Communicating With Executives: 9 Simple Techniques

If you've ever finished a meeting and thought, ah, that made sense in my head, but it didn't land very well, well, this video is for you. Because I don't think corporate professionals struggle so much with intelligence, but sometimes we do struggle with clarity when communicating to executives. In the next few minutes, I'm going to share nine different communication techniques that I learned in strategy and in management consulting, and I still use today. And I'm going to structure it in three different sections. The first is how to speak to executives. The second is how to create slides for executives. And the third is how to write to executives. So let's start with how to speak to executives. I learned this first technique as a management consultant, and I still use it to this very day. And it's the idea that the mind craves the bigger picture. It needs to see the overall structure before it can understand the detail. So when you're communicating, start with the big picture. And what that means is, if you're running a meeting, start with why you're all there. If you're giving an update, start with what prompted the work. If you're proposing a solution, start with the problem that you're solving. And if you're facilitating a workshop, start with the outcome that you want to achieve. And this is especially important when you're speaking to an executive, because by the time you sit down with them, they've probably come from back-to-back meetings, they're talking about really critical things, and you're probably not top of mind. So you need to start by saying things like, what is the situation, why does it matter, and why is it important to them? But here's the trick, keep the context short. You don't want to go into a long diatribe about all the things that you've done. Think in terms of minimal viable context. What's the minimum amount of context you need to give to really sell this idea and get their buy-in? And when you are ready to start talking about the details, there's a specific structure you should use. So you've given the context and your executive knows exactly why they're here and why it's important. So now you can dive into the details. And there's a very particular way you should do this. If you're like me, at university, you are basically told to logically build up to the answer. So you present the data, then you walk through the analysis, then you overview the results, and finally, at the very end, do you actually discuss the implications of what you've found. But that's backwards. Executives want the answer first and the reasoning second. So with an executive, you basically start with the recommendation, the decision, or the outcome, and only after that do you explain the rationale. The more clear you are, the more direct you are, the better. And then when you've given the ask up front, only then do you follow with the details. But there's a very specific way you should communicate those details, and here it is. It's so easy to get lost when you're trying to explain complex details to an executive, so you should use something called signposts. And signposts are basically verbal cues that explain where you are in what you're saying and what's about to come next. There are a ton of different ways that you can signpost. Some other examples are things like, There were three reasons why. First, second, third. We've made good progress so far, and we have a clear pathway forward. So far with X, and next with Y. And I see two options here. Option one is X, option two is Y. Let me walk you through each. And as you can see, in every single case, you're providing a mental structure for the things that you're saying. And this has two main benefits. So the first benefit is it reduces the mental effort for the executive that you're speaking to. And the second benefit is it helps you not ramble. Now, I will say this. When I signpost, I like to keep my lists to only three items. And look, don't tell me why, but for whatever reason, three items, it feels like the right balance between being convincing and having enough data to support what you're saying, and also not saying too much and being confusing for your executive. Now I want to share my three most powerful tips for building slides for executives. And for this section, I'm going to use a real McKinsey presentation as an example. Now, executives don't read slides like you and I. They scan for meaning. And what that means is if you put multiple messages on one slide, it becomes really hard for them to quickly grasp what the slide is saying and you lose them. So here's the rule. One slide equals one message. It's not one slide equals one topic. It's not one slide equals a few related points. It's one slide, one message. Let's take a look at this McKinsey slide, which is from their project called Addressing Homelessness in King County. And this is slide three, which is showing that homelessness in King County continues to increase. And that's the single message of this slide. Now, importantly, this message is communicated as an action title and the action title lives in a slide header and it communicates the so what of the slide. This means that the slide header is not describing the slide. It's not saying homelessness over time. It's communicating the so what, which is that homelessness in King County continues to increase. And this rule of one slide equals one message applies to every slide in this McKinsey presentation. So if you can't summarize your slide in terms of one simple message, then you're doing way too much. But that's about individual slides. How do we put those slides together to tell a story? Storytelling is one of the most critical parts of building slides for executives and it's actually a surprisingly popular topic. I've got a video, my most popular video. It's on storytelling. It has almost a million views and it's also one of my most popular corporate training programs as well. So storylining is very important and the storyline comes from the action titles. So if you were to put all the slides together, one next to the other and just read the action titles, those action titles together should