6 Tactics To Talk Effectively To Higher Ups; Be Persuasive Like A Boss

Learning how to talk effectively to higher-ups is a big deal for your confidence and career prospects. Talking to upper management is daunting, scary and intimidating. It's hard to get their attention. They come across as impatient and abrupt, yet somehow they know exactly which questions to ask to find the weaknesses in your argument. It is almost as if the higher-ups expect you to talk their language to get their attention. Before they take you seriously, you have to get past the barriers they put up. As soon as you learn how to communicate effectively with higher-ups, you instantly get on their radar. They take you a lot more seriously, they listen to your ideas, opinions and solutions and they start to see you as promotion potential. You will also feel a lot more confident. Your fear and unease will go, leaving you relaxed and yourself, which makes talking effectively to higher-ups a lot easier. You'll build better relationships and gain a lot more trust from these senior managers. I have six tactics to talk effectively to higher-ups and these are, firstly, focus on impact and results, not process. Secondly, get straight to the point. Third, talk to their top concerns. Fourth, work out the flaws before they do. Fifth, believe in what you're saying. And then sixth, be open and honest. For each of these, I'll be sharing tips and approaches to put each into practice as quickly and as painlessly as possible. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here, Enhanced.Training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build higher performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below, as well as the video timestamps, so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first tactic to talk effectively to higher-ups is to focus on impact and benefits, not process. Bosses care about results. They care about the impact or benefit your idea or solution will give to them, their team or the business. Impacts and benefits are how their personal performance is measured. Activity only matters to them in terms of how much more likely a result or benefit will be achieved. Activity and the processes to get the results and benefits are your responsibility. Higher-ups only want to hear about them if they doubt you'll deliver the results and benefits, or they want to check if they can think of a better or quicker way of achieving the same result. To talk effectively to higher-ups, focus first on the impact and benefits that you'll bring to them, their team or the business. Add numbers to the impact or benefit to communicate effectively with higher-ups. You need to make what you say specific, not general. If you can talk financial impacts and benefits with higher-ups, i.e. your revenue, costs or profits, brilliant. If not, talk in terms of sales made, conversion percentage increased, or leads created, or efficiency gained, or faults reduced. Be specific and use numbers to clearly define the impact or benefit in a clearly measurable way. The second tactic to talk effectively to higher-ups is to get straight to the point. Upper management is time poor. They don't have the time or energy to decipher long-winded, unstructured communication. They want you to make what you tell them easy to take in, understand, and then action. Tell the manager or leader what you want. Talk in terms of a decision, permission, a course of action, or resources needed. Be clear what you want from them and communicate this at the start. Then you can go into the context followed by the detail of why you're asking. When you communicate with higher-ups, give them time to think and ask questions. A clear structure helps you talk clearly and concisely to upper management. Before you speak to higher-ups, plan out how you're going to summarise what you want to say. How to make clear and concise points like a boss would requires you to think through the key and relevant points before talking to them. A good exercise is to write down what you want to say, which forces you to articulate concepts clearly. Check the structure of what you have written. Does it flow logically from one point to the next? Does it have a start, middle, and end? Now try to improve the flow and structure. Once you're happy, start trying to reduce the words used. Write and rewrite. Keep removing words until you start to lose the meaning of what you want to say. Finally, read what you have written out loud. How does it sound? Ask yourself, is it clear and understandable? Make your final amendments. This process will feel long-winded to start with. The more you practice doing this, the quicker and quicker you'll get at it. Eventually, you'll be able to create clear, concise communications which get straight to the point in a few minutes, largely in your head. Keep practicing so you speak clearly, concisely, and get straight to the point. The third tactic to communicate with higher-ups is talk to their top concerns. The better you know your audience, the more effectively you will communicate with them. Start talking about how you can solve a pressing problem a manager has, and they will eagerly listen to you. Talk about a higher priority for you, but a low priority for them, and you'll be lucky to get any of their