“Too many words.” – a Senior VP’s answer when I asked why he sent Frank, his new VP, to me for coaching, hoping for more effective presentation skills.
Right off the bat Frank complained the Senior Leadership Team only gave him 12 minutes to present his team’s complex research. He’s a technology genius. But it’s difficult for him to “compress everything important”.
I asked him to give me a typical presentation so I could see what he was doing. He managed to keep it to 8 ½ minutes.
Frank started out with the most commonly used –the most overused - sentence in corporate presentations: “I want to talk to you a little bit about….”
Yawn.
It took Frank 5 ½ minutes to get to, “The biggest issue we have is…”
At the 7 ½-minute mark he said, “The most important thing is…”
He ended without a recommendation, closing with the words, “So, I would like your input …”
It would have been a GREAT presentation …. IF Frank had a lower-level technical audience. But he didn’t. He had the CEO of a major multibillion, multinational corporation with his direct reports.
And here’s the effect this kind of presentation has on senior execs: Most tuned out, openly multitasking, until the 5 ½-minute point. And the rest didn’t engage until the 7 ½-minute moment, a minute from Frank’s closing.
From their point of view, Frank hadn’t said anything meaningful until then.
Why is there such a disconnect?
Frank is a brilliant technical guy. What has he been taught?
The current overpowering, but misguided, system for educating brilliant technical guys almost always guarantees that their communications will be misdirected when presenting to execs.
It’s both HOW Frank organizes his thoughts AND how he communicates them.
Brilliant technical professionals use brilliant technical logic. This logic requires that great quantities of minute detail be discussed. It mandates that not only should ALL this detail be laboriously presented and defended, it should ALSO be comprehensively duplicated on every accompanying slide.
This logic blindly follows the mandate, “Prove it!”
In a technical world where absolutes are unobtainable, this logic builds slowly, painfully, systematically, to a plausible conclusion like, “Most probably this is what we should do ... unless you think that we shouldn’t.”
Executives find it excruciatingly frustrating. This isn’t how they think. This isn’t how they decide. This isn’t how they act. Yet they have to rely on the person giving the presentation to help them make good decisions and act intelligently from an executive level.
Both sides feel defeated when it’s over.
How do you cross the divide keeping technical genius from reaching the executive mind? Next week I will talk about the presentation structure that follows Executive Logic™ and creates the language of success.
In the meantime, notice if this goes on around you. I’d also love to hear your war stories of the battle for minds in presentations.
Be the cause!