Anyone who operates at any level in a corporate or work environment, in any way, has faced at some point in their career, or if not, will soon face the need to deliver an executive presentation.
However, although delivering executive presentations is an everyday task for many people, most of the executive presentations that are given turn out to be ineffective or at least boring for the audience.
Many people make a mistake because they feel that when they are assigned the responsibility of giving an executive presentation, their job is to transmit the information well and on time, and although that may be true from a certain point of view, another thing to consider is that each presentation can be an audition for leadership.
And anyone who aspires to grow professionally, whether in the corporate environment, as an entrepreneur, as an independent professional, or as a collaborator in an organization, can access the benefits of delivering impactful executive presentations.
An executive presentation is usually brief, and normally takes between 5 and 30 minutes. In that time, you have to convey very specifically the data that your bosses, your reports, your coworkers, and other stakeholders who may need this information need to know.
When we think about executive presentations, sometimes we imagine them as something very laborious to prepare, and that (when we deliver them) can make us nervous. Why? Because we are presenting facts, we are presenting numbers. And although there is always room for interpretations and updates among numbers, it is also true that numbers speak for themselves.
Trying to talk over the numbers is a mistake. It's as if you and I were going to a Roger Waters concert, and before the concert an unknown and bad band performed. And after an hour of listening to that band, finally, Roger Waters would come on stage to sing Shine On You Crazy Diamond… but the opening band would continue playing in the background.
What would that experience be like for you?
Well, that's exactly what your bosses, your reports, your collaborators and your stakeholders experience when they are trying to understand the story that the data tells, and you put a different story on top of it.
The executive presentation is one in which we have to be very careful with the resources we have, very attentive to time, and very economical with the attention we ask of our audience.
In most cases, it is usually a mistake to try to be too empathetic or too persuasive in an executive presentation. There are other spaces for that. But at the moment you are delivering an executive presentation, you have to make sure you accomplish two fundamental things:
- Number one: make the necessary information available.
- Number two: be assertive with the message you are trying to communicate.
Because at the intersection between assertive communication and the availability of information, that is where a good executive presentation is found.
Common Mistakes in Executive Presentations
I believe that, without a doubt, one of the most common mistakes we see executives, supervisors, middle management, and even management make at Leaderlix is not being aware of time. For example, if you had 15 minutes to present, 15 minutes arrive… and you're barely making the introduction.
Or maybe you don't go that far, but it can happen that, at the end of your presentation, you feel rushed because you're watching the clock and you know you're missing 30% of your slides. And that makes you nervous, and the people in your audience feel that nervousness.
I think the reason why time gets away from us when we have to make an important presentation is because, when we prepare it, sometimes we get nervous, and we can feel that what we are going to present are not good results… or they are good, but they are not enough against the expectations of those who are going to listen to us… or even that they are enough against the expectations of others, but not against your own, of your work or of your team's work.
Sometimes this fear is founded, but in many other cases it is neither a conscious nor rational fear. That is: we don't know we have that fear until after the presentation.
Something that happened to me, when I was just starting to do executive presentations, was that I would start to get nervous, but, for some reason, rationally I didn't want to accept that I felt nervous about the presentation I had ahead of me.
So what happened to me was that my body started to somatize that nervousness, and it did it differently each time. Sometimes it manifested as gastritis or a sore throat, which I suffered days before. Other times I had a headache. I even suffered migraines one or two days before an executive presentation.
In fact, there was a day when I was so nervous about an event where I had to present that I ended up in the hospital with very high fever and strange symptoms that doctors couldn't quite understand.
In most cases, those symptomatic presentations (apparently unrelated) would disappear immediately after delivering the presentation.
It wasn't until many years later that I started to connect the dots. I realized that, although consciously I didn't feel nervous, my body was channeling that nervousness and turning it into discomfort and illness.
Today, in some very specific cases, something similar can still happen to me. But not with that magnitude anymore, because now I am aware that when I have to deliver an executive presentation, I can get nervous.
What I do is I have learned to control that nervousness before the presentation. The first step, at least for me, is to recognize the nervousness before the presentation begins.
