Knowledge = Procrastination, Intelligence = Decisions!

“Why do senior leaders always interrupt when I speak?!”. “Why am I asked to give the bigger picture at times and details on other occasions?”. These are the questions senior executives ask me time and again.

Organisations invest an incredible amount of executive time in preparing for and delivering voluminous presentations and spend hours on end huddled in mind-numbing meetings. Most leaders I speak to confirm that many of these meetings are boring, meaningless, repetitive and, do not always achieve clear outcomes.

Delving deeper into these meeting formats revealed the same pattern to me -

-         the ‘Agenda’ and the ‘Objective’ are mistakenly assumed to be the same

-         the presenter is usually not looking from the audience’s perspective

-         too much or unclear data/facts are dumped on the listeners

-         there is no ‘Ask’ or pointers to enable decisions to be made

-         the presenter tries to impress the audience with their knowledge.

Many times, the attendees are left wondering what the purpose of the discussion or presentation was. As a result, meetings are followed up with sequels and threequels before the audience is convinced and decisions are eventually made. In a majority of cases, it was found that, organisations simply deferred decisions or leaders went into procrastination mode or found excuses to postpone matters.

So, to enable leaders to make decisions, presenters have to bear in mind that –

-         the Objective of the meeting is stated very unambiguously

-         the Agenda is simply a series of steps or milestones for the meeting’s flow

-         what they convey should keep only the audience’s perspective in mind

-         listeners are not impressed with you showcasing your knowledge, but

-         they are looking at the analysis and intelligence based on that knowledge.

Looking futuristic, leaders will have to take swifter decisions with limited time or patience shown from their stakeholders, clients, and so on. The buzz is around Big Data these days and the ultimate use of it is to analyse voluminous knowledge and crunch them all down to intelligent decisions.

Executives must think and act similarly by adapting their influencing styles and not showcase their extensive knowledge or their ability to analyse in-depth or their painful efforts in piecing it all together. Instead, they should invest time and effort in extracting intelligence which enables leaders to say “I Agree/Disagree”.