I was asked by my manager to give a presentation on his behalf to the senior executive of our division at their monthly operational review. I thought this was a great opportunity to get myself noticed. However, having spent a great deal of time putting the presentation together I was told that I had five minutes to get over the ‘salient points’ instead of the full slide presentation which I had planned at half an hour.
I didn’t know how I could condense my slides into five minutes and so tried to negotiate some more time. This only resulted in me getting bumped off the agenda completely. I’m really annoyed as this whole thing has been a complete waste of my time. I think I deserve an apology. What do you think?
I think the first thing I’d recommend is that you put some distance between you and this understandably frustrating experience. I’m glad that you have resisted doing anything hasty as I’m sure you would have regretted it later.
Don’t take the situation personally. Just accept that executives are busy people and issues do arise that necessarily divert their attention away from plan. They will be unaware of the effort you invested in preparing for this presentation and therefore completely oblivious as to how the agenda change affected you.
I cannot agree with you that this situation ‘has been a complete waste’ of your time. It will only be a waste if you do not ‘take the time’ to identify lessons to be learnt, and then learn from them.
Let’s take a look. Do you know why you were ‘bumped’ off’ the agenda. If you don’t then it would be worth finding out. You might find that a major customer outage was
jeopardising the renewal of their annual supply contract worth 25% of your division’s sales target. In this case turning up at your senior executive’s door and demanding an apology might not be the most career enhancing move for you.
Understand that if the executives themselves have little control over the operational agenda, what chance do you have! However you can be in control of the information that you have to present and how you behave as you present it.
Getting a thirty minute slot on an operational agenda is quite a feat in itself. Did you know whether your expectations of thirty minutes would be met? If your manager didn’t tell you and you didn’t check this yourself then…
Never assume anything always ask to make sure you know exactly what’s expected of you. As you manager asked you to do this presentation then he must take some responsibility for what happened. I would have expected him to brief you on what was required and give you some guidance on how to prepare your presentation. If anyone should be apologising to you it’s him. However if he gave you no guidance and you didn’t ask for any then I think it only fair that you share the ‘blame’. You’re clearly annoyed that your request for more time resulted in being ‘bumped off’ the agenda completely.
Do you homework and find out as much as you can about what happens at these reviews and who attends them. Is the full agenda always covered? If you were at the end of the agenda then how likely was it that you might get ‘bumped’ anyway? In fact if this were the case then giving you five minutes to present the ‘salient points’ may well have been the executive’s way of trying to give you some time.
Take whatever time you are granted and treat it as precious. Trust me that once you were in front of these people and got their attention, with your ‘salient points’, they would have made more time to listen to you. As it was you never got into room in the first place and lost that opportunity. Why were you been asked to present? What did the people you were presenting to want to get out of your presentation?
Always review the content of your presentation from your audience’s perspective. Put yourself in your audiences shoes and ask yourself if what you have prepared will make sense to them. Is it pitched at the right level? Do you have too many slides? A good rule of thumb is one slide for every five minutes of presentation time.
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) As senior executives are busy people then they want bullet point top level information not a mass of detail. So always assume that your presentation slot may be cut short and plan to present the ‘salient points’ in the first couple of slides. The rest is back up. And believe me if your audience start asking for that back-up information then you’ve got them.
Finally it’s worth remembering that one of the most important people involved in senior reviews is the senior executive’s PA. She or he will know whether the senior executive that you want to influence is jet lagged or in a foul mood. This information could be invaluable. So your last lesson is:
Build a good working relationship with the senior executive's PAs.
Do I think you deserve an apology? Well no, actually I think you should be grateful that you were given this experience to learn from.
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