Presenting to the Big Dogs

Training & Development, Oct, 2001 by Marsha Redmon

How to hold your own in executive ranks.

If you work in a corporate training department or consult to one, odds are you're expected to make presentations to the company's executive team or board of directors. If you aren't now, you soon will be. One reason is that training departments and training consultants are being asked with more frequency to tie their learning and performance goals to their company's overall business goals, and they're being asked to participate in executive-level strategic planning sessions.

Are you ready to present to your organization's executive management team? Imagine this:

You're standing in your company's richly paneled boardroom, surrounded by executives, in front of the largest conference table you've ever seen. You're prepared with your 12-slide, 35-minute PowerPoint presentation. After all, you train trainers and you've been leading seminars for years. You tell yourself "This is just another audience."

You begin. Less than three minutes into your presentation, the executives start asking questions-- questions you'd planned to answer near the end. You know what you'd do if this were a class of trainees, but what do you do when your CEO wants you to skip to the end-now?

Here are several techniques for making your ascent into the thin air of the executive strata faster and more comfortable.

Get the inside scoop. That probably sounds suspiciously like "know your audience." It is but to a new degree. Of course you need to know your top executives' expectations. Double check your understanding of what information they want and in how much detail.

Now the new wrinkle: Gather as much inside information as you can about the executives' personal preferences regarding presentations. Do they like 20-minute PowerPoint shows, or do they think PowerPoint's a prop for bad speakers. Maybe they prefer to listen for two minutes and then ask rapid-fire questions. Imagine the nightmare of creating a 20-minute presentation with PowerPoint and the exec team turns out to be a rapid-fire question kind of group. Start polishing your resume.

But just how do you gather that kind of information? Ask anyone who has been to executive or board meetings regularly, and talk with the CEO'S assistant. He knows his boss's preferences and has probably heard her and the board complain about poor presentations. Ask other division heads who've made the kind of presentation you're being asked to make, with the caveat that people without the skills at reading an audience might not know all of the answers about why some presenters have bombed before the board.

If you think that's a waste of time, consider that one Fortune 50 firm traditionally used only overhead projectors in board meetings, long after PowerPoint became common. PowerPoint wasn't welcome, and anyone who used it was considered an outsider. In another example, a Fortune 100 CEO was known to flip to the last page of any presentation to see the summary slide with the bottom-line figures. A savvy manager noticed and put the bottom-line numbers on the front page the next time she presented. Her credibility soared.

In my first year of law school, I had a street-smart study partner who spent time talking with the top third-year students who'd had our professors during their first year. The scoop was that our torts professor gave grade points every time you indented a paragraph on the handwritten essay exams. We tried it and aced torts. Inside scoop plus preparation is an unbeatable combination.

Make it short. Executives tend to be busy, pressured people with the attention span of a gnat. In my work as a media consultant, I've conducted media training with hundreds of executives and lawyers--two tough audiences. I can tell you without hesitation that higher-level professionals will think you're competent and worth listening to if you get to the bottom line fast and know when to stop talking. They don't like to suffer through longwinded explanations or reams of detail.

Respond immediately to body language. As a seasoned trainer, you know how to do that better than anyone. Reading the members of your executive audience throughout your presentation is the most important thing you can do. If you notice them squirming or looking distracted, change tactics or topics immediately.

For instance, you can skip to the end if you're speaking on a minor issue or you're almost finished. Or stop and ask, "Any questions?" That lets them steer you back onto the track they want. It also shows you're responsive to their needs.

Be flexible but organized. Trainers are used to being in charge of the room. That's obvious, but it bears mentioning. We run the show. We organize our workshops the way we want to, and usually the people we work with do things our way. But the dynamics of presenting to executives are different.

Training traditionally requires some rigid organizing and control, but those approaches don't work in boardrooms these days. Flexibility and simplicity are in. I speak from the experience of training a lot of executives. Go with their flow. If their body language shows that they don't want to hear any more about e-learning, move on--even if you have five more slides and some nifty numbers.