Now, the point here is the following: sometimes that nervousness is not only channeled as illness or physical discomfort, but we also rationalize it. And when that happens, we can fall into the error of "over-preparing" the presentation.
This means including more information than necessary, or in other cases, putting too much focus on an aspect that wasn't that important, just because you feel especially strong in that topic and, in contrast, you feel weak in others. So you give more weight to what you feel confident in, even if it's not the most relevant to your presentation.
This is a very common trap that our ego and the fear we feel before presenting put on us. We have to be very aware of what is happening, because if we're not, we may find that, ten minutes, an hour, or a day before the presentation, we realize that, although it's full of slides, we haven't dedicated time or space to what the audience really needs to hear. And that is, at its core, a lack of assertiveness.
Being assertive also means identifying what your audience really wants and needs to hear.
And this doesn't mean that your presentation should turn into a question and answer session, or that you should only talk about what others expect to hear. It is also perfectly valid for you, as an expert or specialist in a process, to put information on the table that others hadn't considered.
When that is the case, you not only have the permission, but also the obligation to do it.
But being assertive means doing it in a way in which that new information responds to the real concerns and needs of your audience.
Recently, one of my former students, with whom I was doing a series of one-on-one coaching sessions, had to present at an annual convention. The entire company was going to be present and, in many ways, it was the most important event for the company. She had a very important participation in a key panel.
Over several sessions, we met to curate and ground the information assertively and make sure all necessary information was available. When it came time to give this information design, I advised her to be the one to review her presentation. To which she replied: "I can't do it because I'm not a designer".
This is something I can empathize with perfectly, because I myself am not a graphic designer and I have had to see, at national or international events, slides so finely and professionally designed that they impact by their beauty and aesthetics. So I can empathize perfectly well when someone, like my student in that case (but maybe it's also happened to you, and it can happen to anyone) doesn't feel they have the design skills to give the final touches to a presentation, when many things depend on that presentation.
So my former student went and hired a graphic designer to design her slides. What happened is that the designer took a little longer than expected. In fact, my former student was starting to get a little nervous, because the day of the event was approaching and the designer wasn't delivering updates on time as they had agreed.
But anyway, the case is that one afternoon before the event, the designer kept his word and delivered a beautiful set of slides, perfectly designed and meeting my former student's highest aesthetic standards. So she was happy, to say the least.
The day of the event came. My former student approached the house, which is where the entire team was preparing the materials and managing the files being broadcast on the event screens. She arrived with her file on a USB and told the person in charge: "These are my slides".
They loaded the slides. When the time came for my former student's participation, her slides were projected and she, with the remote in hand, started clicking to start passing the transitions of the information and thus be able to tell the story as she and I had prepared it.
But very soon she realized that things were not going to go as she had planned, because she immediately noticed that the slides, although they were perfectly well designed, the designer had not contemplated the transitions she had asked him to include.
That is, a slide that had, for example, four blocks of information (where first one had to be shown, then after one click the second, then after one click the third, and then after one click the fourth) showed all four at the same time.
Which, in principle, shouldn't be that serious. But when you have prepared your presentation with transitions and it turns out that, at the moment, you won't be able to use those transitions and 3,500 people are watching you, there's no way you won't get nervous.
The same thing happened to her. And although she finally managed to deliver an impactful presentation and exceeded the objective of her presentation, it was something that made her have a very bad time. And it's something that can happen to any of us.
That's why I'm not a fan of the idea of outsourcing to someone else to help you design your slides. I think it's a better idea for you to dedicate the necessary time to preparing the final look of your slides.
And if this means that the 99% of the population that are not professional designers have slides that don't have the perfect finish, or that don't have the impeccable margin, or that the typography is not the best that could have been selected, at least you are going to feel yourself in control of your own slides, and you are going to be able to tell the story in a much more fluid way.
So, for me, truly, one of the most important mistakes is not dedicating time to the visual part or the format of your presentations. Most people don't do it because they feel intimidated by PowerPoint or Google Slides tools.
But I think it's something that, if you have the opportunity to learn, is good that you go practicing. And I repeat: I'm not referring to your presentation being a world design award-winning presentation. The job of a slide is not to be a work of art. It is to be clear and help you convey an idea.
