7 Tips for Nailing Your Presentation to the Board of Directors
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth
While some people view an invitation to present to the Board of Directors as a prison sentence (or worse), this truly can be a career enhancing opportunity. However, like any challenging situation, preparation and attitude are keys to success.
I’ve worked with dozens of professionals faced with this opportunity for the first time, and every encounter reminds me of my own early emotions as I prepared for and dreaded my first board presentation.
It’s not worth the churn, dread and sleeplessness folks, especially if you prepare properly and thoroughly.
7 Ideas to Help You Prepare for and Nail Your Board Presentation:
1. Start early and prepare your mind. Unless you are presiding over a disaster of monumental proportions and have been summoned to explain yourself in front of the firing squad, this is a positive invitation. It’s an honor to be invited. Time is at a premium for most Board meetings, and someone convinced the group you were worth some of that precious time.
2. Know who invited you and why. Since someone had to champion getting your name placed on the agenda, it’s important for you to tune into why you were invited and precisely what you are expected to deliver. Your sponsor in this case has a stake in your success and typically will do whatever it takes to help you prepare for success.
(Of course, if you are leading a monumental disaster, all bets are off on this friendly invitation advice. Start looking for your Teflon-coated Kevlar suit and don’t expect much support.)
3. Know your audience. This one can be difficult for individuals who have had very little or no prior contact with board members. Your inviting sponsor or your boss may have some insights, and of course, it’s reasonable to err on the side of assuming that the Board is comprised of some successful, smart people interested in facts, well-developed ideas, clear plans and how all of this will help the firm achieve its strategic and financial goals.
Warning: they are not interested in bullshit, excessive detail, petty politics, unfounded opinions or anything that sounds like you and your colleagues haven’t baked it long enough.
4. Plan your message. Whatever your topic is, you’re in front of the Board of Directors for just a few brief moments. You need to use this time with the skill of an entrepreneur who has just a few moments to make a positive impression when asking for funding. Your message must be crisp, your key points defensible and your defense supportable.
If you are looking for a helpful tool to organize your thoughts into a crisp and supportable message, try using a Message Mapping approach. (See my post: The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping.)
5. Bring your confidence. Board Members smell “lack of confidence” a mile away. Show fear or doubt and you’ll invite a line of questioning that a 15th century Inquisitor would envy. Planning and practicing your message is critical to building confidence in your content. Practice, practice, practice.
One more commercial for the Message Mapping technique. Used properly, it forces you to think through your support of your key points and core message. Almost all questions you will receive should be answerable using the points in the map. Link your answers to your key supporting points and ultimately your core message.
6. Focus on the message and keep the materials clean and simple. If you suck at building clear, crisp, bullet free and text limited materials or handouts, get some help. Call in a favor from a colleague or go into favor debt, but ask for help.
7. Admit it if you don’t know it. Or said another way, never, ever make stuff up. While this piece of advice might seem preposterous, the pressure of the event has overwhelmed many an accomplished professional’s common-sense, especially in the face of tough questioning. You are much better off admitting you don’t know something than attempting to bluff or b.s. your way through the answer. The cost to your credibility of anything other than indicating, “That’s a great question and I will get back to you,” is more than you should be willing to pay.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Last and not least, remember that the prevailing attitude of the Board before you open your mouth is one of interest and hope. You wouldn’t have made the agenda if they weren’t interested in hearing and learning from you, and you can bet that good Board members are always hoping to uncover new talent. Make a great impression and you will be back. Perhaps in a new and improved capacity!
The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Product Management, Professional Growth, Strategy
Critical communication situations demand crystal clarity.
With apologies for my abusive but personally amusing alliteration above, I’m banging the drum again on the need for all of us to carefully form and frame our messages before we open our mouths and trip on our tongues.
There are many critical communication situations that we face in our organizations and in public, and the moment that you open your mouth is not the time to begin thinking about how to best get your points across. And it’s certainly no time to start rambling like so many politicians or hapless business executives caught on the wrong end of a microphone without a plan. We all know the outcomes, ranging from empty blah blah blabbing to disturbing utterances that demand later apologies.
I use a simple but powerful tool called Message Mapping that is ideal for all of those critical communication situations, including:
- Developing and delivering a speech
- Presenting to executives
- Preparing and participating in a job interview
- Launching a new product
- Communicating a new strategy
- Announcing organizational changes
- Helping to get a group on the same page
- Preparing for an interview
- Delivering difficult news
- Anything else that you can think of…
A group of us learned this approach from a public relations professional years ago and went on to adapt it to serve our own needs in creating corporate and product messaging and helping to ensure that trade show and briefing teams were on the same page about new product launches. Ultimately, we’ve all used it to great effect in our personal professional lives for interview and other presentations.
Creating the Map-Simplicity and Complexity at the Same Time:
The approach is simple to explain, easy to visualize and darned challenging to master all at the same time.
Let’s start with the visual in my poorly constructed, but hopefully, illustrative picture here. In its’ simplest incarnation, the map is constructed on a single sheet of paper (landscape), with the core message placed at the center, no more than 4 key supporting points external to the core message and then supporting data or evidence adjacent to each supporting point. That’s the easy part.