attention. Always make the time to work out what the boss's priorities are. Ask colleagues who know them better. Find out what activities and projects they or their teams are working on. Look up their team's objectives. Figure out how they are helping the company achieve strategy, targets, and goals. Align your work, ideas, and solutions with these goals if you want to get heard by senior management. Frame what you want in terms of how it helps them or their teams. Don't communicate the benefits to you, communicate the benefits to them. The fourth tactic to talk effectively to higher-ups is to work out the flaws before they do. Senior management and bosses have this uncanny knack of spotting any flaws in ideas, solutions, arguments, and data. They have learnt how to ask the right questions to expose problems and issues. Bosses will nearly always ask a few questions to check that you have spotted the obvious issues, and hopefully the less obvious ones too. If you don't give good answers to their questions asked, don't expect to get any further. Put in the time to look at your idea, solution, argument, and data from different perspectives. Try to put yourself in their shoes and work out what questions they might ask. Work out how you're going to answer these questions. When you spot any flaws or weaknesses, work out how you will avoid or mitigate these. Being aware of the potential problems is half the battle. Work out the flaws before the higher-ups do, and you instantly will gain more credibility, trust, and confidence in their eyes. If you can't answer a question, make sure that you get back to them quickly with the answer. Don't try to bluff your way through. Preparing in this way does take time. It takes a lot less time than having a flaw spotted that you didn't know about. You'll then have a ton of extra questions to answer. If you get through these, you'll then need to work out solutions and changes under pressure. Finally and hardest of all, you'll need to rebuild their damaged confidence in you. Consistently spot the flaws before they do and you steadily reduce the questions and challenges while gaining a lot of trust and respect. The fifth tactic to talk effectively to higher-ups is to believe in what you're saying. Most bosses know that the more belief you have in what you are talking about or asking, the higher the chance you've done the hard work to arrive at a great idea or have built a good solution. Your bosses have been in your shoes and have learnt these lessons the hard way. Bosses look carefully at a person's confidence. The more confident you are, the less your bosses will question and challenge you. The best way to gain confidence is to do your homework before talking to higher-ups. Carefully put together the impacts and benefits of what you're communicating or asking for. Go through everything and work out any flaws in your idea, data or arguments. Plan out solutions or mitigations to these. Summarise so that you can talk clearly, concisely and with an easy to understand structure. Gather and organise the data to back up what you're talking about or asking for. Then get straight to the point. To talk effectively to higher-ups, do the work to build your confidence so that you really believe in what you're saying and you're prepared for their questions. The sixth tactic to communicate with higher-ups is to be open and honest. Building trust and credibility with upper management takes time and effort. Try to pull the wool over their eyes and you can lose it all in seconds. Good bosses can smell BS a mile away, so be honest with what you say. Answer their questions truthfully and accurately rather than evasively. The minute you start trying to hide things or reduce their visibility of what is happening, you lose their trust and confidence in you. I guarantee you this will leave you worse off. When you have done the background work properly, you don't need to hide the issues, omit information or be dishonest. The long-term damage to your credibility and senior management's trust and confidence in you is just not worth trying to fool bosses. Try and your career progress will stop. Instead, put the work in and create strong ideas, solutions, arguments and data sets. You will be massively better off in the long run. Always be open and honest. So in summary, talking effectively to higher-ups is a skill to be mastered. Communicating with upper management starts off feeling scary, intimidating and daunting. Implement each of these tactics we've been through today and it won't be long before you start feeling a lot more comfortable to talk clearly and concisely to upper management. Your communication will become a lot more interesting and persuasive to your bosses. We've been through these six tactics to talk effectively to higher-ups. Firstly, focus on the impact and benefits, not the process. Secondly, get straight to the point. Third, talk to their top concerns. Fourth, work out the flaws before they do. Fifth, believe in what you're saying. And sixth, be honest and open. If you have any questions on the six tactics to talk effectively to higher-ups, please leave them in the comments below and I'll get back to you. Don't forget to check out the resources in the description too. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.