Missing from this (possibly it’s in the author’s book which I’ve not yet read but it’s on my list):
For a certain level of discussion, the outcome might have already been set, and the meeting is a formality to make it so. So as long as the presentation isn’t a total disaster what’s said during the formal discussion is only refinement or finishing details on an already closed decision.
If you’ve ever wondered why in a certain discussion someone “came around” or magically the entire room was in support, either that person or their boss worked it out prior to the meeting. It’s not because the PowerPoint was awesome or the policy proposal is clever.
I do this - when I’m working on something (if there’s time) I “run it by” the people who need to buy in. That helps refine the proposal or pitch, but it also helps do a couple of key things:
1. I can say “I ran this by Stan,” privately to some other folks, and truthfully say he liked it or didn’t and I took his feedback into consideration
2. I can hear what people don’t like and either change it or account for constraints they have
3. It prewires the audience. They’ve seen the material or heard it in brief. Some people are readers. Some are listeners. With this approach I can catch both and address them on their communication style
4. At the discussion I can say “I spoke with most of you here to get feedback from product / design / dev / support / ops etc and I heard... and the toll tax is paid to cross various bridges
Importantly - the execs themselves can just have a conversation the week or day before and say “hey we have this problem. I need you to listen to ____ and get someone from your team to help.” That works because two months later the other party will say “Hey, remember when I helped you with the thing? I need you to help me with ____ because…”
This sort of politics is normal. I’m literally doing it between and across companies on a regular basis. It’s a way to get stuff done, as long as its ethical and doesn’t violate various conduct guidelines and (edit) *its in the org’s best interests.* Most of the time for me at least it’s “can we just get X above the cut line and done by October? I know it’s in November but if it’s in October _____.”
> If you’ve ever wondered why in a certain discussion someone “came around” or magically the entire room was in support, either that person or their boss worked it out prior to the meeting.
This is old-school political practice: when it comes to taking decisions, you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be. Going blind is a defeat in itself.
> Hey, remember when I helped you with the thing? I need you to help me with
Trading favours is an invaluable skill. A lot of people do favours for free and feel petty if they remind others at later date; figuring out a way to do it in a pretty neutral way, will help you a lot. Typically it's just about figuring out that it's not personal. For a great intro to the practice, the character of Rawls in The Wire is a decent model.
I don't know. While I'm not completely against the points the OP is making, something about this statement "you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be," really rubs me wrong.
In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Meetings are not the only collaboration point, probably not even the most effective. OP's advice is good advice for increasing communication and building consensus leading up to a meeting, especially if done with an eye towards transparency, as I assume they intend. Ideally you're able to get everyone aligned beforehand and can cancel the meeting. But if someone walks into a meeting blindsided by a predetermined outcome, that's a red flag that you've created an adversarial environment rather than a collaborative one. If a colleague is important enough to be in the meeting then their opinion is an important enough to affect the meeting.
> the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration
A meeting of the executive team is a point of decision, not of collaboration. Individual contributors make meetings for collaborating, middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery, high management make them for decision communication (not decision making).
Most times I see middle managers meeting (and when I participated when I was one) were about "X is happening, the problem is not (entirely) on my area, let's find where it is so we can fix it".
In my experience, managers have no problem looking busy. They can do that without thinking or conscious effort just by letting the system work the way it wants to. What takes conscious effort is doing anything else.
> In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Yes. At the same time, collaboration is limited when you need a lot of one-on-one discussions that are mostly relevant to one person.
You can have those one-on-ones as a part of a larger meeting. But is it optimal? I'd say no. During a meeting attention is limited. You can tackle one problem at the time and can't do them in parallel. If you have multiple problems to discuss where there's one stakeholder, it's a waste of time for others. A meeting that's a collection of queued one-on-ones is not efficient. An efficient meeting is one where every spoken sentence affects every participant.
Bulk of the project progress is done in the trenches, so to speak. Moving it to meetings makes them longer and more frequent. If someone waits for a meeting to drop an unexpected bomb for the whole team, it likely won't be resolved then and there. After all, others weren't aware so they didn't have time to prepare. Asking people to improvise on the spot is not a good idea. I'd argue that giving others as little time to prepare as possible is a symptom of an adversarial environment.
On the other hand, sharing things in advance gives everyone time to digest them.
Perhaps rewording the statement would work. How about "you should go into meetings only if there will be no surprises".
Well, it's a choice that we get to make by shaping our own work environments. The more senior we get, the more impact we have to shape the culture of our workplaces. In my experience technical contributors underestimate the amount of leverage they have to impact these kinds of cultural matters. We often think about the power we have to leave, but we don't use that power to change, or we assume that the organization wouldn't value our input without any attempt to validate that assumption. I have found it valuable in my own career to be more vocal about the kind of organization I want to be in, the kind of team dynamics and politics we choose to enable, etc. I wish I had done so sooner.
The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.
I think what I'm getting at is this: it's wrong to think that there exists any such thing as "the organization". Like "the government" or "the people", it's a useful shorthand but it doesn't really point to anything specific.
The "trick" (not really a trick, just basic politics as correctly pointed out by other commenters) of cultivating one-to-one relationships stems exactly from that realization. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose technical solutions, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or the collective well-being of the set of people defined by "the organization".
My ideal of how the world ought to work is a perfect, strict meritocracy. But people play games on me, hence I have to play games on them in self-defense. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, defecting is at its most powerful when the expectation is that you will cooperate.
There is no honor in naivete. Or rather, you'll be told how honorable you are right before you get stabbed in the back.
If you are in higher position, you are the one to decide whether it will be a lot of "closed doors, based on friendship, access and nepotism" or a little of it and transparency.
Going into it with conviction that closed doors are correct default way ensures your company will on high level of it.
>In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time.
Everyone publicly and mutually agreeing to support a decision IS valuable collaboration even if they all had 1-on-1 discussions on that idea before hand. Meetings are pretty horrible venues to actually discuss an idea in depth for many reasons. However if you don't all publicly agree on the same idea then the chance for backstabbing politics increases significantly. In essence it's a trust but verify approach.
In Japan, there is a concept of Nemawashi, which is the building of consensus privately in advance of any public conversations to avoid the appearance of disagreement or uncertainty. Not condoning the practice but there are some settings where you should only ask questions if you are already sure of the answer you will get.
By contrast in California this is explicitly forbidden under the Brown Act. State and local political officials are not allowed to communicate privately with enough members of a legislative body to form a quorum.
> By contrast in California this is explicitly forbidden under the Brown Act. State and local political officials are not allowed to communicate privately with enough members of a legislative body to form a quorum.
Oh wow! "Serial Meetings" are defined. That's pretty remarkable. Also - it's good to know. Thanks.
Yes, it turns out to be pretty broad. Three members out of a five member city council all liking the same Facebook comment in a public group about an upcoming item on the city council agenda is enough to constitute a Brown Act violation.
