“Speak With Frameworks: How HR Leaders Win the Room” with Vicky Zhao, Founder, School of Human Intellect and Speaking With Frameworks

But I was like, actually, if you're the one that puts the plan together, it's your idea.

And I think it's a little bit of like having a clear plan.

People start to follow you.

But if you can also communicate that plan, if you can help people synthesize the ideas in the meeting, help them understand where we need to go, people are going to follow you.

You're going to be more influential.

But let's talk about some people who might hear they're not coming across as an executive in the way they communicate.

Maybe, for instance, I don't know, someone might say they need to be more strategic, be more executive like.

From your point of view, what does this kind of feedback actually mean?

This we hear a lot and in the end, what it means is you're not thinking about the decision being made.

So when we think about going into a meeting and having a discussion about th- something, everyone's thinking about, "Oh, what should I talk about? How can I make sure that I sound, you know, clever, I sound like someone who knows their thing, that make sure that other people don't push back on me?" Rather, executive communication is we're going to this room, and at the end, we need to make a decision.

A strategy is how can we reach our goal in a way that we make the best decisions to get there.

So when you start to think about the decision at the end of the day, it's a lot easier to be strategic, to be sounding like a executive, because you start to pay attention to, okay, what's the goal here? What's the problem here? What's the solution? How can I make sure I tie these things together so that everyone is on the same page and moving towards that North Star, that goal?

Yeah.

And so it's not about how we communicate and saying fancy things.

It's really about how do we make sure we're getting to an actual goal.

When you think about what does it mean to communicate like an executive.

It's about zooming in and out so you influence the action being taken in the room.

Zooming in means that, yes, we understand the details of what's going on, what have the teams done for this project, so we can talk about that.

But at the same time, it's being able to go up a level and say, "Okay, so what's the so what of everything that the team has done?" So being able to go up and say, now connecting it to the goal that we're doing, connecting it to the result that we want to achieve, how can we make sure that we're getting that across at the executive level when they're not interested in the necessary details unless they want to probe? And then there's also going across in the sense of making sure that everyone's on the same page, right? We go into a conversation assuming a lot of things, assuming we're talking about the same project, assuming we're talking about the same goals, the same problem, the same solution.

But many times, actually, these are not so obvious.

Having a clear head, knowing that at the executive level, one of the roles is to make sure everyone understands what's going on is also key.

So having that North Star, being able to zoom in and out, and then being able to also bring the whole team towards the same understanding is how we're going to get to that decision at the end of the day.