30
Presenting to the Senior Management
“In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.”
–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The CEO vs You
Mr Swamy, the CEO of QRS Technologies, an automobile spare parts manufacturer, is naturally a very busy man. You are a junior process engineer and you have been developing a new forging process using a new instrument. Your immediate boss thinks it is a good idea for you to present your work to the CEO, make a case for the purchase of this Rs 12 crore new instrument, and get his blessings to incorporate your process in the mass production lines.
After much dancing around, they schedule you in an executive technology meeting and you spend weeks preparing gleaming slides and polishing your pitch. On the appointed day, you put on your best tie and step into the heavy, static atmosphere of the executive conference room, ready to bamboozle the company bigwigs crowding the room. Suddenly you feel uncomfortable and nervous. Perhaps you are at the wrong place.
Your turn comes and you start to talk like you are in a trance. The CEO is so near you that you can reach and touch him. You make eye contact with him because you had read somewhere about making eye contact. But you didn’t expect that he too could look you in your eyes and unnerve you. Your pep and confidence are slowly beginning to vaporize. Not once does he smile or do anything to make you feel comfortable.
You are barely warming up, when his cell phone rings relentlessly and he rudely whips it up and answers it, leaving the whole conference room paralysed for the next five minutes. Barely a slide later, his administrative assistant barges in and kidnaps him for an interminable period and you are left to speak to a bunch of people who have very little stake or interest in the matter. Just when you are getting half-way comfortable, he walks in and asks that you continue from where you left. And right when you went back to that point, he gets his next phone call. Talk of non-linear narration.
Somehow you muddle through your talk. There is even a three-minute period where you find your flow. But he interrupts you constantly and derails your talk from your prepared sequence and no matter how hard you try to explain, he feigns ignorance and knuckle-headedness. At one point, you find yourself explaining the second law of thermodynamics that has almost nothing to do with anything you wanted to say. He thinks your explanations are poor. He asks for data on this, data on that, graphs and pie charts that you never knew would be needed. You become alternatively defensive and apologetic and your breathing becomes heavy. In one of your slides you have the name of the CTO of the company wrong (you were cutting and pasting from an older material and this inadvertently crept in) and he takes you to task for it.
‘How many years have you been working here?’ he dresses you down ‘You have to pay attention to what you do.’
You think you could get help from your ‘allies’ sitting in the audience, such as your immediate boss. But they too join him and laugh at you. You look confused and foolish. Then the CEO leaves abruptly with a ‘your case is not even close. Do your homework and get back to me later’ kind of look. All your six months of solid effort—and the chance to gain visibility in the organization—are frittered away in a few minutes of poor communication with the man that matters the most.
Betrayed and humbled, you silently curse the CEO and return to the mundane.
Call it an opportunity of a lifetime or an ordeal that tests every nerve in your body, the rare occasion you get to present in front of your senior management is perhaps the ultimate test of your communication powers. Snapshot 30.1, although highly exaggerated, illustrates how a ‘thoroughly vertical communication’ with a CEO is fraught with landmines and crossfire. To win this war, we need to adopt a slightly different communication strategy, the essence of which is outlined in the following thumb rules and observations.
Much of What we are going to say about presentation also applies to the other big ticket activity that happens for the benefit of the senior management—namely the live ‘demo’ of products and prototypes that you may be asked to give every once in a while—and we will not discuss it separately.
30.1 Before the Presentation
Make sure you are aware of the following ground realities as you prepare your presentation.
Senior managers are a very busy bunch of people: Swamy and company are very busy people, who can’t seem to have enough of phone calls and meetings. Often they multitask and pop in and out of several parallel meetings. They go out of town all of a sudden and will have no qualms about cancelling your appointment. You almost never get their undivided attention, even if you tie them down to their chairs. So, the best you can hope for is to try and get their divided attention between their phone calls and disappearing acts and make the best use of their limited airtime.
Preparation is everything: Spend a lot of time in preparation and organizing your materials and getting the right sequence for your talk—and on how best to handle interruptions. If it is possible, have a rehearsal before a crucial presentation. Make sure you run your slides through spell-check, verify that you have used the standard, official templates and also make sure your dates, names, numbers are all accurate and current, unlike the time when you had the CTO’s name wrong in your slide show.
Pay attention to all the technical details. Make sure your flood of data is organized and that you don’t get drowned in it yourself. Present your case in such a light that he realizes that your role is critical to the company and that you add tremendous value.
