How to Get Your Boss's Boss to Understand

Ultimately, the question is how you will be remembered. Was your presentation clear, concise, and impactful? Or was it overwhelming and forgettable? The choice is yours.

Before entering the room, take a moment to reset. Acknowledge your own feelings, then set them aside. As the conversation unfolds, resist the temptation to plan your response while others are speaking.

The soft skills—the people skills—matter most. Ask some of the best people you know for their advice. Great stuff bubbles up!

The FINESSE Fishbone Diagram is a powerful tool for addressing communication challenges in major decisions.

So how do you do that? Start with empathy. Understand your audience’s concerns, hopes, and values.

I promised myself I would never step into a meeting again without being able to explain who I was and what I wanted in three sentences or less.

Sending your visuals early gives senior leadership more time to understand the material.

FINESSE stands for Frame, Illustrate, Noise reduction, Empathy, Synergy, Structure, and Ethics.

JD Solomon recommends reversing the traditional approach for developing reports and presentations by starting with accessibility.

Commit to being a person that executive leadership wants to hear from when the chips are down.

FINESSE is grounded in systems thinking and cause-and-effect relationships. Ethics is one of the seven bones and represents the tail fin.

Remember to use a guiding graphic on your next big project and with every big presentation!

Focus first on the opening. Focus next on the closing. The blind spot is that they spend too much time on time on the main body.

The soft skills—the people skills—matter most. Ask some of the best people you know for their advice. Great stuff bubbles up!

The Fins of FINESSE provide some helpful associations. The bottom fin of FINESSE, the audience, provides us with our balance.

Career growth depends on using proven communication approaches in addition to hard skills.

Big decisions take months or years to make, involve an inner circle of advisors, require some math, and evolve through uncertainty.