“Our executives don’t want us to tell stories.” After the student made the comment another jumped in, “No way! He’s right! You don’t ever want to tell a story to our executives. They hate stories.” I found the response a little sad and the worst part… this wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this.

These types of comments tell me something about the company and the executives. It tells me they’re creating a culture of mis-led communicators and unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse for the executives.

The Demands of an Executive

I’ve sold to executives and I’ve coached them. I’ve had the distinct honor and privilege to meat some amazing ones! Why do I think they’re amazing? Because they understand how to change a situation permanently by fixing a problem instead of a symptom.

When you’re presenting to your executives, have they put rules in place? You know what I mean. Have the executives outlawed certain types of presentations or certain tools? I’ve heard plenty of these rules from students over the past 20 years.

• Never tell stories to the executives when presenting. It’s a waste of their time.
• Never use animations in a powerpoint presentation. It’s childish and demeaning to executives.
• Never use more than 4 slides for your presentation. You’ll end up taking too much time.
• Put everything you want to say on one slide. This will prevent you from wasting executive time.
• Always give the executive summary at the start. This way the executive can drill down on their personal areas of interest.

I guess what bothers me with wet-blanket rules like this is two-fold:  Number one, they’re just solving a symptom at best. Number two, the executives actually think they’re solving the problem but they’re actually perpetuating the problem by creating an army of presentation foot-soldiers who only know how to present a message one way.  They’re not being taught to think for themselves on how best to construct a message for any audience in any situation for any reason!

The Problem with the Quick-Fix

In reality, when executives are dissatisfied with the presentations being given to them, instead of focusing on how to develop the communication skills of the presenters, they go for the quick fix based on what they personally like and don’t like.

If the executives get burned a few times by presenters using too many animations for the wrong reasons, they will ban all animations.

If the executives get burned by someone using 47 jam-packed slides full of text for a 10-minute presentation, they ban anything more than 3 slides for a 10-minute presentation.

If they’ve been burned by one presenter telling a funny story to kick off a presentation because he read somewhere you should start with a joke, they ban all stories from future presentations.

These all fix a symptom, not the problem.

Let me ask you something…

If a chef puts way too much salt in your food and it tastes awful, would you ban the chef from ever using salt again when cooking for you?

Or would you tell the chef they can only use one teaspoon of salt no matter what he’s cooking?

Or would you tell the chef she could only put the salt in first, but never again after that?

Or…

The Proper Solution

Would you train up the chef to know the best times to use salt in a recipe and how much salt to use depending on the meal being prepared?

If you really care about fixing the issue then… solve the problem not the symptom!

Have a great week,
Russ