313. Train Your Executive Voice with 3 Small Shifts

Let's have a look at the first shift.

Lead with the key message.

This week, I was actually working with a client who's in a huge transformation program, which they're overseeing.

Really amazing piece of work, but tough.

There's a lot of challenges there.

They were practicing with me a presentation that they have to do to executives about the timelines.

They walk me through everything, the tasks, the dependencies, the risks.

All of that was great, and I understood everything.

And I was like, okay, this is cool.

So what? That is the question you can ask yourself to get the key message.

The key point in this case was actually that if one of the dependencies fails, if we don't get this right, it's going to delay the entire program.

That's why I recommend extending the timeline.

That was their message underneath it, and I could hear it.

It was there, but I needed to extract it And it got lost in a lot of the detail.

And it's not that the detail is not important because it is.

But if he'd led with that at the beginning, that would have framed the conversation completely differently.

Lead with the key message.

And all that has to be is such a simple sentence in English like the key message is.

That's it.

Of course, you need to think about what the key message is.

And the good question I like to ask myself a lot with that, and that's come from the First Minute book, which you know that I'm a fan of.

And if you don't, it's a book that I absolutely recommend reading if you have a lot of conversations in English on a daily basis.

I'll put the link in the description box.

The question is, so what? Why does this matter? Why should we care? The key message is...