Brown Act violations do get exposed every so often and usually result in the action that was being discussed getting reversed.
Its most commonly violated by city council members because city councils are usually small, so it's very easy to violate accidentally. Say you have a five member city council. Council member A emails council member B to get their thoughts on an upcoming item. Then a few days later council member B emails council member C to ask a question about that item. That's a Brown Act violation.
I had this idea that now with all them blockchains, eventually favors will be tracked and traded like any commodity using a blockchain.
in essence, this is just tracking all that is exchanged using technologies.
on one hand, a lot of corruption happens over personal favors between powerful individuals. which makes me think this kind of thing will never take off.
this is part of a larger half-baked idea I had about anybody anywhere being able to 'emit credit'. doing a favor being a way to cash in on their emited credit.. or something like that.
Love the Wire : Rawls I think is a great character because he twists the premise. There’s a corollary (I edited my post to make it explicit): all actions should be in the organizations interest. He doesn’t subscribe to that.
I'd argue that Rawls more than anyone understands the true purpose of his unit and later the BPD. Ultimately, the BPD works for the mayor and its job is to make the mayor look good. You can see that in how he handles the bodies in the vacants or Hamsterdam. Same thing when he was in homicide. He fights to keep murders off the city's books and clear the ones he can't avoid.
Anyways, great show with IMHO some great lessons about dysfunctional organizations.
In my career, I've had the pleasure of being an employee that is presenting to executives of large and small tech companies. The advice given feels good to me, especially the "mistakes to avoid" section.
Off the top of my head, I'd also add that "I don't know, but I can get that answer" is a much better answer than winging it and making something up. Knowing the audience is also very important. At one >$100B company, the CEO's questions were very much about the business side of things, while the CTO wanted to get deep into the business side AND the technical architecture.
Side note, I had a boss that I hated for that meeting with the CTO. I did all of the work preparing the presentation and slides under the assumption I'd be presenting. My boss jumped in and tried to present and was stopped in her tracks when she was unable to answer a question from the CTO about who would use the product in question. I gave it a solid, awkward 10 count before answering the question and taking over the conversation.
> "I don't know, but I can get that answer" is a much better answer than winging it and making something up.
I totally agree. I think this is a major thing that experience teaches you. When you're young or inexperienced, you are naturally afraid of saying "I don't know".
The more experience you gain, the more comfortable you tend to be saying that you "don't know" - in fact some of the smartest and well respected people I've worked with have been the ones most comfortable with saying "I don't know, but I'll find out"
They'd still prefer for you just to know the answer.
This is one of the first pieces of advice I heard in my career and IMO it has become a workplace meme.
People don't become respected because they say 'I don't know' a lot - they become respected because people believe them when they aren't saying it. The result of a junior person not following the advice is panic, floundering for an answer, and giving an unconvincing lie. Being revealed for a BSer is the problem you're trying to avoid. Admitting you don't know is one path around this but, in practice, too many make you look unknowledgable and may mean that future important questions will be aimed at your seniors or superiors. When they're asked, they don't say 'I don't know', they say the answer. They're respected because they know.
This problem is built into incentive systems. If guidelines for promotion for a junior are that they can work independently then it can be better for them to spend 2 hours looking for a solution themselves than to spend 10 minutes asking someone else. This encourages convincing BSing, which is more insidious and damaging than obvious BS. The people who are promoted are the ones who can know and the ones who can lie - the latter being easier.
The prime example of this is the executive team. Unless lying is securities fraud, an answer from a CEO can't be trusted at all.
If you want to encourage people to admit when they don't know the answer, you need to cultivate a culture where it's truly unpunished.
> Admitting you don't know is one path around this but, in practice, too many make you look unknowledgable and may mean that future important questions will be aimed at your seniors or superiors.
I think it's also a different circumstance to not know the answer to a specific question vs. appearing generally unknowledgable. The latter will definitely get you bypassed in favor of someone who knows something.
It’s a litmus test. And tbh it’s (if you want) a way to get more visibility or credibility because you can take the todo, then go back later and say “here’s the answer. If you want more detail I can go over it with you.”
Some people are awful. I had a CTO that literally hired me to be the fall guy for some things he implemented that went poorly (before I was hired). I wasn't even involved in those projects and he tried to get me to take responsibility for the fallout. I'm still at the company, he isn't!
I've since moved on from that company (in fact, I moved shortly after that event) but it has been gratifying to see that my former boss has not been promoted in the 6 years since, but that most of her peers have been promoted multiple times.
Yeah, don't jump right in and try to look smarter than them. Give them the opportunity (time) to look bad on their own with no answer. OTOH, helping them save face is also a good way to go if that's someone you want to work with.
Yeah, that kind of pause + coming in with the answer, is also nice because it can serve a dual purpose. It allows you to be both bad cop and good cop, all in one: you created some leverage over your boss by publicly showing the execs that boss doesn't know what they're talking about but you do, and you also helped save them from further embarrassment.
Depending on future scenarios, you can play up either side of the interpretation. It's a nice quality of really useful political moves that they can flex and can be reused for multiple purposes (kind of like... good extensible/reusable software design).
> I gave it a solid, awkward 10 count before answering the question and taking over the conversation.
That sounds awful. Did you have to do damage control with your boss afterwards? I'm not sure how I would rescue that situation. (Ideally you'd have been promoted within an hour, but... ya.)
Short answer: no, I didn't. I essentially tripled down by having a followup meeting w/just, the CTO, and chief engineer of the company FOLLOWED BY a later 1:1 with the company's President of Engineering when I'd traveled to company HQ. That last meeting created a cascade of meetings that afternoon with EVP, then VP, and finally my boss. All but my boss were awesome and seemed to genuinely want to make things better, but I ended up giving notice when I returned home.
Longer answer: I was already "done" with my boss and planning my exit. The company had previously merged QA and Dev orgs while preserving titles. Unfortunately, that meant that Principal QAE and Principal SWE both became Principal Engineer despite the fact that the promotion process was much slower for SWEs. The average Principal SWE had 15+ years of experience while the average Principal QAE had closer to 8.
My boss was promoted just before the conversion and I came in as the head of engineering for an acquired company. I had substantially more IC and Management experience than my boss, who was a shameless self-promoter and really wanted to be seen as the savior getting this acquired company into shape. When it became apparent that we were vastly more mature than her org in our processes, operational excellence, code quality, efficiency, and performance, she had nothing to do.
I got sick of the micromanagement and moved to being an IC, which is when I had the experience. That helped because I basically got left alone, but I already knew my career prospects were zero, so I took full advantage.
This is great advice, but this article was not written for executives.
I skimmed in 5 seconds until I spotted the SCQA bullets, Minto's Pyramid, and the bolded parts of Mistakes to Avoid. If there are other takeaways, I don't really care.