The challenging issue is to distill your core message down to its bare-naked essence and get it right. If you are preparing for a job interview, the core message is your personal-professional value proposition, which for most of us, is something that takes a lot of teeth gnashing and revision work to capture and describe properly. If you are launching a new product, this is the core value proposition of your offering…the essence of why this is important and for whom and how it is uniquely different. And yes, this is captured in one or two sentences.
Once your core message or in this case your core value proposition is defined, you need to back that with points (examples, facts, experiences) that support this message. Once again, you face the task of distilling a lot of examples and supporting points down to the very few that most effectively support your case. And yes, I’m serious about limiting yourself to three or at most four supporting points that make the case for your core message. Any more than that, and you’ve not worked hard enough to sharpen your messaging.
The outer ring as I describe it is used for the facts and supporting points that back your logic. The constraint of a single page or flip-chart challenges you to summarize the critical points and to jettison extraneous anecdotal information.
Using the Map:
Once the map is in place and appropriately tested, it becomes an invaluable personal or group tool. You’ve now got a tool to help you practice and deliver in the most difficult of situations. If constructed properly, your map drives your script and serves as an aid in answering questions. Proper use of the map involves making your case according to the flow and answering questions by referencing back to the supporting evidence…key supporting points and core message every time.
One point of caution: politicians are often observed abusing this tool by answering questions using their maps, with complete disregard for the question being asked. Don’t disrespect your audience this way.
The Bottom-Line for Now
I’ve worked for weeks with teams using this tool to form corporate and product messaging and days and weeks with individuals to help frame their own professional value propositions. I’ve also used this in minutes to prepare for interviews or executive updates. We frequently provided these maps to our trade show teams to ensure that everyone could answer the questions, “What do you guys do?” or “What’s new this year?” with something that actually meant something to someone, other than the inconsistent corporate gobbedly-gook that is often spewed in these settings.
Keep in mind that just because you own the finest woodworking tools doesn’t mean that you are capable of creating beautiful furniture. The message map is a tool that demands care and handling and then and only then, rewards you with rich and productive communication experiences.
Measure twice, cut once.
Leadership Caffeine for the Last Week of February 2009
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership Caffeine, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth
It’s still too cold out to contemplate an iced coffee, but the prospect of turning the calendar page from February to March is not unpleasant here in the frozen Midwest. I’ll kick off this week with a tall cup of my favorite fair trade roast.
Last week we focused on team performance and the week prior on relationships. This week’s Leadership Caffeine offers some personal development suggestions for anyone interested in growing their influence by improving their skills in dealing with executive audiences.
How Strong is Your Executive Presence?
Many otherwise really smart people flounder when it comes time to deal with executives and board members. They become tongue tied or worse yet, they develop a sudden urge to share everything that they ever learned about a topic and like a train barreling down the tracks, are not easily stopped.
One technical leader once described to me that every time he got in an elevator with an executive, he spontaneously blurted out something that was really stupid. I urged him to take the stairs while we worked on correcting this unfortunate habit.
Do You Know How to Get to Carnegie Hall? (Note: old joke…the answer is practice, practice, practice). Why a message map is your best friend.
Preparation, practice and experience are the best cures for improving your executive presence. If you have advance warning of an executive encounter, craft a message map that carefully outlines your key and supporting points. It’s a simple and powerful PR technique.
Place the core message(s) in the middle. Create a few spokes (3-5) that contain supporting points for your core message. If it helps, create a spoke off of each of the supporting points with facts to back things up. Answer all questions by reinforcing the points on your message map.
Practice delivering these points like you would practice a speech, although for heaven’s sake, make certain that you don’t sound scripted during your delivery.
Anticipate questions and carefully frame answers:
Attempt to anticipate the key questions you might receive and frame short, fact-based answers. Some executive questions are fairly predictable, including things that focus on budget, time, improving the schedule, impact and risks. Others are a bit more challenging, including things like “what alternative courses of action did you consider and why were they rejected?” Work hard in thinking through the potential questions. A good initial message map will include most of the answers. It’s also OK to indicate a need to investigate as long as you commit to following up.
Look the part:
Although it might seem like it does not need to be said, how you dress and how you carry and conduct yourself in front of executives says a great deal. The nonverbal cues that you are sending out are likely more powerful than the message you are verbalizing. If your role calls for increasing amounts of face time in front of executives, it might be time to get a wardrobe makeover. Ask for help from a fashion consultant if you need it.
Follow your Mom’s advice: sit up or stand straight and look people in the eyes.
Executives are looking and listening for signs of confidence when you are talking. Chances are you are either asking for something or updating on something important, and in all cases, they are assessing your competence. Look people in the eyes when talking. If you are using a powerpoint deck, don’t read the slides! Stand or sit tall, listen attentively and answer clearly and sound like you believe yourself.
Passion helps with persuasion
Don’t discount how powerful your passion about a particular topic can be in winning over an audience. Don’t be afraid to let this passion come through in the form of enthusiasm and excitement. Don’t overdo it, but don’t forget to bring this dimension with you and use it as a tool. People will remember the passion more than the message.
