Vivek, a Senior VP, was ready to pull his hair out. He was sitting through an insufferable presentation, his afternoon slipping away, watching his smartest engineers perform a lengthy and overwhelmingly complex explanation of he didn’t even know what. It was clear they had spent hours preparing, but he couldn’t understand half of what he was being told, and most of it seemed like a barrage of insignificant details. He gave up on the slides with one look at them. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it only happened once, but he had to sit through 3 back-to-back presentations from brilliant but incomprehensible geniuses his organization was lucky to hire but couldn’t understand at the executive level.
When I talked to Vivek later, he spent 10 minutes just letting off steam.
“I have to go through this every month! It’s driving the whole senior leadership team nuts! Do something!”
Another VP in another company finally reached the same breaking point, and in one fell swoop signed up 139 people to learn how to design and deliver effective executive-level presentations.
We get this a lot.
These technical people are geniuses. That’s their strength and their downfall. They communicate brilliantly inside their immediate circle, but struggle to communicate up to a less technical executive audience.
Frustrating for them, frustrating for execs. You are lucky to have brilliant people, but if they lose the executive audience, their brilliance never fully reaches the organization.
I said: Vivek, what if your people could do this?
Understand executive audience expectations and make the information relevant to your level
Balance technical depth and simplicity in a clear, concise, on-point message
Eliminate unnecessary detail
Communicate key ideas with minimal explanation
Concisely report progress and status
Create alignment on strategy and tactics
Convert complex data into clear, simplified visual slides
Enable clear and fast executive-level decision-making
End with clear takeaways, decisions and ownership for next steps
Vivek had 4 words: “That would be heaven!”
Execs send lots of people to us to learn these skills. We can easily track the results of the training – our success metric is the look of sheer joy on the exec’s face after presentations. Just kidding – our success metrics are: faster and better decision-making, shortened, more efficient meetings that stay on track, great decision outcomes and happy engineers, analysts, IT professionals, HR, finance and other technical people who are now being heard and whose ideas are gaining executive support – in short, happy execs and happy technical geniuses, and an organization that wins.
Vivek decided to pilot the program.
Three weeks after we delivered Designing Presentations for an Executive Audiences, I wrote to Vivek asking how their presentations were going.
He said, “Total transformation. I sent my smartest engineers to you for training. The problem was that they were ‘too smart’ and completely lost their audience when they presented to executives. Now they can create the depth of understanding with anyone, with any audience, inside or outside our organization. The senior leadership team is ecstatic.”
And we heard from the geniuses: “I couldn’t believe it. For the first time as I presented to the senior executives, they were all nodding as I spoke.”
Everyone is happy.
Even though my story focused on Vivek’s geniuses, the skills above are essential if you want to create extraordinary outcomes at the executive level with your presentations. These skills are the ones that give you greatest value with that audience.
Knowing how to present your message so it gets heard and understood puts extraordinary outcomes within your reach.
If Vivek’s technical geniuses can do it, so can you.
Be the cause!
Ingrid