This is how executives think. They have to — they're in meetings for nine hours straight, constantly context switching, needing to suss out who's bullshitting them and who's legit.
One tangential thing: in any situation with an executive, one way to stick in their mind is to deliver little 'nuggets' of interesting information that they can quote to their peers or managers. Should be pithy, novel, and ideally surprising: "Did you know that 25% of users have been doing [totally unexpected thing] outside the product in order to [solve some problem we thought we understood]?"
Don't expect you're going to be able to come up with these things on the spot. Prepare them. Keep 'em in the holster. You're welcome.
It is tagged as "management" and "staff-plus", so most likely the intended audience is people operating on that weird boundary layer between management and engineering.
“The foundation of communicating effectively with executives is to get a clear understanding of why you’re communicating with them in the first place.”
This is essential. I sit in these meetings with senior execs all the time in my role (mostly as neither the presenter nor one of key audience members) and I can’t tell you how often people presenting to execs make their lives hard!
E.g. status updates on key initiative/project is delivered as a summary of all the work that’s been done to date, challenges encountered and overcome, detailed technical commentary, and piles of next steps and detailed charts, when all the leadership team wants to know is 1. Is the project on track? 2. What are the key milestones/ next steps 3. Where and what are future risk /decision points, 4. Economics/budget considerations
Great advice but I disagree that “most executives aren’t awful”. Leadership is a hard and opaque role. More often than not the wrong people are promoted to management. Poor leadership is the norm, not the exception.
It really depends on the company we are talking about. If you look at where Will has worked, it's easy to see why he thinks this way: His executives really were pretty good in general, and some downright great. It's just that his selection of companies, and industries, is not necessarily representative of the world at large.
There are many companies, often older than the ones Will has worked at, which, as you say, tend to have executives with a far lower quality. A non-trivial amount that yes, I'd call awful, especially after seeing the difference with the excellent ones. It's hard to run a good company with a bad executive team though. Therefore, I'd argue that the right take is that, if you are working for a firm that is doing well over average, Will's take is the right one, and that when it isn't right in your environment, you should consider greener pastures.
Being a good executive or good manager is actually very hard and thankless. When you're at the top there's no one to pat you on the back and say "good job" or "how are you feeling?" and everyone either sees you as a villain or is waiting for an opportunity to slit your throat and take over. The last few years i've been surrounded by execs and high-up managers at my clients and firm. I don't envy their positions honestly, maybe the comp is good but the stress and pressure isn't something i could handle. And i say that has someone in a fairly stressful and pressurized role.
Regardless of whether a majority or plurality of leaders/managers are bad (because there are definitely tons of them, I may be one myself), I think a lot of people use personal outcomes to blame leaders/managers for structural issues.
Perhaps a team delivered a mediocre or poor outcome, but was that outcome potentially the best result due to organizational constraints? I suppose that I’m just pointing out that since leadership can be “hard and opaque” judging it’s effectiveness can be just as hard
A lot of large institutional companies effectively work "on rails", so loads of C-level execs there are glorified middle managers whose only talent is climbing the greasy pole.
Young companies though, they have "real" go-getter execs.
In my career, I've met a single executive that I feel would not stab me in my face to further their own career (assuming it won't be found out or they could blame my stabbing on someone else).
I think you are wrong.
"Most executives arn't awful" - true. They are sociopathic.
This is solid advice that I wish I had many years ago.
I think it's particularly important not to blind-side execs with information they can't act on or process during a meeting (related to the "don't present a problem without a solution" tidbit in the article).
Ironically, this is the stuff they _really_ need to know.
The way you get around it is by having channels of communication which are outside of the formal meeting. These channels can be almost anything but the main feature is that they're safe for both you and the exec-- you don't have to have "a solution" and the exec doesn't have to make a snap-decision.
Had a little bit of Deja Vu reading this. After I clicked around the site I realized it's because I read it in the book https://staffeng.com/book which the author of this post wrote.
I was promoted to principal engineer earlier this year (first in my company) and felt a bit unsure of what exactly the role entails and what I should be doing. I still feel that way to an extent, but that book has been very helpful in clearing some things up, providing me some more solid footing, and generally spurring me to take initiative. Can recommend the book if you're in a similar situation, or aspire to be.
> If you try to give a structured, academic presentation to that executive, they will be bored, and you will waste most of your time presenting information they won’t consume. Other executives will disregard anything you say that you don’t connect to a specific piece of data or dataset.
And here I thought people become managers because they're actually great with people. So why does that imply that they should stop listening to their staff unless the staff can intuit their idiosyncratic communication preferences?
IOW, the advice is probably right given current realities, and I agree in general that giving an outline before going into excessive detail is a good practice, but I also feel that if an executive wants something from their staff, they should tell them exactly what they need and be prepared to listen to the experts. It should be in their interest after all.
I have found more than one executive whose style is idiosyncratic but you don’t have to intuit it. They will interrupt, ask pointed questions, mansplain* and etc. to control the conversation so you fit to how they want to consume it. The problem I find is when in that mode they are unlikely to get the point because they don’t want to hear. They want you to say what they already want to hear.
* not a pc word but it sums up perfectly the communication style I can’t think of a better one. Maybe condescending?
> not a pc word but it sums up perfectly the communication style I can’t think of a better one. Maybe condescending?
As long as you’re insulting men, heterosexuals, white people or cis people you’re perfectly ok with the pc brigade. No need to apologize as long as you’re intersectional.
I feel like this is a reality when communicating across any two domains. People have their own problems their mind is busy with, you have to optimize for the least attentive person. That said, this sales-pitch style communication is exhausting.
Sure, but why is it solely the responsibility of the domain expert to adjust their communication style to the executive, instead of the executive - who after all hired the domain expert, at least indirectly, and who stands to gain more from the company performing well - learning to communicate with domain experts?
> Sure, but why is it solely the responsibility of the domain expert to adjust their communication style to the executive, instead of the executive - who after all hired the domain expert, at least indirectly, and who stands to gain more from the company performing well - learning to communicate with domain experts?
While in principle (as a non-executive who gets endlessly frustrated with these sorts of constraints) I wholeheartedly agree with your point, it's probably more reasonable to expect domain experts to learn one general "communicating with executives" style than to expect executives to learn countless "communicating with domain experts" styles.
Is it though? I think what will happen is that people who have big career ambitions will learn this style in order to please their superiors. But plenty of "regular" people, who don't feel a need for the career treadmill, will refuse to play along because after all - what's in it for them?
In ignoring those people (who may be technically brilliant or huge experts in their domain), the executives miss out more than the domain experts do, since the latter don't necessarily have a stake in the company's success.
