Executive communication at work: the parts worth your attention

Settings differ even when the general advice does not. The same person reads a weekly report and an incident update with different questions in mind. A message that fits one fails the other.

Below: five recurring settings, what the reader is trying to find out in each, and how each one goes wrong.

What to take away

The weekly or monthly report

What the reader wants. The state against expectation, what changed since last time, and whether anything needs them. Nothing else.

What goes wrong. Sending it because it is the day. A schedule-driven report trains the reader to skim, and the one that matters then arrives looking like the ones that did not. The second failure is activity in place of state: a list of what happened, which reads as a request for credit and produces the reply "so are we on track?"

The steering or review meeting

What the reader wants. To make the two or three decisions that cannot be made without them, and to leave knowing what will be different.

What goes wrong. The meeting is used to inform rather than to decide, so the decisions get deferred to a conversation that never gets scheduled. A close second is the pack that arrives on the morning, which guarantees that the first twenty minutes are spent reading rather than deciding.

The fix. Send the material two days ahead and ask each attendee for their strongest objection in two lines. Open the meeting with the decisions rather than the status. Formal review cycles exist for the same reason, and the performance management cycle used in the federal service is explicit that the review is a point in a process rather than the process itself.

The skip-level

What the reader wants. Information that has not been filtered by the layer between you, and a sense of whether the layer is working.

What goes wrong. Two opposite errors. Treating it as an opportunity to complain about your manager, which is remembered and rarely helps. Or treating it as a performance, giving a polished status update the senior person could have got from anyone, which wastes the one channel that exists for unfiltered material.

The fix. Bring one thing that is genuinely going badly and is not yet an incident, and one thing you have learned that they would not otherwise hear. Tell your manager you are doing it and roughly what you will raise. That single sentence removes almost all of the risk.

The incident or bad-news update

What the reader wants. What happened, what it means for the thing they care about, what you have already done, and what you need. In that order and short.

What goes wrong. Waiting for a full picture, which is usually waiting for a solution. By the time it arrives, the useful moment has passed and the reader has learned that your reporting is filtered. The other failure is burying it: the bad news technically present in paragraph five, phrased so carefully a reasonable person could miss it.

The fix. Send it before you have the fix, with what you know and what you do not. Then send short updates on change rather than on the hour. A reader who is being kept current will leave you alone; a silent one will start asking other people.

The board or executive pack

What the reader wants. To understand the decision, the alternatives, and the risk, from a document read alone, at night, without you there to explain anything.

What goes wrong. Writing for the presentation rather than for the reading. Nobody presents a pack any more; they read it and arrive with questions. A pack that only makes sense with narration produces a room full of people asking what a slide means.

The fix. Write it as prose that survives alone, with the recommendation on the first page. Assume every number will be quoted without its footnote, so put the qualifier in the sentence rather than under it. And write the minutes yourself if nobody else will, because the record of what was decided outlives everything else in the room.

The five, side by side

What carries across all five

Answer the question that was asked and stop. Say which parts you are sure about. Send when something has changed. Assume every message will be forwarded to someone you have never met, because it will be.

The triage that decides all of this is described in executive communication, with sentence patterns in executive communication techniques.

Why material reaching a senior reader is already filtered on the way up is set out in leadership influence.

If the pack is really asking several people to accept a decision, the order they hear it matters, covered in stakeholder influence.

Common questions

My weekly report is required. I cannot send it on change.

Then keep the required cadence and put a one-line state at the top that is different every week, or says plainly that nothing has changed. The requirement is that a report exists, not that it be long, and a reader learns quickly which reports are worth opening.

How do I raise something at a skip-level without it looking like going around my manager?

Tell your manager first, in one sentence, and say what you plan to raise. Almost nobody objects, and the sentence converts a possible betrayal into an ordinary piece of information. If they do object, that reaction is itself worth knowing about.

Nobody reads the pack in advance.

Then the pack is too long, or it arrived too late, or the meeting has taught people that reading is optional because it will be presented anyway. Send it earlier, cut it to the decision and its alternatives, and open the meeting by asking for objections rather than by summarizing.

Is it ever right to hold bad news for a day?

For a few hours, to establish what actually happened. Not for a day. The cost of a slightly incomplete early message is a follow-up. The cost of a late one is that everything you have said becomes provisional in the reader's mind.

Who should write the minutes if I am the most junior person there?

You, if nobody else is doing it. The person who writes the record shapes what the record says, which is real influence available without any standing at all. Circulate it as a check rather than as a ruling.