In fact, for many presentations (including the inspirational presentation and the promotional presentation) I am a fan of not using slides when it's not essential to use them.
One of my favorite resources of all time for giving presentations is the marker and the flipchart. You may have heard me talk about this, because I say it very frequently. But whenever I'm going to give a presentation, I make sure that the event organizer or the person responsible at the company in front of which I'm going to present provides me with a flipchart of bond paper sheets. And I bring my own markers, because I use special markers.
I don't use the typical markers you can find at any stationery store. The type of markers I use are thick markers, which allow people to see, even if they are at a great distance. Not only that, but they have a great impact. And when someone has to come to the front to draw something, you feel the power of that thick marker. And that is much more effective.
That type of resources, although they are not always necessary, in the case of executive presentations, sometimes they can be useful. The message I'm trying to communicate to you is that: Your slides don't have to be award-winning art slides. You don't have to have 300 slides either. The fewer slides, the better. And the more minimalist your slides are, the better too.
That doesn't mean you're going to leave out important information obviously. But sometimes there are people who dedicate a lot of time to "decorating" their slides. By decorating I mean adding extra colors, adding animations that don't add value, adding those flashy transitions and the text, instead of simply appearing, like it comes from a hurricane and lands on the presentation. That kind of thing doesn't add value and distracts.
So, in design, less is more. Sometimes it happens that people like me, who are not professional designers, fall into the mistake of thinking that a slide, if it's very empty, is ugly. It's not necessarily so. In fact (as I have already said, and not only do I say it, but people of the caliber of Steve Jobs, for example, have said it too) in design, less is more.
Another one of the most frequent errors we have worked on with clients at Leaderlix, when in a presentation we cannot control going back and forth to different places without having a clear narrative, or as it is called in literature, a leit motif.
The leit motif is that guiding thread that takes you through a presentation from beginning to end. Many executive presentations lack this structure, and because of that the presentation seems like a jumble of ideas that has no clear beginning or end, that is, it has no story.
The problem with presentations of this type, which present this common error, is that many times the presenter doesn't realize that they are making that error, but what do you think? All the other people do notice, and even though according to you you're being clear and coherent, for everyone else you're rambling and going from one place to another. That is the challenge and that is the most important reason why going back and forth without a fixed course is a common error, because many times we don't even realize it when we're preparing a presentation.
How can we tell, then, if our presentation is being confusing and doesn't have a clear narrative? Well, we can appreciate it very easily with the response of the audience.
If we see that the group in front of which we are presenting, from one moment to the next, starts to get distracted, starts to check their phone more and more cynically, or starts to review their emails, or to converse among themselves, or you can see in their eyes that they are getting bored and getting sleepy, that is one of the main signs that your presentation may not be well structured and doesn't have coherence in terms of having a beginning and an end.
Another one of the most frequent errors I have seen in former students who give executive presentations is falling into one of two extremes: either putting too much information to the point of excess, or putting little information out of fear of bringing up certain topics. Both things happen, and it is very important to be aware of the importance of finding the right balance between too much information and too little information.
The best way to do that, in my opinion, will be to be clear about what your personal objective is in giving an executive presentation. This notion might be a little odd for some people, since in most cases, when I'm giving an executive presentation, I'm giving it not because I want to give it or because I have an objective, but because someone else has asked me to give it (my boss, in most cases) or it could be anyone else.
The thing is that an executive presentation often appears as a report, a reactive response to the needs of another person. But this is something that doesn't have to be that way. Because if you stop for a moment before you prepare your data and ask yourself: What is my intention in giving this presentation?
That is, beyond the objective of other people,
What is my intention in communicating this message?
What is the change I want to create?
What is the change in behavior associated with that change in results?
And what is the learning objective or information related to that change in behavior?
If you are able to answer these questions quickly, congratulations, because that means you have the leadership vein more developed than many people.
If you have to give an executive presentation and all you do is present the data that other people need to hear, what you're doing is presenting from a reactive point of view, that is, reacting to the needs of another person or the needs of the organization.
And it's not that this is bad per se, but if you have leadership aspirations or a leadership vision, it's insufficient. Because any executive presentation can be an opportunity to create change in your organization.
"Any presentation is a leadership audition".
