Do you struggle to keep your talk on track when you present to executives? Perhaps you lose control of the conversation, and get taken off topic. In this episode of Perfect Presentations Podcast, we'll explain what you might be doing wrong, and share techniques for establishing order from the start, and retaining it as you present.
Presenting to a group of strong-willed executives is no easy task, whether they are equals or superiors. But you can win the day and ensure your message is heard.
Discussed in this episode is a Global Executive Study from quartz.com. You can find it here.
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Prefer to read? Transcript:
It’s episode two of P3 -- the Perfect Presentations Podcast. It took me all of one episode to want a shorthand for Perfect Presentations Podcast. P3 seems a pretty good fit, so we’ll see how that feels. One thing I’m enjoying about the podcast is the flexibility to change and I expect that to continue as I hear feedback from clients and others about what they—and you—find most valuable about learning better presentation skills.
Today’s topic is How to Present to Executives. I suspect that were it not for the feedback we get from clients I probably wouldn’t have prioritized this topic, but it’s become sort of a greatest hits request. We get asked this at every training session, even before we bring it up. Recently we were in California training a team of financial executives. When we asked what kind of challenges they face, one executive spoke up immediately and said he never got more than 2-3 minutes into a presentation before the executives in the room derailed his conversation and took it over. And more often than not he never got back to his point. He had to follow them down the rabbit hole because he lost control and couldn’t get it back.
Something weird happens in meetings that doesn’t happen in most of polite society. Imagine you were out to dinner with a group of friends and you start to tell them a story about your kid’s baseball team, or the crazy wedding reception you went to last weekend. At what point during your story would one of your friends interrupt you and start talking about how they’d rather hear about your vacation instead of the wedding reception. Uh, never! And if they did, everyone’s jaws would drop, right?
But there’s a power dynamic at play in meetings, with leadership at the top. There’s an expectation that they may interrupt and take you off track. There’s that saying that we serve at the pleasure of the king. That dynamic is very much at play in a meeting.
In our first podcast we talked about understanding your audience. That will be very helpful to understanding how to present to executives, so if you haven’t listened to that, it might be worth your time. Every leader is different. But you’ll see one common thread throughout the leadership ranks. They tend to challenge your ideas. To test and poke at the premise you put forth. That’s part of their job of course. Even if you’re a trusted lieutenant they’re going to do their due diligence, because they’re evaluating your ideas against the lens of making the right decision for the company. That’s never a small task.
There’s also a conventional wisdom that says that you need to keep it short. Keep it short! Cut to the chase. Executives are busy and won’t listen to anything but the key takeaways. We’ve seen a titanic shift in marketing recently toward short-form content. In a world of social media and YouTube videos, no one has patience to sit through anything long anymore, says the conventional wisdom. The website Quartz recently published a global executive study, what they describe as – what’s it say here, just a sec--a study of the media habits of the word’s smartest, busiest people. I’ll link to it in the description. They interviewed more than 1,300 execs across the world. If you’re at all interested in this kind of thing, it’s a really fascinating view into media consumption for this audience.
