You could be forgiven if the thought of making your first presentation to a corporate board of directors evokes feelings of helplessness and inarticulacy – but it doesn’t have to be that way: the moment is yours to own, and you are the one with the greatest control over what happens in the room.
Here, then, are some tips for how to succeed in your first board presentation.
Your audience is only as blank and faceless as you want it to be.
Like any group of people, your board is a collection of personalities, qualifications, accumulated work experience and foreign travels. The majority of corporates will have a section on their official website that sets out who is on their board – including photos and sometimes quite lengthy biographical paragraphs explaining what each member has done in their lives and where their careers have taken them.
To get past the perception that you will be speaking to a slate-grey wall of expensive business attire, your mission is to humanise these people in your mind. So, before you even get to the material, swot up on those ‘Our Board’ web pages – and any other paraphernalia on your firm’s top people and credentials that you can get hold of – and find out who you will be speaking to.
It may even be the case that you have previously encountered smaller groupings of board members in meetings with your senior finance executives. If so, lock on to your memories of those people – and a quick handshake and “Nice to see you again” as everyone settles down for your presentation wouldn’t go amiss.
Or, at any rate, a very diligent mage. The whole point of being invited to deliver a board presentation is that you’ve been asked to speak from a position of expertise.
When all is said and done, you wouldn’t have received the call if somebody somewhere on a desk near yours didn’t think that you could do it.
Being asked to present to the board isn’t like being ushered into a walk-in freezer in the meatpacking district of some foreboding metropolis. It’s a badge of honour: you have been recognised for skills and qualities that you have already shown in your immediate team, such as organisation, attention to detail, technical knowledge and/or accurate forecasting.
Performing for the board is just a way to confirm what others – including yourself, if you’re honest – already know. So, plug into the self-assurance that ought to stem from that knowledge and use it to fuel your confidence.
Again, not my words, but those of the late, great screenwriter William Goldman, from his peerless book Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Part memoir, part manual, Goldman’s book set out to school budding scribes in the art of how to hone a script so that it convinces an audience – initially of producers and studio chiefs – that the story is compelling and worth pursuing (and financing).
As such, the writer must have total command over the material and know the world they’re building inside out, to ensure that the whole thing can’t simply be unravelled by someone in the audience zooming in on a scrap of woolly thinking and picking away at it.
Like a screenwriting hotshot, you must do everything you can to give your presentation an internal consistency, so there’s a clarity and logic to it, and a compelling argument that will keep your crowd watching and listening on till the end.
Know the topic in all its dimensions, and rehearse your spiel till you have it down. If there are a couple of “don’t knows” because you’re looking at a fast-moving field – say, geopolitical risk – be honest about that and explain what you are doing on a rolling basis to get more facts in.
Think carefully about the primary, headline takeaway – and four or five sub-takeaways – you want the board to extract from your presentation.
Even (or especially) if you are dealing with complex subject matter, work on the material until it’s distilled into a series of very distinct sections that flow like a funnel: starting out with a big contention, idea or conjecture and then drilling down into a few chunks of relevant detail before tying off in a conclusion – or a few thoughts on what could happen next in the field you’re exploring.
A loose, unstructured sprawl of information will only leave your audience frustrated and confused. You’ve seen all those cartoon versions of dazed boffins wrapped up in reams of printer paper? Well, don’t be like that.
Instead, pick out the facts and figures, or a few lines of data, that most convincingly demonstrate your points, particularly if the ideas you are trying to get across are quite provocative. You want this material to lodge in the board’s collective mind.
That also means that the PowerPoint graphics you use as you go through the material should be punchy and easy to read. If you spot opportunities to add a few grace notes of dry humour to those graphics, great – just as long as you don’t go full-on Dave Gorman (nothing against him, of course, but there’s a time and a place…).
Fielding questions is often seen as even more daunting than the presentation itself, but that doesn’t have to be the case. It’s the part where the scenario becomes interactive, rather than just you saying your piece, and that means you’re at last having a dialogue with those people you’ve been finding out all about on your corporate website.
Take one question at a time, maintain eye contact with each board member who raises a query and, most importantly, be completely open and non-evasive.
That should be no problem if you have exhaustively followed tips 3 and 4 – but there are always the tripwires of tough questions to manage, particularly if you have been presenting about a touchy topic, such as a rough quarter or a delayed M&A deal.
Under those conditions, all you can do is be 100% honest about the circumstances behind the less-than-glad tidings, and explain what sort of measures you and your team are taking to remedy the situation.
Finally, thank the board for their time, and let them know that you will be emailing them your slide deck for their reference. And then actually send the email – that’s super important.
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist