Almost every person in charge of a team has had a similar experience. With only a few minutes to present to senior management, you must communicate a proposed project on behalf of your team. You labor until you perfect the delivery, only to see that the executives were unmoved by your proposal. Why?
I have found some excellent techniques to help gain senior level support through my work with change leaders over the past ten years. I have also seen more than one attempt flop. I decided to talk directly with several senior level leaders both in corporate and public organizations in order to discover best practices in presentations to senior management.
One thing nearly every executive noted was that team leaders eager to pitch a proposal for support, be it money or otherwise have a consistent tendency to offer far too much information in their presentations. Many proposals never make it past the proposal stage because the executives were too busy and consumed with their current projects to learn every detail of a new proposal. Most senior managers dont care to be involved in every detail that makes up the project your team is working on. They trust you to a number of decisions related to that proposal and dont want to have to be part of that process.
Here are three proven strategies to have a presentation to senior management that will limit the presentation to the most important details.
1. Summarize your main points in a Power Point presentation.
Because its purpose is to visually present your talk in short bullet point format, a PowerPoint deck presentation is an excellent tool for your proposal. Use stories and anecdotes to bring your main points alive, but keep the information on the Power Point presentation to the key points you want senior management to take away from the presentation. Each slide should take no more than three minutes of your overall presentation. Yes, have the information to back up your main points, but use it only if you are asked a specific question about that issue.
2. Categorize the key activities and objectives into subgroups.
In a presentation I witnessed recently, the team leader included every detail of the tasks his team intended for 2009. While he had hoped to strengthen his case with a lot of details, it really just irritated the executives instead. One senior manager even spoke up and told the presenter that they had no interested in hearing what activities the team intended to undertake. The only thing important to them was the key highlights.
Separating goals and tasks into related groups is a helpful technique. One example of this might be to state in your introduction that in the coming year, your groups goal is to focus on cost savings, making processes more efficient and creating a stronger bottom line. Then, your presentation would consist of giving examples of how you intend to be successful in each of these three areas. Using this approach will help senior management to focus on how the proposals you suggest for your team will impact the entire company, and allow them to decide if these are the areas that they want to stress in the coming year.
3. Briefly describe what you need from senior management to press forward.
Too many presentations to executive teams are informational in tone. The team or project leader provides an update and asks for any questions. They hope (and pray) that the executives will somehow jump to offering funding and support, which almost never happens.
A better approach is to end the presentation with a visual that describes what you are looking to senior management to support. Perhaps this will be a financial commitment, a key decision only they can make, or additional resources to complete the project. True, there is always the possibility that what you ask for will be denied, it is a much better situation to understand right away if what you need to be successful is a possibility.
In the 90s, a group of external consultants went to work with General Electric to derive a change acceleration process. As part of that process, the team found a four step process that worked very well in short, effective presentations:
* Our project or initiative is about . . . * It is critical to the company because . . . * What this means for you is . . . . * Heres how you can help . . .
Use this approach both in one-on-one conversations with stakeholders and in your formal pitches and presentations. You will find that your ability to argue for your case will improve as you learn to focus on these key elements.
By keeping your pitches to senior management short and crisp you will be able to focus on strategy, not tasks. When you are clear about what you need senior management will understand up front what it is your team proposes, what you need from them, and how it will help the organization.
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