Great advice. I have an executive/boss who is rather special. He acts more or less like a french aristocrat from the 17th century. His main focus is on chitchat. However, when the matter at hand is critical enough and i feel the need to step up he does listen . Most times i get my way but later on i will hear some blaming for the situation. I can live with that. Right now i need to start a serious conversation affecting the future of the company (small company, 50 people). I have a solution which involves intellectual property that i hold- i am not an employee, he is my client but treats me as such. How can i make it easier for him to align? Anyone who has been in a similar situation?
I'm working through an executive communication pickle as I write this. My (startup) CEO is a slide perfectionist who never likes any deck he sees the first time. And he's critical of decks in subsequent passes as well. I'm responsible for revising our company pitch deck with "fresh eyes" as I'm relatively new to the company.
Have had to remind myself multiple times that his feedback is not bad, or wrong, or too critical, at least not 100% of the time. And instead that I should reason through how to integrate that feedback or find a way to meet somewhere in the middle while properly describing why I am choosing a different path.
Perhaps unprofessional advice but having dealt with my fair share of perfectionist CTO's/VPs, when dealing with hypercritical types, if I have to deliver any creative output for review then my strategy is to add "low-hanging fruit" that I know will no be aligned with what they want or even small typos.
That usually gives them something to focus on and then only what really needs to change will bubble up from their feedback.
Exactly this. I've found many CTOs/VPs that want to feel like they have contributed.
Give them something to focus on and they'll generally not rip the rest apart.
Same goes for designs, have an element in an odd color or font, and it'll be picked up and corrected. Without it you may find yourself redesigning huge swathes of the design.
Let me toss a q back to you: when you work that strategy for a deck, do you subsequently send it first and gather feedback, or do you prefer to talk through it with that person? I've always preferred talking through presentation drafts as I feel the "talk-track" is the essential piece, not the particulars of the slides. But curious to hear what you've done in past or now
I didn't see my number one piece of advice, which is to tell them how the thing brings value to the company. They don't care if your button functions really well, they care that the old button was preventing people from completing checkout, and that problem has been solved.
My number two piece of advice is to present way less information than you want to. A small fraction. They don't want all that context, they want a clear story that looks like the SCQA model given in the article.
Also, they live in a world where people project confidence, not a world where people present both sides and talk about the uncertainties of both. Often this confidence is unwarranted, but that is utterly beside the point. While the real world is full of uncertainty, what most executives want to hear is "I have the solution to this problem, and I can make it happen".
> what most executives want to hear is "I have the solution to this problem, and I can make it happen".
I guess that applies to most people.
I'm getting flashbacks of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho's State of the Union presentation. "I got a solution", followed by a simple, 3 point plan.
If anyone has any suggestions on resources for how to present to *lawmakers*, I would greatly appreciate it. Especially if they are willing to talk about how they target their messaging based on party / area of government. I've yet to find a good piece article or book that goes beyond platitudes, ideally with specific language that I can iterate on.
A specific, concrete examble might be how to express "look I know you cant vote for this, but I suspect you are secretly with us, even if you wont say it during this meeting cuz you dont know us well enough to trust that we wont leak it, but can you at least get us meeting with x other lawmaker who might also agree with us, and is in more of a swing district but we cant get ahold of because they have a shit schedular that if they vote our way we can help them out in the primary?"
I've been in the "part time citizen lobbyist" game for a while now and I suspect that just saying the above (even without the "we cant get ahold of" part) would be to much a specific / blunt ask. But none of my attempts at soft balling a "can you introduce us to X?" has worked thus far. And I am not sure if its just that I am an untrusted newcomer who needs to build up more relationships, or if its an issue with the language / tone, or if its the nature of the ask itself.
I really wish there where more leaked audio recordings of meetings between lawmakers and hired lobbyists. that would be helpful.
> Everyone has worked with a terrible executive at some point in their career, but most executives aren’t awful. Almost all executives are outstanding at something; it’s just that often that something isn’t the topic you’re communicating about with them.
I'll save y'all the time and tell you what that something is: climbing organizational hierarchies. Executives are good at becoming executives: glorifying themselves, stealing credit, shifting blame, pandering to superiors' weaknesses and petty idiocies.
The fact that OP got this so wrong, and spaffed such ridiculous pro-employer bias on the page, discredits the rest of the treatise.
I agree, and a few other comments here also say that the call that executives are operational geniuses is far fetched. Most are sociopathic ladder climbers looking out for no one but themselves. Corporations aren't meritocracies - you don't work your way to the top by being better than anything other than working your way to the top. Organizations will also impose C-level hierarchies from other organizations they have previously worked at. So it's management by network and affiliation vs. by skill.
For presenting to executives, my experience is: present quickly. Focus on what they personally care about, whether or not it's what the organization is (supposed to) care about. Get to the point. Repeat your point. make your ask clear. BLUF and BLAB. If you don't know what that means, look it up. If you're not clear about what you want, don't be surprised if you don't get it. Appeal to ego. Understand rivalry. People support what they feel like is in their personal best interest to support.
Interesting article, but I would suggest to the author changing the title to something like "How to present to people.", as at present, the title treats executives as some feudal lords that need to be specially appeased. Of course, job duties differ, but the advice the article gives is rather universal for any internal business/company/industrial presentation.
It also helps to understand their motivations and speak in terms that they actually care about. Things like revenue, customers, markets, resources. Hint: They almost never care about the engineering details.
Missing from this (possibly it’s in the author’s book which I’ve not yet read but it’s on my list):
For a certain level of discussion, the outcome might have already been set, and the meeting is a formality to make it so. So as long as the presentation isn’t a total disaster what’s said during the formal discussion is only refinement or finishing details on an already closed decision.
If you’ve ever wondered why in a certain discussion someone “came around” or magically the entire room was in support, either that person or their boss worked it out prior to the meeting. It’s not because the PowerPoint was awesome or the policy proposal is clever.
I do this - when I’m working on something (if there’s time) I “run it by” the people who need to buy in. That helps refine the proposal or pitch, but it also helps do a couple of key things:
1. I can say “I ran this by Stan,” privately to some other folks, and truthfully say he liked it or didn’t and I took his feedback into consideration
2. I can hear what people don’t like and either change it or account for constraints they have
3. It prewires the audience. They’ve seen the material or heard it in brief. Some people are readers. Some are listeners. With this approach I can catch both and address them on their communication style
4. At the discussion I can say “I spoke with most of you here to get feedback from product / design / dev / support / ops etc and I heard... and the toll tax is paid to cross various bridges
Importantly - the execs themselves can just have a conversation the week or day before and say “hey we have this problem. I need you to listen to ____ and get someone from your team to help.” That works because two months later the other party will say “Hey, remember when I helped you with the thing? I need you to help me with ____ because…”
This sort of politics is normal. I’m literally doing it between and across companies on a regular basis. It’s a way to get stuff done, as long as its ethical and doesn’t violate various conduct guidelines and (edit) *its in the org’s best interests.* Most of the time for me at least it’s “can we just get X above the cut line and done by October? I know it’s in November but if it’s in October _____.”