Gather a lot of related data that you may not even get a chance to present. The idea is that often a senior-management presentation could turn into a scenario-building activity and all kinds of risk-reward, ‘what-if’ and cost-benefit analysis will be performed ad hoc. A CEO, like Mr Swamy, will look for several ways to convince himself because he doesn’t want to make a Rs 12 crore mistake. Go through such analysis and arguments in your mock session before the actual presentation.
If you are the messenger bringing in bad news, also give him a detailed analysis of what happened and your suggestions on how to mitigate it or recover from it. (For further details on reporting bad news, refer to Chapter 29.) Merely reporting the bad news and presuming that he will take care of the problem himself is poor judgement. He may be a very smart man, but he doesn’t have the bandwidth to get into the nitty-gritties of the problem. You will have to shortlist the choices and guide him through the nuances, so that he can take effective executive decisions.
Basically, the senior manager wants you to get into his mind and speak his language. And he will be very frustrated and annoyed if there is a major disconnect with you. Your preparation should focus on his concerns.
Your talk should have an ‘executive’ structure: Give your talk a pyramidal structure, like newspaper stories. The first slide should pretty much contain everything you are going to say in the rest of your presentation. So even if you don’t get through the entire presentation, the main points are not lost. Also, prioritize your points and let first things be first. You should have enough supplementary information that you can potentially have a follow-up discussion, should time and interest permit. If all this looks familiar to you, it is no surprise. These are exactly the tenets of a good presentation discussed in earlier chapters. ‘tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them’ is something that you have heard before. You have to muster all these skills to the highest level when you are presenting to the CEO or the senior management. If you are a regular presenter to the top management, you will eventually settle into a pattern and your slides will have a standard template and feel. But if this is going to be your first time, talk to your more experienced colleagues on the format and design of the slides and the presentation style. Basically, your presentation must make a nice package.
Your presentation should be modular: The CEO is not likely to stay through your entire presentation and watch you go slide by slide. You should try to grab his attention whenever you can get it. Instead of a long, linear narration, make your presentation modular to suit the CEO’s short and highly fragmented attention-span. Your nuggets of wisdom should hit him like darts, right on target. Cluster-bomb him with several sound bites and takeaways, so that he leaves the meeting content and if needed, he will be able to later piece together the bigger story by himself. Repeat your main points over and over. If you paused your talk because he got interrupted, refresh him on where you left off. You usually don’t have time for long-winded explanations, philosophical discussions or to campaign for your off-beat ideas. But if you are smart, in whatever minutes are available to you, you can still impress him with everything he expects, and more.
Your presentation should use a lot of graphs, visuals, analogies, etc.: Like a little kid, the CEO too loves colours, pictures, pie-charts and anything that breaks down complex data into intuitive inter-relationships. Remember that he is not an expert in your field and so you may have to interpret your pictures and graphs and explain to him what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. It is often useful to show him some benchmarks so that he knows what to compare your data to. He loves sigmas and statistics too.
The big bosses love standard pictorial tools like the Gantt charts, project network diagrams, flow-charts, decision-tree diagrams, etc. And therefore, become familiar with these and cast your information in these forms.
30.2 The Presentation Proper
During the actual presentation, be aware of the following points.
Get his attention, create a rapport: Given how limited his concentration is, try to lock him in a virtual strangle-hold when you have him in front of you. Make eye-contact with him and don’t let go, even if you periodically move your gaze through the rest of the audience. Your body language should indicate that you are talking just to him. Address him by name every once in a while or drop in phrases like ‘you have always said…’, ‘in the last all-employee meeting you emphasized …’, etc. Agree with him on his points and try to connect to his understanding of the situation.
Does he fully understand the new forging machine? Does he understand any machines? Remember that you are the window into this technical topic for him and a good rapport is absolutely necessary to gently guide him through the maze. Slow down or speed up to conform to his speed. Be dramatic (as necessary), modulate your voice effectively and gesticulate so that his attention stays fixed on you.
Give it to him straight: Present your case in simple, plain English. Don’t beat around the bush. No stories, preamble or embellishment with jokes or side-bar discussions are required. (But be open to such discussions, should the situation warrant it.) When briefing him and giving him project updates, remember there should be no misinformation or selective or partial information.
If you have bad news to report, give it without mincing words. Don’t quietly slip it in or sugarcoat it. He is smart enough to see through. Tell him everything in the level he wants. Remember, he is your super-boss and he has the right to know. Be very focused and even if the discussion wanders off in a different direction, try to steer it back to where you left off.
