6 Thinks every Business Leader Should do before a Board Meeting as a Non Native Speaker

Most board meetings are administrative updates that accomplish very little other than informing board members about the performance of the company since the last board meeting.

That's certainly one function of every board, but if you are a Non Native speaker and you might find more difficult to turn your board into your "brain trust" and act as a sounding board. It is the one group truly privy to your most confidential information and your hardest choices. So compelling communication is crucial, as well as building a strong board around you.

This article will help you how to help you have more productive meetings by preparing properly in advance and make them really effective.

1. Create your own set of KPIs for your communication as a non native speaker. Follow them when communicating with the board. In this way, you can measure your success and know exactly what you still need to work around.
2. Decide what your most strategic issues are and build a vocabulary around them. About six weeks before your board meeting you should meet with the executive team who attends or prepares for board meetings and agree what the most significant issues the company is working on. So there will be enough time to check, prepare your vocabulary and communication around topics like fundraising, product development choices, sales, marketing effectiveness, competition, business development, M&A, etc.You can write this as a script in 3-5 key bullet points. It helps you to gather your thoughts, structure your ideas and rehearse. Once done, it also gives you space to reflect on which items are relevant for your board.
3. Create a short strategy/discussion deck. Create a 5 to 10 page presentation in your favorite presentation software on any key issues you are grappling with. It is a sort of pre-read giving you an overview of what you need to recalibrate. Here are a few structures that you may integrate in your presentation: We're thinking about launching a new line of business."

• Our current product only has 30 percent gross margin.
• We could raise price, reduce costs, or keep margin steady and sell more units.
• If we raise price, we worry about competition since we have competitors already below our price point.
• We can reduce costs, but it will take us 12 months to reduce the bill-of-materials.
• We can stay steady, but given our customer acquisition costs we are concerned we won't scale profitably.
• We therefore would like to launch an adjacent product. We think it will have a 30 percent attach rate to our core product. Our adjacent product has 70 percent gross margins, so if we can get even a 20 percent attach rate, we can hold prices steady on our core product and increase total margin from 30?to 38 percent.

No matter what your level is English or French, as a non native speaker, it makes the difference between just turning up at a board meeting and presenting financials and preparing. But it's also a great discipline although you might be telling yourself ”There are numbers, I can manage it!”.

4. Create a board agenda Creating a board agenda in advance with particular focus on topics and time allocations brings you focus and clarity and you can easier follow your ideas in a more confident way. Be very specific and purposeful about how much time you plan to spend in each area. Keep your speech simple and avoid adding to many details or embellishments trying to prove how expanded is your vocabulary. Especially when there are native speakers in our audience, we tend to ”prove” them how good our French or English is, losing ourselves in unnecessary details and getting stuck.

Think to yourself about the goals of the day, what is important to you and how much time you want to allocate toward?it. Start with important stuff and leave the unimportant stuff at the end of the meeting. When you are squeezed of time, you tend to rush and lose the track of your ideas.

So save your agenda for the things that matter for you and for your talk.

5. Get your financial deck out 72 hours in advance. Numbers again! What can be so difficult to present some figures! From experience with non native speakers, even the most fluent speakers might still encounter difficulties when presenting numbers. Either because of pronunciation, or because counting, numbering is processed in the native language. Statics show that 90+ percent?of financial packs come out 1-2 days before the board meeting, and I think 65 percent come one day before. There is limited time for you, for your board members to read them, digest them, compare them to the last board meeting, and write up questions. So asking for them in advance, you have time to get prepared and avoid space to surprises. And also create a deck with possible questions and answers. You can implement a routine of receiving them 72 hours before the meeting.

6. Send your agenda to each board member individually or set up calls in advance. Send the agenda in advance and ask for "pre calls" to see whether they'd like to add items to the board agenda or whether they think these topics are the right ones. In this way, you check if there any areas that you need to revise or rehearse when it comes to your vocabulary, structures, building your communication. You also get familiar with each board member, you get to better know them, so when you will be on the board meeting they will not be ”strangers”. As this feeling of ”I do not know them” might impact on your communication and highjack your brain.

Does this sound ”complicated”? It may, but it is part of your self management, of your communication performance and impact. Besides running the meeting effectively.

I'm sure not every Business Leader agrees with my plan of how to prepare their communication for great board meetings. It may sound like too much work to do, too much to rehearse, too much energy and time invested. And it is not relevant. On the other hand, what I believe it is truly relevant is that you figure out how and what best works for you with your board. The almost 2 decades of experience proved to me that early pre-planning and practice make your communication, your speaking way more effective. No matter how experimented non native speaker you are.

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