> If you’ve ever wondered why in a certain discussion someone “came around” or magically the entire room was in support, either that person or their boss worked it out prior to the meeting.
This is old-school political practice: when it comes to taking decisions, you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be. Going blind is a defeat in itself.
> Hey, remember when I helped you with the thing? I need you to help me with
Trading favours is an invaluable skill. A lot of people do favours for free and feel petty if they remind others at later date; figuring out a way to do it in a pretty neutral way, will help you a lot. Typically it's just about figuring out that it's not personal. For a great intro to the practice, the character of Rawls in The Wire is a decent model.
I don't know. While I'm not completely against the points the OP is making, something about this statement "you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be," really rubs me wrong.
In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Meetings are not the only collaboration point, probably not even the most effective. OP's advice is good advice for increasing communication and building consensus leading up to a meeting, especially if done with an eye towards transparency, as I assume they intend. Ideally you're able to get everyone aligned beforehand and can cancel the meeting. But if someone walks into a meeting blindsided by a predetermined outcome, that's a red flag that you've created an adversarial environment rather than a collaborative one. If a colleague is important enough to be in the meeting then their opinion is an important enough to affect the meeting.
> the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration
A meeting of the executive team is a point of decision, not of collaboration. Individual contributors make meetings for collaborating, middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery, high management make them for decision communication (not decision making).
> middle managers make them mostly for problem discovery
I'd say most middle manager meetings are for salary justification. They want to look busy.
I guess maybe one or two meetings per week may be classified as 'problem discovery'. The rest is just to make them appear busy and visible.
Agreed with the high management and IC points.
Most times I see middle managers meeting (and when I participated when I was one) were about "X is happening, the problem is not (entirely) on my area, let's find where it is so we can fix it".
In my experience, managers have no problem looking busy. They can do that without thinking or conscious effort just by letting the system work the way it wants to. What takes conscious effort is doing anything else.
Yup. Obviously this isn’t black and white - but for the type of presentation / meeting from the blog - the decision is not the presentation. :-)
> In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Yes. At the same time, collaboration is limited when you need a lot of one-on-one discussions that are mostly relevant to one person.
You can have those one-on-ones as a part of a larger meeting. But is it optimal? I'd say no. During a meeting attention is limited. You can tackle one problem at the time and can't do them in parallel. If you have multiple problems to discuss where there's one stakeholder, it's a waste of time for others. A meeting that's a collection of queued one-on-ones is not efficient. An efficient meeting is one where every spoken sentence affects every participant.
Bulk of the project progress is done in the trenches, so to speak. Moving it to meetings makes them longer and more frequent. If someone waits for a meeting to drop an unexpected bomb for the whole team, it likely won't be resolved then and there. After all, others weren't aware so they didn't have time to prepare. Asking people to improvise on the spot is not a good idea. I'd argue that giving others as little time to prepare as possible is a symptom of an adversarial environment.
On the other hand, sharing things in advance gives everyone time to digest them.
Perhaps rewording the statement would work. How about "you should go into meetings only if there will be no surprises".
I don't think many would say it's how the world ought to work, but it definitely is how the world does work.
The coordination problem just gets intractable at a certain scale.
Well, it's a choice that we get to make by shaping our own work environments. The more senior we get, the more impact we have to shape the culture of our workplaces. In my experience technical contributors underestimate the amount of leverage they have to impact these kinds of cultural matters. We often think about the power we have to leave, but we don't use that power to change, or we assume that the organization wouldn't value our input without any attempt to validate that assumption. I have found it valuable in my own career to be more vocal about the kind of organization I want to be in, the kind of team dynamics and politics we choose to enable, etc. I wish I had done so sooner.
The intractability of the coordination problem at scale is the reason the original article is valuable. At scale, you do need management that focuses the majority of their time on the overall coordination of the work in order to protect the time of those doing the work. Because of that scale you can't involve everyone in every conversation. So you start needing to have conversations that abstract to a higher level, and which cross levels of leadership. Hence "How to present to executives" But even as a company grows, it can choose to maintain a culture of collaboration and transparency, even if the practices that enable them have to change to adapt to the larger scale.
I think what I'm getting at is this: it's wrong to think that there exists any such thing as "the organization". Like "the government" or "the people", it's a useful shorthand but it doesn't really point to anything specific.
The "trick" (not really a trick, just basic politics as correctly pointed out by other commenters) of cultivating one-to-one relationships stems exactly from that realization. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose technical solutions, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with technical merit or the collective well-being of the set of people defined by "the organization".
My ideal of how the world ought to work is a perfect, strict meritocracy. But people play games on me, hence I have to play games on them in self-defense. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, defecting is at its most powerful when the expectation is that you will cooperate.
There is no honor in naivete. Or rather, you'll be told how honorable you are right before you get stabbed in the back.
I don't even think of it as about meritocracy. I thinking about it as transparency and better decision making vs nepotism and a lot of intrigues.
If you are in higher position, you are the one to decide whether it will be a lot of "closed doors, based on friendship, access and nepotism" or a little of it and transparency.
Going into it with conviction that closed doors are correct default way ensures your company will on high level of it.
>In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time.
Everyone publicly and mutually agreeing to support a decision IS valuable collaboration even if they all had 1-on-1 discussions on that idea before hand. Meetings are pretty horrible venues to actually discuss an idea in depth for many reasons. However if you don't all publicly agree on the same idea then the chance for backstabbing politics increases significantly. In essence it's a trust but verify approach.
In Japan, there is a concept of Nemawashi, which is the building of consensus privately in advance of any public conversations to avoid the appearance of disagreement or uncertainty. Not condoning the practice but there are some settings where you should only ask questions if you are already sure of the answer you will get.
By contrast in California this is explicitly forbidden under the Brown Act. State and local political officials are not allowed to communicate privately with enough members of a legislative body to form a quorum.
> By contrast in California this is explicitly forbidden under the Brown Act. State and local political officials are not allowed to communicate privately with enough members of a legislative body to form a quorum.
Oh wow! "Serial Meetings" are defined. That's pretty remarkable. Also - it's good to know. Thanks.
Yes, it turns out to be pretty broad. Three members out of a five member city council all liking the same Facebook comment in a public group about an upcoming item on the city council agenda is enough to constitute a Brown Act violation.
This sounds wonderful in theory. How often does this get exposed and enforced in real life?
Brown Act violations do get exposed every so often and usually result in the action that was being discussed getting reversed.
Its most commonly violated by city council members because city councils are usually small, so it's very easy to violate accidentally. Say you have a five member city council. Council member A emails council member B to get their thoughts on an upcoming item. Then a few days later council member B emails council member C to ask a question about that item. That's a Brown Act violation.
Does anyone think that law is respected?
