You have 1 article left to read this month before you need to register a free LeadDev.com account.
Communicating with an executive audience requires a targeted approach. But the rules behind them can be expanded and generalized to help you articulate an idea to any audience.
One of the most challenging aspects of growing into leadership is figuring out how to communicate with an executive audience. Once I got comfortable with it, I realized that the process of crafting clear, impactful messages is valuable far beyond executive communication.
What makes for good executive communications
Effective executive communication is clear and concise. You’re conversing with busy people, and getting to the point seven paragraphs into a message will be a frustrating experience. However, good communications are also comprehensive. If getting all the necessary information requires rounds of back-and-forth, it also builds frustration.
Those seemingly contradictory points are the lynchpin of good communication. It’s about determining the questions they’ll ask and answering them before they are raised. From there, it’s about making the message as tight as possible. Editing and trimming are often the most time-consuming parts of the process, but also the most important.
The ideal communication leaves no questions, fills the audience with confidence in your understanding of the topic, and either convinces them of your position or equips them to share their perspective. But truly, that should be the goal of almost all leadership communication to any audience.
How to adapt the process for any audience
In my previous piece about executive communication, I focused on three main areas: knowing your audience, building a convincing argument, and being aware of what people do or don’t remember. With just a little adaptation, all three of those points can also be applied to more general communications.
Know your audience
If you’re communicating to a broader audience, this step can be a little harder – you can’t reasonably know every detail if you’re explaining something to one hundred folks across product, engineering, and design. But you can think through some common archetypes and figure out what those people need to hear.
These archetypes can look like the nervous person who is uncomfortable with any change, the skeptic who is trying to figure out what you’re not telling them, the enthusiastic person you’re hoping will help champion the idea, and more. Whatever the message, you need to figure out the different buckets people will fall into and decide how to address each of them.
Convince, don’t pitch
Most people don’t like being sold to, which is even more pronounced when there’s more distance between the audience and the communicator. Nothing will bring out the skeptics in your audience more than giving them the sales-pitch version of a message rather than something more direct.
This ties back to knowing your audience’s archetypes and roughly what proportions they occupy. If you have an audience that will be 90% on board with your message or idea, you can do a lot more cheerleading, whereas if you have an audience that is 90% skeptic, cheerleading will backfire spectacularly. When you’re thinking about your audience’s archetypes, think through what each bucket needs to hear.
Don’t assume anything
Going into executive communications, you likely have an understanding of the audience’s baseline knowledge. For broader communications, there will be more varied levels of knowledge, and you’re unlikely to know the specifics of every individual. You shouldn’t assume anything, including things that you might have communicated earlier. If you’re building on prior messages, you should assume that your audience forgets everything you want them to remember and remembers everything you want them to forget.
This continues the complication of being comprehensive versus being concise. In an attempt to make sure that everyone is on the same page, it’s very easy to bloat your communications. If the message format allows external references or sending a preread ahead of time, that can be very helpful. Regardless, the normal procedure for me is throwing everything possible into the drafts, and then being ruthless with the editing pencil. If something isn’t necessary to convince your audience, then cut it out, and even the necessary things need to be as tight as possible.
Final thoughts
When we’re communicating upwards, there’s a natural pressure to make a good showing, which is part of why there’s such a focus on executive communications in leadership positions. But the same rules can be applied to all our communications, and we shouldn’t skimp on the effort. Treating all your communications as if they had an executive audience goes a long way towards crafting a message that lands and resonates.