What this phrase means is that we, as an audience, are always auditioning other people.
This means that we are always searching for people to add to our circle. We are looking for potential partners, we are looking for potential allies, we are looking for potential employees. We are looking for all of that all the time, and this is true for 100% of the people in front of whom you will give a presentation.
What that means is that each and every one of the people sitting in that conference room (or on the other side of the city, each one connected on Zoom), each one of these people is looking for leadership in you.
And how does that leadership look? It looks like when you not only give your executive presentation because others have asked you to present it or because it's required by your position, but because you have a purpose and an intention for giving that presentation.
The question you have to ask yourself is: What is my intention in giving that presentation according to my personal plans, according to my agenda, according to my vision of change and according to what I want for my tribe? What would I like to happen as a result of this presentation?
If you have to give an executive presentation and you believe the only objective is to convey the information you've been asked to convey, I'm sorry to tell you that you're falling short and that you're wasting what are probably enormous possibilities for personal growth for you. And not just for you: for your team, for your project, for your vision, for your way of doing things and also for your family.
It's difficult to create a presentation following another person's objectives, and that is why sometimes we fall into putting too much or too little information, because we haven't taken ownership of the presentation. And the reason we haven't taken ownership of that presentation is because we haven't thought about what the objective is for us to give that presentation. That decision is a leadership decision, and you can make it at any time.
So these are some of the errors I most frequently see when we are working at Leaderlix with professionals at all levels, while we help them prepare their executive presentations.
I'm not saying that this list is exhaustive. Surely you have also seen other errors, and of course I would like you to share them with me. We will find the space to do so, but in the meantime what I ask of you is: try to be aware of those errors and fix them. Because your next presentation may be your most important presentation. You never know where the person in front of whom you are presenting will be in a year, and if you have made a strong impression, it is something that will certainly help you in your own professional growth.
Believe it or not, developing mastery in the art of making executive presentations is not only something that will help you avoid headaches, stress crises and feedback from the people you work with, because in fact, becoming a master of executive presentations can be one of the least used highways to accelerate the growth of your career and your professional development. Getting good at making executive presentations, for some people, can be one of those skills that would desirably be developed.
Some think: one day I'm going to read a book about it or take a course on the subject, but in the rush of daily tasks, that day never comes.
But then there is another small percentage of people who truly know that it is a priority and who put their focus and attention on developing good practices for their executive presentations.
That is why today I am going to share with you a brief list of best practices that, if you test them and bring them into the world of actions, and you do it in a disciplined way, I guarantee you that you will see a significant increase in the quality of your conversation, in the impact of your communication and in the recognition of the people around you.
The first best practice is to make sure you improve your assertive communication. As we have already seen, assertive communication is not the same as empathetic communication. Assertive communication is the ability and habit of having at hand the specific words to say precisely what you need to say.
It is true that there are people who have different skills. There are people who are good at sports, good at driving, good at fashion and good at making others laugh.
Likewise, it is true that there are people who are more skilled than others in terms of assertive communication, but that does not mean in any way that assertive communication is something that you cannot develop. In fact, assertive communication is something that any person can get better at, as long as two things are met:
- First, you have to have a technique of assertive communication.
- Second, you have to put that technique into practice.
Although my purpose today is not to delve into the technique of assertive communication, I do want to share with you some practical advice that, if you incorporate it, will put you on the right track to improve your assertive communication.
First tip: become disciplined in the habit of reading.
I believe that if you and I go out to the street and ask a group of strangers we meet passing by if they have the habit of reading, nine out of ten people are going to say yes.
I also have the hypothesis that if we went to the homes and offices of those nine people, nine out of ten times we wouldn't find them reading. For some reason, it seems to be a matter of pride to say that we have the habit of reading.
If you ask someone if they prefer to read the book or watch the movie, 80% of people will tell you they prefer to read the book. At the same time, I believe that 99% of people will watch the movie before reading the book.
In our collective imagination we have the idea that an intelligent person is a person who reads, and nobody wants to be classified as a non-intelligent person. That's why everyone says they read, but the reality is that, in my experience, most people don't read as much as they say they do.
This is for multiple reasons. The first reason is that reading books, specifically books o
if not fiction, it can become difficult. It can also become demotivating, it can even become boring, and that is the reality.