tell the complete story of the presentation. So in our McKinsey example, you can read the storyline by just reading the action titles. Homelessness continues to increase in King County. More than 22,000 households experience homelessness each year. Seattle's economy, population and incomes have grown quickly. But despite that, the housing supply and average household incomes have not kept pace with job growth or rent decreases and so on. And taken to the extreme, you should be able to wipe all the content off your slide bodies. Just read those action titles and it should communicate to the executive, your storyline. But how do you make sure that your storyline is actually bulletproof? Well, let me tell you the next technique. So once you have your slides with action titles, you need to support those action titles with data that's in the slide body. And it's absolutely critical that everything that you say in those action titles is fully supported by data. Because if an executive sees even one slide with a claim in an action title that's not supported by data, they don't just doubt that slide, they doubt the validity of the entire presentation. So in our McKinsey example, you can see that it says, though the King County point in time count dropped in 2019, homelessness continues to increase. So we are looking for data to support the drop in 2019 and then the continued increase. And here on the left, we can see the drop and here on the right, we can see it continues to increase. And that's what I'm talking about. Everything in the action title is fully supported by data in the slide body. And if you do that for every slide in your presentation, there is nothing in your storyline that can be disputed by the executive. By the way, if you like the techniques in this video, my training programs teach corporate professionals how to think and communicate like a senior leader. And I'll put a link in the description below. Anyway, now I wanna share my three most powerful techniques for communicating in a written form with executives. I'm so guilty of sharing too much information. I just love getting into the detail, understanding the complexities and sharing that with others. And in fact, when I was at university, I spent five years studying electrical activity in people's brains. Painfully detailed stuff, but honestly, I bloody loved it. And during that time, my supervisors taught me to communicate in a very specific way. And what they said was, I should start with first principles and then build up to the conclusion. And looking back, that makes perfect sense in academia, but it doesn't make sense in the corporate world because executives don't wanna learn with you. They want to quickly understand what's important and quickly make decisions. That means you need to flip your writing. You need to take the bottom line and bring it up to the top. And what that basically means is, you need to start with the thing that you're building up to. So for example, you need to start with the request for a decision or start with the recommendations that you're making or start with the specific status update that you're giving. Whatever it is that you're building up to, you should start with that. And only once you've done that, do you follow with the evidence, information or rationale. It's very simple actually to what we learned about in verbal communication. You start with the answer or the ask. You start with the most important thing, then you follow with the information that supports it. And if we don't bring the bottom line up front, we end up talking about the things that are not as important and we end up rambling as well. One of the other things I did a lot at university was write journal articles. And as you can imagine, super dense. They contain walls of text that you basically need a PhD to understand and that's not the right thing for corporate communication. In fact, if an executive was to look at a wall of text like that, they would immediately switch off. So you need to break it up and to break it up, you use a bunch of different techniques. These are things like, you use headers to organize sections, you use bullet points for lists of items or options and you can also use selective bolding and other formatting to highlight the most critical information. So if we don't use those techniques, our writing could look something like this. And look, I'm not gonna read this end to end. Feel free to hit pause and read it yourself, but it's very clear that it's a long, dense piece of text. But let's now compare it to an email with structure. And I'm sure you'd agree, the second example is much clearer. But the trick is, don't go overboard. You gotta find the balance because too much formatting can actually make things a little bit more confusing. So just use enough formatting to make your writing clear. Break up those paragraphs, simplify things, but just don't go too far. And that leads us to our final written technique. So one thing that so many corporate professionals are guilty of doing is using unnecessary or overly complex words. And honestly, in my experience, there's two reasons why they do it. So one is people do it because they want to hide the fact that they don't understand the detail. So they use big words to kind of mask the clarity that they should be communicating. And the second is because they think that it's more professional to use bigger, more complex words. And actually it's the opposite. Every unnecessary or overly complex word actually takes away from clarity. So we need to trim unapologetically. And that means you have to do things like remove paragraphs that are not integral to the meaning. So this is stuff like unnecessary context, repeated points, or background information that we already know. And the second thing we need to do is remove words within sentences that don't earn their place. Every word needs to earn its position in that sentence. Otherwise it should get cut. If you're interested in learning more about how to think and communicate like a senior executive, you can check out some of my other videos on the screen now, or check out my training programs which I'll link to in the description below.