> some settings where you should only ask questions if you are already sure of the answer you will get
"In open court" is one of those settings that springs to mind
> ..you should go into meetings only if you know in advance what their outcomes will be. Going blind is a defeat in itself.
yep. If you find yourself in a fair fight it's time to re-think your strategy.
> the character of Rawls in The Wire is a decent model
But everyone hates that guy... I think Vito Corleone is a better example of a person who understands the nature of trading favors.
I had this idea that now with all them blockchains, eventually favors will be tracked and traded like any commodity using a blockchain.
in essence, this is just tracking all that is exchanged using technologies.
on one hand, a lot of corruption happens over personal favors between powerful individuals. which makes me think this kind of thing will never take off.
this is part of a larger half-baked idea I had about anybody anywhere being able to 'emit credit'. doing a favor being a way to cash in on their emited credit.. or something like that.
Favors not being 'visible' or 'tracked' is the _whole point_
If everyone knew who owned favors to whom, they would be able to maneuver around.
Love the Wire : Rawls I think is a great character because he twists the premise. There’s a corollary (I edited my post to make it explicit): all actions should be in the organizations interest. He doesn’t subscribe to that.
I'd argue that Rawls more than anyone understands the true purpose of his unit and later the BPD. Ultimately, the BPD works for the mayor and its job is to make the mayor look good. You can see that in how he handles the bodies in the vacants or Hamsterdam. Same thing when he was in homicide. He fights to keep murders off the city's books and clear the ones he can't avoid.
Anyways, great show with IMHO some great lessons about dysfunctional organizations.
In my career, I've had the pleasure of being an employee that is presenting to executives of large and small tech companies. The advice given feels good to me, especially the "mistakes to avoid" section.
Off the top of my head, I'd also add that "I don't know, but I can get that answer" is a much better answer than winging it and making something up. Knowing the audience is also very important. At one >$100B company, the CEO's questions were very much about the business side of things, while the CTO wanted to get deep into the business side AND the technical architecture.
Side note, I had a boss that I hated for that meeting with the CTO. I did all of the work preparing the presentation and slides under the assumption I'd be presenting. My boss jumped in and tried to present and was stopped in her tracks when she was unable to answer a question from the CTO about who would use the product in question. I gave it a solid, awkward 10 count before answering the question and taking over the conversation.
> "I don't know, but I can get that answer" is a much better answer than winging it and making something up.
I totally agree. I think this is a major thing that experience teaches you. When you're young or inexperienced, you are naturally afraid of saying "I don't know".
The more experience you gain, the more comfortable you tend to be saying that you "don't know" - in fact some of the smartest and well respected people I've worked with have been the ones most comfortable with saying "I don't know, but I'll find out"
They'd still prefer for you just to know the answer.
This is one of the first pieces of advice I heard in my career and IMO it has become a workplace meme.
People don't become respected because they say 'I don't know' a lot - they become respected because people believe them when they aren't saying it. The result of a junior person not following the advice is panic, floundering for an answer, and giving an unconvincing lie. Being revealed for a BSer is the problem you're trying to avoid. Admitting you don't know is one path around this but, in practice, too many make you look unknowledgable and may mean that future important questions will be aimed at your seniors or superiors. When they're asked, they don't say 'I don't know', they say the answer. They're respected because they know.
This problem is built into incentive systems. If guidelines for promotion for a junior are that they can work independently then it can be better for them to spend 2 hours looking for a solution themselves than to spend 10 minutes asking someone else. This encourages convincing BSing, which is more insidious and damaging than obvious BS. The people who are promoted are the ones who can know and the ones who can lie - the latter being easier.
The prime example of this is the executive team. Unless lying is securities fraud, an answer from a CEO can't be trusted at all.
If you want to encourage people to admit when they don't know the answer, you need to cultivate a culture where it's truly unpunished.
> Admitting you don't know is one path around this but, in practice, too many make you look unknowledgable and may mean that future important questions will be aimed at your seniors or superiors.
I think it's also a different circumstance to not know the answer to a specific question vs. appearing generally unknowledgable. The latter will definitely get you bypassed in favor of someone who knows something.
It’s a litmus test. And tbh it’s (if you want) a way to get more visibility or credibility because you can take the todo, then go back later and say “here’s the answer. If you want more detail I can go over it with you.”
Some people are awful. I had a CTO that literally hired me to be the fall guy for some things he implemented that went poorly (before I was hired). I wasn't even involved in those projects and he tried to get me to take responsibility for the fallout. I'm still at the company, he isn't!
I've since moved on from that company (in fact, I moved shortly after that event) but it has been gratifying to see that my former boss has not been promoted in the 6 years since, but that most of her peers have been promoted multiple times.
Sweetest ten seconds of anticipation in your life. Great story!
Yeah, don't jump right in and try to look smarter than them. Give them the opportunity (time) to look bad on their own with no answer. OTOH, helping them save face is also a good way to go if that's someone you want to work with.
Yeah, that kind of pause + coming in with the answer, is also nice because it can serve a dual purpose. It allows you to be both bad cop and good cop, all in one: you created some leverage over your boss by publicly showing the execs that boss doesn't know what they're talking about but you do, and you also helped save them from further embarrassment.
Depending on future scenarios, you can play up either side of the interpretation. It's a nice quality of really useful political moves that they can flex and can be reused for multiple purposes (kind of like... good extensible/reusable software design).
> I gave it a solid, awkward 10 count before answering the question and taking over the conversation.
That sounds awful. Did you have to do damage control with your boss afterwards? I'm not sure how I would rescue that situation. (Ideally you'd have been promoted within an hour, but... ya.)
Short answer: no, I didn't. I essentially tripled down by having a followup meeting w/just, the CTO, and chief engineer of the company FOLLOWED BY a later 1:1 with the company's President of Engineering when I'd traveled to company HQ. That last meeting created a cascade of meetings that afternoon with EVP, then VP, and finally my boss. All but my boss were awesome and seemed to genuinely want to make things better, but I ended up giving notice when I returned home.
Longer answer: I was already "done" with my boss and planning my exit. The company had previously merged QA and Dev orgs while preserving titles. Unfortunately, that meant that Principal QAE and Principal SWE both became Principal Engineer despite the fact that the promotion process was much slower for SWEs. The average Principal SWE had 15+ years of experience while the average Principal QAE had closer to 8.
My boss was promoted just before the conversion and I came in as the head of engineering for an acquired company. I had substantially more IC and Management experience than my boss, who was a shameless self-promoter and really wanted to be seen as the savior getting this acquired company into shape. When it became apparent that we were vastly more mature than her org in our processes, operational excellence, code quality, efficiency, and performance, she had nothing to do.
I got sick of the micromanagement and moved to being an IC, which is when I had the experience. That helped because I basically got left alone, but I already knew my career prospects were zero, so I took full advantage.
This is great advice, but this article was not written for executives.