We live in such a technological environment and so full of impulses, that our ability to pay attention in the long term has truly weakened. It is more stimulating to watch a Netflix episode, a YouTube video or a TikTok than to sit down and read a book.
Not only that, but reading is a really demanding activity. It is very difficult to read while doing something else at the same time. For example: you cannot read while driving, you cannot read while working and you can very hardly read while you go to the gym or go for a run with your family.
For all these reasons, although Mexico is a country that buys books, many times those books remain on the shelves. Or we read one or two chapters at the airport… and we never open it again.
However, reading is important. We already know that many of the people we recognize as great businessmen, entrepreneurs or opinion leaders read books as part of their personal habit.
I believe that it is an almost unquestionable fact that there is a persistent correlation between people who read books and people who are successful in life, and in large part that correlation is due to the fact that reading gives you the skills of assertive communication that will accelerate you on your path to success.
That is why it is important. Now, I recognize that, in the current lifestyle that almost all of us have, it is difficult to sit down and invest one or two hours a day just to read a book. That is why there are alternatives that you can turn to.
The most common one is listening to audiobooks. There is nothing wrong with listening to audiobooks, there is no shame in listening to an audiobook instead of reading it. I myself can tell you with confidence that of the last 100 books I have consumed, perhaps 75 I have consumed in audiobook format, and the truth is that it is fine.
It is true that you do not internalize the information in the same way when you listen to an audiobook as when you read it, because when you read it you have the opportunity to underline, take notes and capture the information in other ways. Listening to the audio of a book is a bit more limiting. I, for example, use Audible, which is Amazon's application for listening to audiobooks, and the truth is that taking notes, placing bookmarks and managing the information I read is not easy, it is difficult, and that is why, when I listen to an audiobook, I try to listen to it over and over and over again.
For me, listening to audiobooks has become part of my routine: when I am driving in the car because I am going to take my daughters to school, or when I am at the gym, especially when I am on airplanes. One of my favorite activities is listening to audiobooks, and I don't listen to them just once, but I listen to them several times, and I recommend you do the same.
Now, if you want to go all out and truly take advantage of your reading, you can buy a book in physical or digital format, and also buy the audiobook version, which many times are very similar or identical, especially the books that are more recent.
I am going to tell you what my reading habit is like: there is a book that interests me a lot and that I know I am going to have as a reference book, and that I want to have as part of my personal library and even pass it down, I buy it, and I buy it physically. In fact, I buy it in hardcover, because hardcover books, although they are a bit more expensive, withstand the test of time better.
Whenever possible, I like to buy books in the original language, which many times is English. I did not learn English at school or at home. I learned from when I was about 20 or 22 years old, and that is because I forced myself to read books in English. Instead of buying books in Spanish I bought them in English.
Currently I also buy books in Spanish when the original language is Spanish, and in almost no case do I buy books that have not been originally written in Spanish or English. I know that there surely must be books in French, German or Chinese that are very interesting, but unfortunately I do not have them on hand, I do not know them, I do not know who the Japanese, Thai or Brazilian authors are who speak about the topics that interest me. If I meet them in the future, I would certainly buy their books, although since I do not speak French, Japanese or Cantonese, I would surely buy the Spanish translation.
So, when I buy a book that I know will interest me, because I trust the author, because I really like the topic or for any other reason, I buy it in physical, and I always buy it in hardcover when possible.
But I rarely touch that version of the book, because most of the time I also buy that same book in digital format. My wife gave me an e-book reader brand Kindle for my birthday, about five or six years ago. I love that e-book reader, because when I touch it it has a very pleasant texture, which makes the act of reading more pleasurable for me.
Whenever possible, I take my e-book reader on my work or personal trips, and that is where I get the most out of it. One of the good things about these e-book readers is that they have very good battery performance: you charge them for a couple of hours and they last you at least two, three or four days.
Because they have that "electronic paper" technology, they consume very little battery. It is not like an iPad or a computer; those devices have batteries that last much longer. That is why they are a very good way to read books.
Another interesting thing is that, on an e-book reader, you can make notes practically as if it were a physical book: you simply select the text and an electronic keyboard opens for you, which will allow you to take notes with relative ease.
