Presenting to a Board

The mistake that shapes most board presentations is treating the room as an audience to be persuaded rather than a body discharging a duty.

Directors carry obligations that attach to them personally. They are not deciding whether your proposal is interesting. They are deciding whether approving it is defensible, and they are simultaneously forming a view about whether you can be relied upon.

Two assessments run at once

The first is the proposal. The second is you, and over a tenure the second matters more.

A board sees an executive perhaps ten times a year, for two hours. From that they build their assessment of whether this person’s judgment can be trusted between meetings, which is when nearly all the consequential decisions happen. Every presentation is evidence for that question whether or not the presenter is thinking about it.

Which has a practical implication that cuts against the instinct. Winning a particular approval by overstating confidence is a poor trade, because the confidence is checkable and the assessment is cumulative. An executive who has been slightly too optimistic three times in a row has spent something considerably more valuable than any single approval.

The packet did the work

Where a written packet went out in advance, presenting its contents aloud is the most common waste of a board’s time.

Directors who read it are being told what they know. Directors who did not are not going to absorb it now. Reading the deck also signals that you expected them not to prepare, which is a slightly insulting thing to communicate to people serving without pay.

Three minutes is right for most items: what has changed since the packet was sent, the one thing you most want them to focus on, and the decision required. Then stop and let the discussion happen, because the discussion is what the meeting is for and it is the only part that could not have occurred by email.

Say what you are asking for

Boards are routinely left uncertain about their own role in an item, and the uncertainty produces bad meetings.

A board that thinks it is being informed will not scrutinise a decision that needed scrutiny. A board that thinks it is deciding something you have already committed to will discover that later and be justifiably annoyed. Both are avoidable with one sentence at the top.

This is for information. This is a decision I need tonight. This is a direction I intend to take and I want your reaction before I commit. Naming which of the three converts an ambiguous agenda item into a clear one, and it is the single highest-value sentence in most board presentations.

Disclose the bad thing yourself

Anything a director could discover that you did not mention will cost you more than the thing itself.

Raise the unfavourable variance, the missed milestone, the complaint, before anybody asks. Two effects follow. The item is now framed by your account of it rather than by the discovery of it. And the board learns something durable about you, which is that difficult material arrives from you rather than surfacing.

The alternative is worse than it appears. A director who finds the problem in the appendix does not simply learn about the problem. They begin wondering what else is in the appendix, and that wondering does not switch off in subsequent meetings.

Handling the difficult question

The reflex is to defend. The better move is almost always to concede the accurate part first.

You are right that the timeline slipped twice. Here is what caused each one and here is what is different now. That answer costs nothing, since the slippage is in the packet and cannot be denied, and it converts the exchange from an argument into an explanation.

Where a question is hostile rather than substantive, answer the substantive version of it and do not engage the tone. A director occasionally arrives with an agenda, and the room can see it. Responding calmly to the reasonable core of a loaded question is more effective than any rebuttal, and the other directors will do the rest.

Never argue with a director in front of the board. If a matter genuinely needs resolving, take it offline and say so.

Public boards

Anyone presenting to a school board, hospital district, city council, or highway district is presenting to two audiences simultaneously.

The board is deciding. The public in the room, and whoever reads the minutes afterward, is forming a view about whether the institution is being run competently and openly. A presentation that satisfies the first and ignores the second creates a problem that surfaces later, usually at a levy or an election.

The practical consequence is to avoid internal shorthand, state figures in terms a member of the public can evaluate, and explain reasoning rather than asserting conclusions. Anything that would look evasive when quoted in isolation should be said differently, because it will eventually be quoted in isolation.

Afterward

Send a short note confirming what was decided, what you committed to, and by when. Within a day.

Boards meet infrequently, and memory of a meeting decays substantially before the next one. The executive who supplies the record is the executive whose version of the decision persists, and this is not a manipulation. It is the only account anybody will still have in six weeks.