Drive Change Using Effective Communications

For data scientists, AI experts, and frankly anyone to drive change, we all need effective communications to influence others. I believe communication skills to be among the top 5 skills to future proof your career.

What I Learned About Communicating to Executives

Last week, our Data Leaders Community of Practice cohort met to discuss and learn about data storytelling and communications to influence key decision-makers. I shared my own personal experiences about presenting to executives.

When I had led data science teams at LinkedIn, we constantly pushed ourselves for effective communications.

We knew simply creating a machine learning model, a statistical analysis, or a dashboard would have only limited adoption unless we communicated the relevance and persuaded the business to take action.

We learned a lot about effective communications and influencing through co-presenting with some of our business partners like the MBAs who came from management consulting.

In my weekly group meetings with various VPs in the company, I saw all the prep work that the presenting teams needed to do. Whenever my team and I presented, we would also need to have carefully prepared both the written and verbal parts.

Thankfully, we all got better with more practice over time.

I’ve also presented to our company’s CEOs and their staff.

For the first CEO several years ago, our presentation was frankly inadequately prepared and was a minor disaster. However, for the second CEO more recently, we nailed our presentation.

One thing that made a difference was that we spent more time preparing to present to the second CEO and the other C-level execs, along with collaborating on the presentation with the leads from the non-data science teams.

Certainly, my team and I had gained more presentation and communication skills by then too.

Best Tips on Presenting to Senior Leaders

It’s very common for data professionals and other corporate leaders to need to present to senior leaders to either inform, persuade, or call to action. Building a statistical analysis, an ML model, or a dashboard by themselves are not enough for data leaders to influence the business.

Here are my highlights for effective data storytelling and influencing:

1. Understand your audience. Tailor the message to the audience.
2. Set clear objectives. What action should the audience do next?
3. Provide appropriate context. Why is this topic important to the audience?
4. Use compelling data visualization. Summarize the key takeaway in a simple visual.
5. Use narrative structure. Highlight an example of a particular user to add depth to aggregated data.
6. Keep it simple. Focus on key points. Avoid extraneous data and distractions.
7. Reinforce main takeaway. Emphasize key insight or recommendation.
8. (Bonus) Pre-wire the meeting. Avoid surprises with skip levels. Rehearse draft with boss with anticipated questions. Brief key attendees before the meeting.

Pre-Wiring the Meeting?

I need to explain the last point about pre-wiring the meeting.

What pre-wiring means is that you influence the attendees of the meeting before the big meeting.

Often, when you present to the executive, you’re also presenting to the executive’s senior leadership staff at the same time. You don’t want any surprises to pop up in the big meeting.

Here are some steps to avoid surprises:

1. Rehearse your draft presentation with your boss. You’ll be representing your boss to the skip level leader and the boss’s peers when you ultimately present to your skip level leader. It’s in mutual best interest to partner with your boss on the important presentation.
2. Prepare anticipated questions. With your presenting team, brainstorm and write down a list of potential questions in advance that the attendees of the big meeting may throw at you. Potential points of confusion? Potential objections? Potential doubts. If you and the presenting team can anticipate these questions, then you can present and handle questions much more confidently. To gather these potential questions, also try rehearsing your presentation with people unrelated with your project for their candid feedback.
3. Read the room early. Some of the attendees of the upcoming big meeting may have doubts about your project. They might even actively try to block your project for various reasons. What you want to do is to give a heads up to those influential attendees before the big meeting day. Perhaps set up a private pre-meeting with that attendee to gauge reactions and to resolve any potential objections. It would be better if the influential attendees gave you all their doubts and questions in advance of the big meeting, than having them speak out during the meeting. You might even get a chance to take steps to convert the naysayer into a supporter before the meeting. You want to avoid the situation where the influencer reacts negatively during the big meeting, which could derail your ability to persuade the other attendees and the ultimate decision-maker executive.

I hope you can benefit from my experiences on communicating to and influencing executives in high-stakes presentations. To advance as a data professional, you’ll need to master many of these steps not normally taught in school.

Learn This Topic and More For Data Leaders

We addressed this exact topic in last week’s data leadership cohort meeting. We learned from the real experiences of every data leader in the cohort meeting, about what worked and what didn’t work. Everyone was able to gain something actionable from the meeting.

You can join our Data Leaders Community of Practice too. Our next 6-month cohorts start in September. We will also launch a Zoom-only cohort next month for people outside the SF Bay Area. We limit each cohort to a maximum of 8 attendees for the optimal experience of the participants.

If you’re interested, I invite you to either contact me, or learn more from the announcement and our website where you can apply now. Sign up now before the next cohorts are full.

P.S. Simply email me at [email protected] if you want to chat about these cohorts or about other ways I can help you and your team.

Jimmy Wong Coach, speaker, and entrepreneur enabling people to thrive in the age of AI. Data science leader with 12 years experience at the LinkedIn company and 27 years in the industry. Visit aijimmy.com​ ​​​​​​

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