It is true that the experience of reading an e-book is not the same as reading a physical book, but if you think about it, when you travel you can take your e-book reader with your entire library, whereas, if you did it with physical books, you can only take some books.
So: I buy the book in hardcover, I also buy the book in digital format, whenever it is available, and finally I download it through my Audible membership, through which I have a certain number of credits, and for a super reasonable amount, I can download the same book.
And so what I do is that I read as I can, when I can. If I am on the airplane, it may be that I take out my e-book reader and, at the same time, my phone and my headphones to read while I listen to the same book. If I am at the gym, I will surely have my phone on hand and maybe that day I choose to listen to a podcast or a chapter of a book I am reading. Maybe one night I am accompanying my daughters while they fall asleep, and then it may be that I take out my e-book reader and advance with the book I am reading.
For me, one of the most important challenges that people face is that they are easily discouraged when they buy a book. The reason is that they buy that book, read the first two chapters and realize that it is not what they expected. That makes us feel disappointed and discouraged, therefore, we close the book and abandon it. Let me share with you how I have learned to deal with that emotion so I can read more.
What I do is that almost all the books I buy I see as if they were reference books. I do not feel the burden of reading a book from beginning to end, rather I associate the books I have bought with moments in my life, moods or persistent challenges.
So, what I do is that when I have time to read, I don't necessarily take the last book I bought, but I take the book most appropriate to what is happening in my life at that moment, and that is something that helps me maintain more discipline in my reading habit.
What I definitely do not recommend you do is buy book summaries or settle for what ChatGPT tells you, because those summaries, most of the time, will have highlighted what is important for a person or for a machine, but what is important about a book is different for each person. So I do not recommend at all buying book summaries. Rather, I recommend you find your own way to take advantage of reading.
Doing so will surely help you continue developing your assertive communication.
Second tip: Write
I want you to imagine for a moment that you are trying to become a professional tennis player. So you start watching videos, buying courses, even hiring a coach. But you never practice. What result do you think you would have? Evidently, practice is key to the development of any skill, and although we do not always have the possibility of practicing our assertiveness through specific conversations, we can always do it through writing.
I have always personally liked to write, and although I know that not everyone has the same hobby, doing so is something that can undoubtedly help you improve your assertive communication.
Third tip: Seek debate and test your ideas
The third tip is my favorite. Look for spaces to debate and ask others to test your ideas. For me, the human mind is as if we turned to the sky and saw giant soap bubbles flying around each other. Ideas are up there, like bubbles, but as they land on the ground, one by one they pop. This is because the ideas we have almost never withstand the test of materiality, the test of the real world.
Surely it has happened to you that you have an idea that works perfectly in your mind, but then, when you put it into practice, something happens or something changes that does not work the way you had imagined. That is why one of the best ways to test your ideas is by debating them with other people.
The only problem is: we live in a society that does not like conflict. It happens the same as with reading. Many times, people are going to tell you that they agree with conflict, as long as it is positive. The reality is different. Most people do not enjoy conflict, in fact, they fear it and avoid it. They think they like conflict, but most people rather flee from it and see it as something bad.
Conflict, however, when seen from a positive and constructive point of view, can be one of your most important allies for developing your assertive communication. Because only through conflict are you going to be able to test your ideas.
Only through this positive conflict, or through debate, are you going to put yourself in a pressure situation in which you have to find the most specific words to defend your arguments.
One of my favorite hobbies is watching debates. I do not care so much about the topic as the debate itself. Whenever I have a little free time, or when I have 15 or 30 minutes between meetings, or when I am waiting in line at the bank, one of my favorite ways to kill time is watching debate videos.
For example, I love to watch debate videos where there are people for and against controversial topics, such as abortion, social programs or sexual relations before marriage. Of course I have my own points of view on these controversial topics, but that is not the reason I watch these debates.
The reason I am a fan and follow professional debaters (regardless of their political or ideological leaning) is because I find great satisfaction in seeing the strategies they use to defend their arguments, even in the most adverse conditions.
It is a subculture, that of debate. Believe it or not, there are people who do that professionally and who make a living from it. There are debate tournaments, not only academic, but after school there are also people who continue participating in these debate tournaments.