I skimmed in 5 seconds until I spotted the SCQA bullets, Minto's Pyramid, and the bolded parts of Mistakes to Avoid. If there are other takeaways, I don't really care.
This is how executives think. They have to — they're in meetings for nine hours straight, constantly context switching, needing to suss out who's bullshitting them and who's legit.
One tangential thing: in any situation with an executive, one way to stick in their mind is to deliver little 'nuggets' of interesting information that they can quote to their peers or managers. Should be pithy, novel, and ideally surprising: "Did you know that 25% of users have been doing [totally unexpected thing] outside the product in order to [solve some problem we thought we understood]?"
Don't expect you're going to be able to come up with these things on the spot. Prepare them. Keep 'em in the holster. You're welcome.
It is tagged as "management" and "staff-plus", so most likely the intended audience is people operating on that weird boundary layer between management and engineering.
“The foundation of communicating effectively with executives is to get a clear understanding of why you’re communicating with them in the first place.”
This is essential. I sit in these meetings with senior execs all the time in my role (mostly as neither the presenter nor one of key audience members) and I can’t tell you how often people presenting to execs make their lives hard!
E.g. status updates on key initiative/project is delivered as a summary of all the work that’s been done to date, challenges encountered and overcome, detailed technical commentary, and piles of next steps and detailed charts, when all the leadership team wants to know is 1. Is the project on track? 2. What are the key milestones/ next steps 3. Where and what are future risk /decision points, 4. Economics/budget considerations
Great advice but I disagree that “most executives aren’t awful”. Leadership is a hard and opaque role. More often than not the wrong people are promoted to management. Poor leadership is the norm, not the exception.
It really depends on the company we are talking about. If you look at where Will has worked, it's easy to see why he thinks this way: His executives really were pretty good in general, and some downright great. It's just that his selection of companies, and industries, is not necessarily representative of the world at large.
There are many companies, often older than the ones Will has worked at, which, as you say, tend to have executives with a far lower quality. A non-trivial amount that yes, I'd call awful, especially after seeing the difference with the excellent ones. It's hard to run a good company with a bad executive team though. Therefore, I'd argue that the right take is that, if you are working for a firm that is doing well over average, Will's take is the right one, and that when it isn't right in your environment, you should consider greener pastures.
Being a good executive or good manager is actually very hard and thankless. When you're at the top there's no one to pat you on the back and say "good job" or "how are you feeling?" and everyone either sees you as a villain or is waiting for an opportunity to slit your throat and take over. The last few years i've been surrounded by execs and high-up managers at my clients and firm. I don't envy their positions honestly, maybe the comp is good but the stress and pressure isn't something i could handle. And i say that has someone in a fairly stressful and pressurized role.
"CEO's get it right 17% of the time" was a great quote that I read.
Seems about right. We draft 10-20 design documents for every one implemented.
Regardless of whether a majority or plurality of leaders/managers are bad (because there are definitely tons of them, I may be one myself), I think a lot of people use personal outcomes to blame leaders/managers for structural issues.
Perhaps a team delivered a mediocre or poor outcome, but was that outcome potentially the best result due to organizational constraints? I suppose that I’m just pointing out that since leadership can be “hard and opaque” judging it’s effectiveness can be just as hard
Maybe this is just because leadership is hard, and more people are needed in leadership positions than are capable of fulfilling the role?
There are probably too many managers tbh
Leadership is not managing though.
I think the problem is in conflating the two so the leading gets forgotten because most of the time is spent managing.
Maybe the criteria for selecting leaders is based on connections as opposed to personal qualities.
Are you talking about actual C-level executives at major corporations, or just mid-level managers you've had?
I think it depends.
A lot of large institutional companies effectively work "on rails", so loads of C-level execs there are glorified middle managers whose only talent is climbing the greasy pole.
Young companies though, they have "real" go-getter execs.
Finding out who is who, is a skill in itself.
100% correct. You are extremely lucky to get one good executive at a company nevermind several.
In my career, I've met a single executive that I feel would not stab me in my face to further their own career (assuming it won't be found out or they could blame my stabbing on someone else).
I think you are wrong.
"Most executives arn't awful" - true. They are sociopathic.
Who are the right people? Mind contrasting …
- values?
- characteristics?
- abilities?
- experience?
- education?
Best way to tell them apart in interviews?
This is solid advice that I wish I had many years ago.
I think it's particularly important not to blind-side execs with information they can't act on or process during a meeting (related to the "don't present a problem without a solution" tidbit in the article).
Ironically, this is the stuff they _really_ need to know.
The way you get around it is by having channels of communication which are outside of the formal meeting. These channels can be almost anything but the main feature is that they're safe for both you and the exec-- you don't have to have "a solution" and the exec doesn't have to make a snap-decision.
Had a little bit of Deja Vu reading this. After I clicked around the site I realized it's because I read it in the book https://staffeng.com/book which the author of this post wrote.
I was promoted to principal engineer earlier this year (first in my company) and felt a bit unsure of what exactly the role entails and what I should be doing. I still feel that way to an extent, but that book has been very helpful in clearing some things up, providing me some more solid footing, and generally spurring me to take initiative. Can recommend the book if you're in a similar situation, or aspire to be.
> If you try to give a structured, academic presentation to that executive, they will be bored, and you will waste most of your time presenting information they won’t consume. Other executives will disregard anything you say that you don’t connect to a specific piece of data or dataset.
And here I thought people become managers because they're actually great with people. So why does that imply that they should stop listening to their staff unless the staff can intuit their idiosyncratic communication preferences?
IOW, the advice is probably right given current realities, and I agree in general that giving an outline before going into excessive detail is a good practice, but I also feel that if an executive wants something from their staff, they should tell them exactly what they need and be prepared to listen to the experts. It should be in their interest after all.
I have found more than one executive whose style is idiosyncratic but you don’t have to intuit it. They will interrupt, ask pointed questions, mansplain* and etc. to control the conversation so you fit to how they want to consume it. The problem I find is when in that mode they are unlikely to get the point because they don’t want to hear. They want you to say what they already want to hear.
* not a pc word but it sums up perfectly the communication style I can’t think of a better one. Maybe condescending?
I think condescendingly explain is what you're looking for.
> not a pc word but it sums up perfectly the communication style I can’t think of a better one. Maybe condescending?
As long as you’re insulting men, heterosexuals, white people or cis people you’re perfectly ok with the pc brigade. No need to apologize as long as you’re intersectional.
I feel like this is a reality when communicating across any two domains. People have their own problems their mind is busy with, you have to optimize for the least attentive person. That said, this sales-pitch style communication is exhausting.
Sure, but why is it solely the responsibility of the domain expert to adjust their communication style to the executive, instead of the executive - who after all hired the domain expert, at least indirectly, and who stands to gain more from the company performing well - learning to communicate with domain experts?
