How to Give a Business Toast: The Protocol of Raising a Glass

Alexandra Roberts on executive presence and social protocol

The toast is the shortest speech an executive will ever give, and the one most likely to be remembered for the wrong reason. I once watched a chief executive lose a table of sixteen in about ninety seconds, glass in one hand and phone in the other, reading notes off the screen while the halibut went cold. Nobody mentioned it the next morning. Everybody remembered.

Most people prepare for a toast the way they prepare for a presentation. They gather material. That instinct causes most of the damage, because a toast has almost no room for material. It has room for one idea and a line that tells the table when to drink.

Who speaks, and when

The host toasts first. That rule is older than anyone at your table and it still governs, whether the host is a founder buying dinner for a portfolio company or a general counsel closing out a settlement over a long lunch in the Financial District. A guest who raises a glass before the host has quietly taken the host’s role, and at a formal table people register that as a small seizure of the evening even if they could not tell you why.

Timing is narrower than people think. A welcome toast can come once everyone is seated and glasses are filled. The main toast belongs just after the entrée is served, or at dessert. Never while plates are being cleared. Staff working around a table while one person holds the floor makes everyone uncomfortable, the staff most of all.

Then the guest of honor responds, and here is the rule people get wrong at almost every dinner I attend: you do not drink to yourself. Stay seated with your glass on the table and let the room drink to you. When they have finished, rise, thank the host by name, and return the toast.

Getting the floor

Stand. Wait. If the table is large and loud, catch the eye of the two or three people nearest you, and the quiet will travel outward on its own within about ten seconds. Do not tap your glass with a knife. Restaurants that pour good wine also pour it into thin crystal, and I have seen one shatter over a tablecloth during a Series C celebration in Palo Alto, which became the only thing anyone said about that dinner for a year.

Length

Under two minutes. Ninety seconds is better.

If you are wondering whether your toast is too long, it is, and the fix is almost always to cut the opening, where people spend a paragraph clearing their throats about how they were not expecting to speak or how terrible they are at this sort of thing, until the actual content finally arrives and finds the table has gone back to its bread. Start with the person’s name. Or the occasion. Either earns you the room.

What goes in it

One specific thing. A single observed moment about the person or the deal, told in enough detail that the table can picture it, will outperform any amount of general praise. “Priya is a remarkable leader” is information nobody at the table can use. “Priya took the regulator’s call at eleven at night from a hotel parking lot in Fresno and settled it in one sentence” is a toast. People will repeat that line on the drive home. They will repeat it to Priya, too, which is the point.

Then turn it outward. Your last sentence hands the moment to the room: a clear invitation to raise glasses and a short phrase they can say together. “To Priya.” “To the next ten years.” Anything longer than four or five words falls apart when fourteen people try to say it at once, and the mumbled, uneven chorus undoes much of what came before.

What never goes in it

Inside jokes, first. A reference only three people at a table of fourteen understand splits the table into the people who were there and the people who were not, and you have just told eleven guests which group they belong to.

Money comes next. Deal size, or worse, the valuation. A closing-dinner toast that mentions the price converts a celebration into a scorecard, and somebody at that table almost always believes they were on the losing side of it. I have written about hosting a client dinner without missteps, and this is the most expensive one available after the check arrives.

Private life stays out unless the honoree raised it first. Spouses, children, health, the divorce everyone at the table already knows about. Toasts travel. Assume every word will be quoted, slightly wrong, to someone who was not in the room.

Humor at your own expense is fine in small doses.

The glass itself

Hold it at about chest height and lift it slightly on the final phrase. Eye contact with the person being honored matters far more than touching glasses with them. Clinking is optional at a business table and becomes a liability past eight guests, when it turns into a slow procession of people reaching across the centerpieces and apologizing to each other. If you do not drink, raise water or nothing stronger than sparkling. Nobody notices what is in the glass. They notice an empty hand.

When you are asked without warning

It happens more than people expect. The host turns to you over dessert and says you know the guest of honor best, would you say a few words. Stand up. Take a breath long enough for the table to see it, because a visible pause reads as consideration, the same principle I describe in when silence is the only acceptable response. Then say the person’s name and one true thing you have watched them do, and raise your glass.

Declining is also available, and it is underused. “I’ll defer to Martin, who has known her twice as long” is gracious. If Martin was hoping to be asked, it is a gift to him as well.

The second toast

Every table has someone who wants to give the second toast, and the kindest thing a host can do for the evening is let the first one be the last.

Why a toast counts as presence

A toast compresses most of what I work on with clients into ninety seconds with a glass in your hand. You have to read the room before you rise and know whose moment it is (rarely yours). Then you have to stop. Stopping is where executives fail most often, at dinner and everywhere else, because it requires believing that what you said was enough. The clients who can stop at the table can usually stop in the boardroom too.

When someone tells me they are dreading a toast at an upcoming closing dinner, I take it seriously. It is rarely about the toast.