Many times, people who do professional debate do it on a topic of interest to them. For me, what I am most passionate about is learning debate strategies and techniques that are applicable to any type of topic.
I, personally, have found a lot of learning by listening to debates and analyzing their arguments.
Above all, I believe that learning these techniques has allowed me to become much more specific in my use of language. One of the first rules of competitive debate is to refine the terms or semantics on which the debate will take place. Semantics means "meaning", and something that professional debaters understand very well is that each word has a very specific job that no other word can do.
can remove. Learning and mastering the detection of those differences in meanings will help you dramatically improve your active listening and assertive communication skills.
More Best Practices
Another best practice is to know the information you are going to present inside and out. Many people would think this is obvious, but most people don't really understand what it means to know and understand information.
Many times, people who deliver executive presentations do is search for graphics from other presentations, or what the system gives them, and they copy and paste them. And after that, what they do is go and read those graphics or those tables in front of a group of people. That's an excellent way to tell your audience that you're not in control of the information.
Many people see tables and graphics as immovable elements that we cannot move or modify. The reality is that all tables and all graphics have an origin, they have a source, where the data comes from. There are two types of people in life: those who do copy-paste, and those who go to the reference, investigate more about it, understand the details and the origin of that information, and then can present it with much greater clarity and knowledge.
Copying and pasting tables and graphics will get you through, they will put double checkmarks on you and everyone will say you did the work. But before doing it, understanding the origin of that data is something that will put you in a position of control and power in front of other people, and that is something that others will notice.
That's why understanding the origin of the information you are presenting is important to communicate with leadership.
Another best practice you can implement when making an executive presentation is: if you are asked a question and you don't know the answer, instead of making it up or rambling, acknowledge that you don't know the answer. There's nothing wrong with not having all the information at hand immediately. What's wrong is the way many people handle this situation.
There are people who feel that they are expected to be omniscient and omnipresent, and to have all the answers at hand. This is impossible for everyone: from the specialist who goes deeper into a subject to the general manager with more tenure, we are all exposed to being asked questions and not knowing the answers. The best way to handle that situation is, first, by acknowledging that you don't have the answer, and then making a commitment and, subsequently, fulfilling that commitment to find the answer and communicate it to the person who is interested.
Finally, one of the best practices I most recommend we borrowed from the general strategy of active listening, which is to rephrase the questions before answering them.
Most people see questions as personal attacks, as if someone were throwing a baseball at them at full speed, and what they want to do is hit that ball as far as possible so it never comes back.
That's not a good way to practice active listening. It's also not a good way to give good executive presentations. A good presenter handles questions in the following way: first, he asks himself if he has perfectly understood the other person's question.
If the answer is no, you can, in your role as a presenter, ask questions to the people who are presenting their questions to you to the point of being perfectly clear about what the other person needs to know. And finally, when you have absolute clarity about what the person's question is, you have to rephrase it. I like to say:
What I'm understanding from what you're asking me is XYZ, did I understand you correctly or did I go off track?
I have found this active listening technique particularly useful when giving executive and promotional presentations, and I encourage you with full confidence to use it and adapt it to your personal communication style, since doing so will allow you not only to project more confidence, but to have more information about how your presentation is landing in the minds of your audience.
This list of best practices is neither final nor exhaustive. They are simply the ones that come to mind as most frequent, and this is the result of more than a decade helping clients and students prepare better executive presentations. Surely you also have best practices. I propose to you to add your positive experiences to these new positive experiences, so that you can create your own catalog of best practices and make your executive presentations better every day.
I'm going to give you some advice that for some may be politically incorrect. I give this advice to some of the people I've worked with, specifically helping them prepare executive presentations that are of great importance. Those types of presentations can include Kickoff events, regional meetings, Townhalls or simply meetings with your bosses.
The reason I don't give it to everyone is because I'm very aware that there are many people who still don't have the right mindset to assimilate that advice, and for many people it may seem like an unnecessary risk or simply something completely out of place.
Then there's a small percentage of people who give executive presentations who receive that advice very naturally. It's no coincidence that these people grow faster up the corporate ladder, because that's what leadership requires: unusual and out-of-the-box thinking.
