This is great. I’ve been encouraging my teams at Facebook to really focus on creating quality pre-reads, especially during this work from home period. It really makes a significant difference in the ability to drive towards clear outcomes, and providing proper context in advance.
Another adjacent lesson to the "speak to your audience" I learned from your reviews was the importance of coming in with a clear POV for the audience to agree/disagree with. It seems so obvious in hindsight but being explicitly clear via the tactics you've listed out on what you want the execs to opine on has really helped my reviews run a lot more smoothly.
Such great and actionable advice. Exec presentations are still, after all of these years, a pain point for me but your advice about narrative storytelling resonates. Thank you.
This is so pragmatic and helpful! Can you shed more light on what you mean by narrative storytelling? Can you share examples from your own experience of how you built a story or recommend publicly available examples?
Great article -- I like how clearly you articulate such complex ideas. Another category of meetings (and maybe it already gets covered in your set of categories?) that I've often found myself leading are x-org consensus building meetings. The goal of such meetings is to drive various stakeholders to the same page and commit to resources and priorities for a common objectives. In a large company we often find ourselves caught between so many differing viewpoints that making any meaningful progress seems impossible. One technique that I find useful is to define success upfront, what's in it for everyone and clearly state what you need from every stakeholder. If you don't state these things and assume that every executive knows what you are asking for, you are leaving a lot to chance and the perceptiveness of the audience and in the end don't achieve everything you want to.
Great article Deb! Re: the pre-read, how prevalent, in your opinion, is the executive not having time to read the pre-read? I believe effective context-setting in the meeting would help counter that, but I'd love to explore pre-read 'read' effectiveness!
You mentioned - "I was the PM of a team that delivered straightforward executive updates that were factual recounting of how things were going, metrics, roadmaps, and progress. While these were adequate, they didn’t garner much feedback."
Do you have any advice/examples on how to make these presentations more engaging as presenting company metrics to a large group of people is tough to not bore everyone.
Are there any concrete (good) examples of executive presentations and/or pre-reads to review? As an example, I saw one version of the 6-page Amazon report. As for building the executive presentations, I assume you would start with putting pen to paper then building the associated presentation? Is there a flow to piece all of this together? Thank you for the guidance!
Deb,
This is great. I’ve been encouraging my teams at Facebook to really focus on creating quality pre-reads, especially during this work from home period. It really makes a significant difference in the ability to drive towards clear outcomes, and providing proper context in advance.
Another adjacent lesson to the "speak to your audience" I learned from your reviews was the importance of coming in with a clear POV for the audience to agree/disagree with. It seems so obvious in hindsight but being explicitly clear via the tactics you've listed out on what you want the execs to opine on has really helped my reviews run a lot more smoothly.
Such great and actionable advice. Exec presentations are still, after all of these years, a pain point for me but your advice about narrative storytelling resonates. Thank you.
I love the "You are the only one who knows what is in your head. Everyone else needs context." So true!
Such useful pieces of info. I had read it a few weeks ago & referred to if again today right before my exec meeting:)
This is so pragmatic and helpful! Can you shed more light on what you mean by narrative storytelling? Can you share examples from your own experience of how you built a story or recommend publicly available examples?
Well written pragmatic advice - well done, Deb!
Great article -- I like how clearly you articulate such complex ideas. Another category of meetings (and maybe it already gets covered in your set of categories?) that I've often found myself leading are x-org consensus building meetings. The goal of such meetings is to drive various stakeholders to the same page and commit to resources and priorities for a common objectives. In a large company we often find ourselves caught between so many differing viewpoints that making any meaningful progress seems impossible. One technique that I find useful is to define success upfront, what's in it for everyone and clearly state what you need from every stakeholder. If you don't state these things and assume that every executive knows what you are asking for, you are leaving a lot to chance and the perceptiveness of the audience and in the end don't achieve everything you want to.
Great article Deb! Re: the pre-read, how prevalent, in your opinion, is the executive not having time to read the pre-read? I believe effective context-setting in the meeting would help counter that, but I'd love to explore pre-read 'read' effectiveness!
You mentioned - "I was the PM of a team that delivered straightforward executive updates that were factual recounting of how things were going, metrics, roadmaps, and progress. While these were adequate, they didn’t garner much feedback."
Do you have any advice/examples on how to make these presentations more engaging as presenting company metrics to a large group of people is tough to not bore everyone.
Are there any concrete (good) examples of executive presentations and/or pre-reads to review? As an example, I saw one version of the 6-page Amazon report. As for building the executive presentations, I assume you would start with putting pen to paper then building the associated presentation? Is there a flow to piece all of this together? Thank you for the guidance!