Talking to Executives: a lesson in workplace communication
A week ago, I witnessed a group of developers at the front of a room explaining the results of their recent code refactoring project. What the developers had accomplished was quite impressive technically, although the CEO was sitting at the back of the room looking fairly confused.
At one point, one of the developers pointed out that their work had reduced the company’s bandwidth requirements by 30%. Someone turned to the CEO just after that and said, “that means it’s cheaper.” Everyone laughed.
Good workplace communication involves considering your audience
CEOs and other executives see things with a very different “lens” than a geek does. While a geek might think about how cool their solution was, an executive thinks, “how will we monetize that?”
Many executives simply filter out all the details they don’t believe are important, which could be a large portion of what you’re saying — if not everything you’re saying.
So if you want an executive to hear you, your communication has to use concepts they consider important. While it may be obvious to you that deploying an open source solution is lower cost, if you say “open source solution” and not “lower cost”, your words might be filtered out.
In particular, here are nine words you’ll want to put to use in the workplace:
- revenue - will your proposal generate new income for the company? If so, when and how much? Estimate.
- cost - how much will your proposal cost? Will it reduce operational costs later on?
- customers - does this address a need or problem for existing customers? Will it help the company retain customers or acquire new ones?
- opportunities - where can we go with this? Does this lead to access to new markets?
- partnerships - can we work with any of our partners on this, or build new partnerships?
- competitors - who are the competitors that might care that we’re doing this?
- threats - is there a chance that a big competitor might also be working on this?
- risk - is there a chance that this might fail or be more costly than projected?
- shareholders - if you had to explain to the board of directors how this will increase the value of the company, could you?
Before going into a meeting with an executive, spend some time considering how what you have to say might impact the business and then use concepts like the ones above as your talking points.
The benefits of an executive vocabulary
Developing an executive vocabulary might not only help you become an executive yourself one day, it will also help your career in the more immediate future.
By becoming known as the person who can communicate the business reasons for technical initiatives, you increase your own value to the company.
It goes back to the VIP rule: you’re improving your visibility, your image and your performance.
Related Categories
Communicating,
Leadership
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