There's also a possibility that this advice I'm about to give you, you're already implementing it right now. In that case, congratulations on the initiative. And if for some reason that's not the case, I invite you to read this advice with an open mind, because if you find a way to do it, it's something that can greatly improve the image that other people have of you, which inevitably will result in people who didn't trust you before, now trusting you more, or people who didn't see you with leadership potential, once you start implementing it, will see you with much more leadership potential.
And this advice is to close your executive presentations with a call to action.
The reason this is different or counterintuitive advice is because most people see executive presentations as a moment of accountability and presentation of results.
They wonder: why, if I'm the one reporting results, would I be in a position to make a call to action to my bosses, shareholders or my peers in other areas? The answer is very simple: Leadership is not positional leadership. And to have positional leadership, you must first have a leadership mindset.
It's easy to say, but putting it into action sometimes can carry an element of risk. But you already know what they say: all good things are on the other side of fear.
Making a call to action in front of your bosses or the people you report results to may seem out of place, but doing so will position you as a person with natural leadership.
To make a call to action to people who are organizationally above you, or at your same level, the first step is that you classify in your mind what you need those people to do to improve the organization.
Let it be very clear: the call to action is not a call for them to do what you want or what you need for yourself or for your particular interests. Making a call to action from a leadership perspective is first thinking about what direction the organization should go, being very careful and observant, appreciating what is already being done in that matter and finding a gap, an opportunity for proactivity. And that's where the call to action fits in.
As I was telling you, in the past I've given that advice to some people I believe have the potential to do it. Half of them think I'm crazy and never put it into practice. Others have tried it and taken the risk, and many of them have come back to me to thank me because making the change has given them good results. I believe that making a call to action in executive presentations, even in front of people who are organizationally above you, is an acceptable risk and if you try it, the results can surprise you.
Delivering an executive presentation and doing it with impact requires two things from you: first, it requires that you have a high level of awareness of what is happening in the organization.
You need to understand the numbers and results you are presenting at a higher level than the people in front of whom you are presenting; otherwise, your presentation is obvious and irrelevant.
You need to learn to go beyond what the numbers show on the surface, understand the story, see what's behind it, connect the dots and learn to identify patterns and trends that might not be so obvious to the people in your audience.
It also requires that you communicate with a lot of assertiveness. What that means is learning to find the specific words to convey the specific meanings you need to land in people's minds. This is something that takes time, as we have seen in these pages, because cultivating vocabulary is something that takes time. But there is also a mechanism you can use to find more specific words and articulate messages with more precision: and that is to help yourself with artificial intelligence engines.
As we have seen previously, artificial intelligence won't give you anything that isn't status quo, but it can give you access to enormous libraries of human knowledge.
Be very careful with confidential information and, from a precautionary standpoint, upload your presentation to your preferred artificial intelligence engine. Ask it to connect the dots for you, ask it to help you identify areas of opportunity that you hadn't identified. Read carefully how those opportunities are presented, and doing so will allow you to remember words that can help you communicate with greater assertiveness.
Earlier this year, I had a series of coaching sessions with a commercial manager who had to deliver executive presentations to the business unit leadership of his company.
During the call, we did this exercise: we took the raw information, uploaded it to the artificial intelligence engine of the company where this former student of mine worked, and asked it to help us identify areas of opportunity for business growth.
This was in early 2025, when many companies still hadn't fully incorporated artificial intelligence systems as part of their data analysis process. So we did it and found four or five angles that, honestly, had escaped both of us. So doing that kind of analysis is something that's already at your disposal, within a click's reach.
Delivering executive presentations can be one of two things: it can be a source of stress and worry for many, but for those who learn to use their assertive communication and dare to be in control of the information, they can be powerful growth opportunities.
Quantum leaps have been made from one week to the next just because of an executive presentation. If you have to deliver executive presentations every month, every quarter or every semester, don't see these presentations as sources of worry, see them as growth opportunities doing so will allow you to live that challenge with renewed eyes, hope, sense of adventure and as a true leadership opportunity.
Where to Start?
All executive presentations are different, but here I share a script that you can use as a basis and adapt it.