Numbers can greatly enhance your communication. If you say that your Rs 12 crore machine can result in an eventual savings of Rs 3 crores per year, it might make a greater impact on a CEO like Mr Swamy. Similarly, if you can quantify the bad news and give it to him in terms of numbers (‘delay of 3 days’, ‘cost over-run of Rs 10 lakhs’, etc.) he would grasp the magnitude of things better.
Be prepared to explain the very basics: The CEO bunch is thorough and methodical in wanting to digest what you are presenting.
They may not be rocket scientists, but they would want to understand rockets. They are sticklers for details and sometimes don’t mind if the entire discussion gets hijacked along a totally different path. They will often want the core concepts and basics to be explained to them. So be prepared to hold an impromptu 101 class.
When you do get down to explaining the basics, remember that they are smart people—otherwise they would not have risen to the top—and you need to explain only till a little light bulb gets turned on in their heads. They have their own ways of comprehending and systematizing knowledge and so, don’t force anything on them. They know the big picture perfectly—and now they want to know more about the small piece of the puzzle you are holding and its relationship to everything else. In the bargain, people like Mr Swamy might also get to understand the second law of thermodynamics.
Get a lot of help: Plant your trusted colleagues in the audience. Enlist your immediate manager. Have support from your ranks—people who can be your back-up, argue your point or show alternate support data. If possible, keep some ‘trump cards’ ready, that lend complete finesse to your argument.
Make the time to meet with other managers in other functional teams who might benefit from your new forging process and get them to rally for you. But be forewarned that they will distance themselves from you if you make major goofs. As much as you want to make an impression on the upper management, they too want to look good.
Don’t get flustered or confused and don’t collapse: The CEO-bunch is also a very impatient lot. Make sure you are not on a slippery slope and ruin everything. If the big executive chews you up, hang in there, accept guilt and wear your best put-on smile. Only the less resolute will wilt under pressure and give up.
When he says, ‘go back to the previous slide’ it is usually a warning sign that he has spotted some glitch in your presentation. When that happens, take a deep breath and wait for the assault. Remember that you don’t win by being cocky and combative, but by enamouring and gratifying him.
The super boss-underling relationship is highly unequal. So, don’t take their insults and merciless dressing down personally. They do it to many other people in the organization as well and it is almost a part of their job description. Don’t talk back to them or interrupt them when they are talking. Take their feedback as positive criticism and offer to bring the required information the next time. Take copious notes on what they want and arrange for your colleagues in the crowd to also take down notes. If you can think on your feet and ad lib your way out of the situation, then well and good. But don’t get confused and confuse everyone else—or the big boss will start to lose confidence in you.
30.3 In Summary
Being at the big dance with a big boss creates interesting dynamics. It pitches your preparedness against his due diligence, your depth of knowledge against his breadth, your technical expertise against his managerial concerns and above all, it is a battle between your communication skills and his communication style. The keys to an effective presentation are total familiarity with the technical details and the ability to read his mind.
Who knows? in the next go-around, you may charm Mr Swamy so much that he not only buys you that forging machine, but also asks you to be on the committee to look into the modernization of the entire plant.
We summarize this chapter with a checklist of some of the key points to remember about presenting to the senior management.
- Do you have a complete set of presentation material—and in order?
- Is it reasonably simple, vivid and does it have a lot of pictures, graphs and other easy-to-understand objects?
- Have you carefully read through your material and eliminated silly typographical or factual errors in your slides?
- Do you have a clear idea of how long you have? Have you planned to use that time fully, and not ask for more time?
- Are you mentally prepared not to have the time you had planned for? In other words, should you have less time than what you had planned, have you prioritized what you would like to highlight?
- Have you translated all the benefits into an approximate rupee amount, instead of subjective, iffy, qualitative terms?
- Have you made sure you are not presenting an unrealistically rosy picture that is not rooted in reality?
- Have you got a concise and pointed summary of your presentation in which you have clearly articulated what is the action plan and what support you need from the senior management?
- Have you made a short summary report of your material for him to take home?
Fig. 30.1
- Do you also have a bunch of support data and extra, related materials handy, in case he wants to look at them?
- Did you go through a ‘mock presentation’ with your colleagues and immediate manager?
- Did you bring a few of your friends and immediate colleagues to the real presentation to support you, in case you need help during your presentation?
- Are you perfectly relaxed and loose on the day of presentation?
- And finally, do you know why you are making this presentation and where this fits in with the big picture?