> Sure, but why is it solely the responsibility of the domain expert to adjust their communication style to the executive, instead of the executive - who after all hired the domain expert, at least indirectly, and who stands to gain more from the company performing well - learning to communicate with domain experts?
While in principle (as a non-executive who gets endlessly frustrated with these sorts of constraints) I wholeheartedly agree with your point, it's probably more reasonable to expect domain experts to learn one general "communicating with executives" style than to expect executives to learn countless "communicating with domain experts" styles.
Is it though? I think what will happen is that people who have big career ambitions will learn this style in order to please their superiors. But plenty of "regular" people, who don't feel a need for the career treadmill, will refuse to play along because after all - what's in it for them?
In ignoring those people (who may be technically brilliant or huge experts in their domain), the executives miss out more than the domain experts do, since the latter don't necessarily have a stake in the company's success.
Great advice. I have an executive/boss who is rather special. He acts more or less like a french aristocrat from the 17th century. His main focus is on chitchat. However, when the matter at hand is critical enough and i feel the need to step up he does listen . Most times i get my way but later on i will hear some blaming for the situation. I can live with that. Right now i need to start a serious conversation affecting the future of the company (small company, 50 people). I have a solution which involves intellectual property that i hold- i am not an employee, he is my client but treats me as such. How can i make it easier for him to align? Anyone who has been in a similar situation?
This was a refreshing read, and a solid reminder.
I'm working through an executive communication pickle as I write this. My (startup) CEO is a slide perfectionist who never likes any deck he sees the first time. And he's critical of decks in subsequent passes as well. I'm responsible for revising our company pitch deck with "fresh eyes" as I'm relatively new to the company.
Have had to remind myself multiple times that his feedback is not bad, or wrong, or too critical, at least not 100% of the time. And instead that I should reason through how to integrate that feedback or find a way to meet somewhere in the middle while properly describing why I am choosing a different path.
The learning process never ends!
Perhaps unprofessional advice but having dealt with my fair share of perfectionist CTO's/VPs, when dealing with hypercritical types, if I have to deliver any creative output for review then my strategy is to add "low-hanging fruit" that I know will no be aligned with what they want or even small typos.
That usually gives them something to focus on and then only what really needs to change will bubble up from their feedback.
Also called the Duck-strategy, point 5 on this list: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
Exactly this. I've found many CTOs/VPs that want to feel like they have contributed.
Give them something to focus on and they'll generally not rip the rest apart.
Same goes for designs, have an element in an odd color or font, and it'll be picked up and corrected. Without it you may find yourself redesigning huge swathes of the design.
Fascinating suggestion.
Let me toss a q back to you: when you work that strategy for a deck, do you subsequently send it first and gather feedback, or do you prefer to talk through it with that person? I've always preferred talking through presentation drafts as I feel the "talk-track" is the essential piece, not the particulars of the slides. But curious to hear what you've done in past or now
Don't ever let them find out you do it deliberately. This is quite disrespectful use of their time.
Telling a story is important, I agree with that.
I didn't see my number one piece of advice, which is to tell them how the thing brings value to the company. They don't care if your button functions really well, they care that the old button was preventing people from completing checkout, and that problem has been solved.
My number two piece of advice is to present way less information than you want to. A small fraction. They don't want all that context, they want a clear story that looks like the SCQA model given in the article.
Also, they live in a world where people project confidence, not a world where people present both sides and talk about the uncertainties of both. Often this confidence is unwarranted, but that is utterly beside the point. While the real world is full of uncertainty, what most executives want to hear is "I have the solution to this problem, and I can make it happen".
> what most executives want to hear is "I have the solution to this problem, and I can make it happen".
I guess that applies to most people.
I'm getting flashbacks of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho's State of the Union presentation. "I got a solution", followed by a simple, 3 point plan.
If anyone has any suggestions on resources for how to present to *lawmakers*, I would greatly appreciate it. Especially if they are willing to talk about how they target their messaging based on party / area of government. I've yet to find a good piece article or book that goes beyond platitudes, ideally with specific language that I can iterate on.
A specific, concrete examble might be how to express "look I know you cant vote for this, but I suspect you are secretly with us, even if you wont say it during this meeting cuz you dont know us well enough to trust that we wont leak it, but can you at least get us meeting with x other lawmaker who might also agree with us, and is in more of a swing district but we cant get ahold of because they have a shit schedular that if they vote our way we can help them out in the primary?"
I've been in the "part time citizen lobbyist" game for a while now and I suspect that just saying the above (even without the "we cant get ahold of" part) would be to much a specific / blunt ask. But none of my attempts at soft balling a "can you introduce us to X?" has worked thus far. And I am not sure if its just that I am an untrusted newcomer who needs to build up more relationships, or if its an issue with the language / tone, or if its the nature of the ask itself.
I really wish there where more leaked audio recordings of meetings between lawmakers and hired lobbyists. that would be helpful.
> SCQA - Situation, Complication, Question, Answer
I've found the SPUR agenda to be helpful:
- Status;
- Plans (includes 5W + H - who, when, what, where, why, how);
- Uncertainties (includes explicitly identifying possibly-flawed assumptions & possible black swans);
- Risks (includes identifying likely- and worst-case downside outcomes)
> Everyone has worked with a terrible executive at some point in their career, but most executives aren’t awful. Almost all executives are outstanding at something; it’s just that often that something isn’t the topic you’re communicating about with them.
I'll save y'all the time and tell you what that something is: climbing organizational hierarchies. Executives are good at becoming executives: glorifying themselves, stealing credit, shifting blame, pandering to superiors' weaknesses and petty idiocies.
The fact that OP got this so wrong, and spaffed such ridiculous pro-employer bias on the page, discredits the rest of the treatise.
I agree, and a few other comments here also say that the call that executives are operational geniuses is far fetched. Most are sociopathic ladder climbers looking out for no one but themselves. Corporations aren't meritocracies - you don't work your way to the top by being better than anything other than working your way to the top. Organizations will also impose C-level hierarchies from other organizations they have previously worked at. So it's management by network and affiliation vs. by skill.
For presenting to executives, my experience is: present quickly. Focus on what they personally care about, whether or not it's what the organization is (supposed to) care about. Get to the point. Repeat your point. make your ask clear. BLUF and BLAB. If you don't know what that means, look it up. If you're not clear about what you want, don't be surprised if you don't get it. Appeal to ego. Understand rivalry. People support what they feel like is in their personal best interest to support.
Interesting article, but I would suggest to the author changing the title to something like "How to present to people.", as at present, the title treats executives as some feudal lords that need to be specially appeased. Of course, job duties differ, but the advice the article gives is rather universal for any internal business/company/industrial presentation.
Become an executive yourself. Then it’ll be obvious.
Solid advice for presenting in general
It also helps to understand their motivations and speak in terms that they actually care about. Things like revenue, customers, markets, resources. Hint: They almost never care about the engineering details.