How to Present a Recommendation to the Board Without Drowning It in Detail
Updated: Sep 24
The board does not need to hear everything you know. It needs to understand what is happening, why it matters and what you believe should happen next.
You start adding slides, moving things around and trying to work out what should go where. Before long you have too much information, too many slides and a message that feels harder to explain than it did in your head.
For experienced leaders, the real work of planning a presentation happens long before you touch the slides. Clear speaking begins with clear thinking.
How do you plan a leadership presentation?
A strong leadership presentation starts with three questions:
Who is your audience?
What do you want them to remember?
What do you want them to do next?
These sound simple, but they change the way you prepare. Instead of asking, “What should I put on the slides?” you start by asking what the people in the room actually need from you.
1. Who is your audience?
The same information can land very differently depending on who is listening.
If you're speaking to the board, they might want to understand risk, impact and the decision required. Your own team may need more detail about implementation. A client may be listening for confidence that you understand their priorities.
Before you plan the content, think about the room you’re walking into.
What do they already know?
What matters most to them?
What might they be worried about?
What questions are they likely to ask?
This is one of the easiest ways to stop yourself overloading a presentation. If the information doesn’t help this audience understand the issue or make the decision, it probably doesn’t need to be there.
2. What do you want them to remember?
This is where capable leaders often get caught out. You know the subject inside out, so everything feels important.
But your audience cannot remember everything you know. Your job is to decide what matters most.
Try to reduce the presentation to one clear message. If someone stopped a member of your audience in the corridor afterwards and asked, “What was Liz’s point?”, what would you want them to say?
Once you know that, choose three supporting points. Three gives you enough structure without turning the presentation into a data dump.
For example, if you are recommending a change in approach, your three points might be:
What is happening now
Why it matters
What you recommend
The exact structure will depend on the presentation, but the principle stays the same: decide the message before you build the slides.
3. What do you want them to do next?
A presentation can be interesting, polished and well delivered but still leave people wondering what happens next.
Leadership communication should make the next step clear.
Do you want approval?
A decision?
Agreement to move forward?
A change in behaviour?
More information from the group?
If you know the action you want, you can build the whole presentation towards it.
It also gives you a much stronger ending than, “That’s everything from me. Any questions?”
Why starting with slides makes presentations harder
PowerPoint encourages you to think in slides before you have worked out the story.
That is how presentations become longer than they need to be. You add a slide because the information exists, then another because someone might ask about it, then another to explain the previous one.
More information can feel reassuring when you are preparing, but it often makes you harder to follow when you are presenting.
A senior audience rarely needs to see everything you know. They need you to help them understand what matters.
What should you leave out of a presentation?
Deciding what not to include is an important part of leadership communication. For each piece of information, ask: does this help the audience understand the message or take the action I want?
If not, you can leave it out, move it to an appendix or keep it ready for questions.
That is not dumbing down your expertise. It is showing judgement.
Plan the questions as well as the presentation
If you are presenting to senior stakeholders, the questions are often as important as the presentation itself.
Think ahead about the areas they are most likely to challenge: cost, risk, timing, resources, trade-offs or the impact of doing nothing.
You do not need to script every answer. You do need to know where the difficult questions are likely to come from.
That preparation helps you stay composed and focused when the conversation moves away from your slides.
Then open PowerPoint
Once you are clear on your audience, message and action, the slides become much easier to create.
You are no longer asking, “What can I put in?” You are asking, “What will help me communicate this clearly?”
That might mean fewer slides, less text and more space for the conversation itself.
Planning a presentation now?
I created the Leadership Presentation Planner for leaders who know their subject but sometimes struggle to decide what to include, what to leave out or how to stop themselves rambling.
The 13-page workbook helps you work through your audience, your message, three key points, stories and evidence, your call to action and the questions you need to prepare for.
By the time you open PowerPoint, you’ll already know where you’re going.
Would you like to know more about leading presentations to get the board on board? Listen to Liz talk more on this subject on the latest episode of the podcast Leadership Communication in Action
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-stop-rambling-in-presentations-get-your-point/id1757118454?i=1000787113979
Comments