The bottom-line for now:
Chances are the opportunities to address and interface with board members or your firm’s top executives are infrequent. You definitely want to seize these opportunities to show your skills, intelligence and excitement for the business. Great careers are launched when a firm’s leaders see and hear someone that is comfortable, confident and passionate about the business of the firm. Now, about that executive small-talk problem in the elevator…
Marketing Yourself Part II: Defining Your Professional Value Proposition
Filed under: "To Do" List, Marketing, Marketing Yourself, Professional Growth, Strategy
Job search is a hot topic right now, and I received a number of notes from individuals who read my Irreverent Opinions of a Resume Hobbyist post the other day, asking for input about how to craft a Personal/Professional Value Proposition to support their job-hunting activities. In essence, people want to know how to stand out in a crowd. A well-developed Professional Value Proposition is an essential tool for differentiating yourself from the herd, the pack and the flock!
I said in the post that I view this as the hardest task in developing an effective resume and self-marketing strategy. This is where you will spend the most time creating content and agonizing over wording. Many people struggle to effectively articulate how they have created value in the past and how they will do it again in the future. You need to get this right!
After receiving the inquiries, I spent some time thinking about how to help by offering some guidelines and suggestions for navigating the slippery slope of defining your own Professional Value Proposition.
A quick health warning. I’m neither a resume writing pro or career coach, although a lifetime of hiring, developing and leading professionals along with many years leading marketing and strategy initiatives at least give me a license to fly here. Part of Management Excellence includes effective career development, so I don’t feel like I’m too far afield with this important topic.
Please feel free to add in your thoughts and comments below or use the “Suggest a Topic” box in the far right column of this blog.
What is a Professional Value Proposition?
Don’t let the fancy strategy and marketing words get in the way of a straightforward concept. Your Professional Value Proposition (PVP) is simply a central message that that describes how you as an individual uniquely create value for your customers, companies, co-workers and stakeholders.
When do I reference my Professional Value Proposition?
In short, all of the time. Your PVP is the core message that needs to come through in your marketing materials—your resume, cover letter and other supporting materials. It also defines the core message that you will reference and support during interview processes.
OK, I still don’t get the Value Proposition part. What is it?
In strategy terms, a simple explanation of the concept of “Value Proposition,” is: Why people buy. Firms and hiring managers will buy you because you very uniquely solve complex problems for customers and stakeholders. Of course, the devil is in the details of describing why you are unique and providing evidence to substantiate your claim.
Another way to relate to your PVP is as your personal elevator pitch. If given the chance to pitch yourself for a job during a ride from the lobby to the 14th floor, how would you effectively communicate why the hiring manager should consider you.
Last and not least, your PVP is not a single sentence statement, but rather a concise message map with a core message at the center and supporting messages and evidence hanging off of that core message.
How do I Develop my PVP? Questions about you.
I’ll offer a series of questions for you as thought prompters. By thinking through and answering the questions, you will have the materials needed to finalize your PVP.
What is it that you do that creates value for your organization?
For example:
As a leader, I am uniquely gifted at identifying and developing talented professionals and teams that fuel growth and create positive change in organizations.
I connect strategies to execution and guide teams to innovate, experiment, learn and adapt tactics and strategies to better solve client problems.
As a sales manager, I create operationally excellent and innovative sales teams that work relentlessly on developing high quality business by solving specific client problems.
What evidence supports your value-create statements?
This is the part where you need to clearly and succinctly substantiate with numbers and examples. Include answers to what you did that drove results, how you did it and how you impacted your team and organization.
PVPs Can’t Just Focus on History…You Need to Look Forward
While your past experiences define where you have come from and what you’ve accomplished, the hiring manager is looking at today and the near future at that need solving. A good PVP will incorporate both the historical examples and data points and then offer a forward-looking component. You need to connect the dots on how your past adds up to creating value in the future. Otherwise, you’re just offering a personal biography.
What qualities, skills, approaches, and outcomes can you describe that show why you are unique and different from typical candidates?
Remember, I didn’t say this was easy. What are your unique skills and experiences and how do they help you create value? If you reach this point in your exercise and you cannot confidently state why you are unique and distinct (talents, skills, successes, evidence, go forward abilities etc.), then you need to keep working. If you get stuck, ask a valued professional colleague for help.
Who’s Your Buyer? Tailoring Your PVP to Your Buyer:
This sounds dirtier than it is. It’s actually good marketing. The CEO seeking an executive hire has one set of needs, HR another and prospective peers have their own. Your absolute core message does not deviate, but you may emphasize different skills and experiences to better match with the needs of your immediate customers.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Describing who you are and what you bring to a firm and a team is remarkably important to your search success. Ideally, your Professional Value Proposition will be a Resonator (thanks, Tuned In authors!): something that shows how you so perfectly solve unresolved problems for your buyers that they have to have your services. Creating the genuine message about you that resonates with hiring managers require a lot more effort than constructing the typical run-of-the-mill chronological/functional resume.
So, tell me about yourself. Why should anyone hire you?
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