Presenting to senior management? Agility is the key

I regularly give a workshop called ‘Presenting Concisely to Senior Executives’ and the first exercise I ask the participants to do is to complete this sentence – “Senior executives are a_________ audience”.

What suggestions do you have for the missing word?

My choice is the word “tough”. And one of the reasons they are a tough audience is that they can be so unpredictable, right?

When faced with unpredictability the best approach is agility. Here are five tips that will help you be more agile as you present to this challenging audience.

1) Structure your presentation like an accordion.

Be prepared to shorten or lengthen your presentation as the discussion evolves. The usual scenario is that your presentation will get cut down. An excellent structure to use that allows for a shorter-than-expected presentation is the ‘Pyramid Principle’ where you lead with your key message, followed by main arguments followed by supporting details.

2) Leave enough time for discussion

Executives are really looking for a discussion more than a presentation. Your presentation simply forms the basis of the discussion. Follow the 10/30 rule: if have 30 minutes on the agenda, plan for 10 minutes of content and reserve the other 20 minutes for interaction. Let your audience know of these timing plans in advance. If they know you’ll only be speaking for 10 minutes, they’re more likely to refrain from interrupting you when you’re giving your content.

3) If your presentation time gets cut right down, use the structure ‘PREP’

P – Position: Your position on the topic being discussed (the bottom line).

R – Reason: The reason for your position on the topic.

E – Evidence: The evidence you have to support your position/point

P – Position summarised – A repetition of your position to ensure it’s well understood.

4) Use the ‘notice and ask’ strategy to refocus the discussion

It’s not your place to tell the executives what to do or where they should be focusing. However, if the discussion starts to go in an unexpected direction, you can say, “I notice our discussion is now focused on X. Can I get your guidance? Would you like to keep moving in this direction, or would you like to get back to our topic?”

5) Use hyperlinks to jump easily to different slides in your deck

It’s difficult to know where the executives will want to deep-dive so one of the areas where you need to be agile is with your slide deck. Plan appendix slides with detailed data that you can pull up if necessary. A great way to show agility is to set up hyperlinks from information in your main slide deck that take the audience to the detailed data in the appendix slides if they ask for it.

Presenting to senior management is a high-stakes communication scenario where you not only need to prepare your content well, but you need to prepare it to be as flexible as possible on the day. The tips above will help you build that flexibility into your presentation.