewell to your boss, but it can also help people to bond as a group. Shared experience is the basis of bonding. Again, this can be a serious thing (for example, when a group has served together in combat), but it can also be non-serious. The humor you choose to include can be an important part of your speech that taps into people’s feelings about the organization.

Finding humor that will work

If your boss is retiring, it’s not the time for a lot of heavy experiences which appeal to deep emotions. Nor is it the time for metaphorical I-climbed-the-mountain inspiration. As in the outline above, you can remind your audience of a metaphorical mountain where your retiring boss took charge and you all climbed together. However, I recommend primarily focusing on the lighter fun stuff.

Inevitably, what’s funny to a group who experienced it might not be so hilarious to people outside the group. There’s a saying people sometimes use when a funny line fails to create laughter: “You had to be there”. It’s a cliché, but for speakers reaching out to their audience, it’s very true.

You can test my theory with this experiment. Tell a group of friends from outside your workplace a funny incident you can recall which included your boss, relates to your profession/industry and happened at work. Then, tell a group of colleagues, who aren’t singers, something hilarious that happened at your weekly choir practice. The lack of common experience means that they probably won’t see the humor, even though it’s totally obvious to you.

In conclusion, by making use of the three-part structure outline above, using short anecdotes that will represent your boss in a meaningful way both to him/her and your audience, you have everyone happily joining into your toast as you conclude your speech.

    Paul Carroll is a member of Toastmasters International, a not-for-profit organisation that has provided communication and leadership skills since 1924 through a worldwide network of clubs. There are more than 400 clubs and 10,000 members in the UK and Ireland.

Members follow a structured educational program to gain skills and confidence in public and impromptu speaking, chairing meetings, and time management. To find your nearest club, visit Toastmasters International.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.