Presenting information to leaders and managers - get your ideas across before they’re poo-pooed

How do you present new information to leaders in your organisation? Have you thought about ways to get your ideas across before someone gets wind and poo-poos them?  In this blog post, Pam Betts looks at the importance of feeding information to leaders before your idea gets off the ground. Without them on board, you’ll fail miserably. 

Giggle test preparation

The giggle test is a quick synopsis of your idea on a few slides, very high level and containing the 3 most important elements:

• What you're going to do
• When you're going to do it
• What’s in it for them?

Why do you need to do the giggle test? The answer is easy. You know many leaders are busy in their own area delivering their objectives - they find it annoying when new ideas and initiatives take up their time. 

This sort of annoyance causes the following familiar behaviours: your emails about your new idea are ignored; no one accepts your meeting invites; and they moan to your boss about what you’re doing. Does this sound familiar? 

Well, once you have prepared your giggle test, you need to move to the pre-cook stage.

Leadership pre-cooking

Pre-cooking is a term we’ve used many times over the years. The idea is to grab a few minutes with all the leaders to be impacted by your idea on a one-to-one basis. Grabbing those 5 minutes can be tricky though. 

Why not try catching them at the water fountain, coffee pot or even in the car park. Try saying something like, 

“Hope you’ve got a minute. I’d like to grab a coffee or a quick 5-minutes in your office when you're free. It’s about some new changes coming that will impact your area, and your help is needed.”

Covid times have hindered that approach, so skilling up on creating a hook in the subject section of your email is critical. Mentioning you need their help can get you a pre-cook Zoom meeting. 

Benefits to pre-cooking with a giggle test 

The benefits are many. 

Firstly, you’ve fed forward what you’re going to do - they’ll like that as you’ve reduced the element of surprise which disengages them. 

Secondly, you’ve told them when you’re going to do it - they’ll like that too, as they can now feed forward to you their key time slots to avoid and have some control of your idea’s impact. 

Thirdly, you’re gathering cross-functional information from each leader to feed into your implementation plan, reducing your stress levels ahead of your grand finale presentation to the whole leadership group. 

Pulling the big picture together 

From your hard work planning the giggle test and gathering information from pre-cooking each leader, you’re ready to confidently pull the big picture together. 

By engaging most of the leaders across the business, you’ve gained a holistic picture of how your idea can be implemented. The information will give you insight to how the changes will transition into business as usual. 

And if you need further support with your presentation skills, why not come along to our How to feel less nervous about speaking at your own funeral workshop in London on June 10th? Your idea will knock your leadership’s socks off after that.