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Tired of sitting through endless PowerPoint presentations that never answer your question? Does your team drown you with emailed essays and spreadsheets without clear conclusions? Help your team provide more useful information and drive clear decision-making by asking yourself three questions.
Why Your Team Wastes Time with Vague Reports and Frustrating Presentations
When your team doesn’t give you the information you need, there are usually a couple of factors at play.
Often, they simply don’t know what you want or how you want it. They don’t understand how you’ll use the information or what happens next.
Sometimes, they’re looking for approval (look at how hard I worked on all this data!). Or they deliver vague reports and drown you in data to keep out of trouble and avoid your anger or criticism.
Three Questions to Help Your Team Give You Useful Information
You can solve for all these issues and unlock your team’s potential by asking yourself three questions.
1. Have You Clearly Asked for What You Want?
You know what you want. You need a clear recommendation and point of view from the people closest to the issue.
But do your people know that?
If you haven’t clearly asked for what you want, the answer is always “no, they don’t.”
And you almost certainly want that report or analysis differently than their last manager.
When you communicate what you want, think about the following questions:
- What will a successful report or presentation do? Are there specific criteria the team needs to meet? Clarify the criteria right away.
- How will you use the information? If you want raw data to analyze, let them know. If you want a single recommendation with one page of analysis that you can pass to the next level, tell them.
- How much analysis and precision do you need? Sometimes you need a general direction and a quick summary. Other times, you need maximum confidence and for the team to take the time to make sure it’s right.
- How do you like to get information? You might prefer to read a report and then ask questions. You might like a verbal presentation.
- When do you need it? Schedule the finish and ensure they can meet the timetable.
Take the time to clarify what you want. Your team can’t meet expectations they don’t know about.
2. Have You Checked for Understanding?
Once you tell them what you need, check for understanding. You don’t know that they have it and will truly present useful information until you hear them explain it in their own words. For example, you might say:
“If there aren’t any other questions, let’s do a quick check for understanding. What will a successful report do for us? How and when will you present it?”
Note: asking “Do you understand what you need to do here?” is not a check for understanding. You need to find out what they understand.
3. Are You Responding or Reacting?
You asked for what you want. You checked for understanding. But people still bring you vague reports or slide decks with hundreds of irrelevant slides.
Now what?
The next step is to pay attention to how you respond (not react) to your team. If you react poorly, you’ll get more useless information.
We’ve worked with many frustrated senior leaders frustrated who see too many data dumps and endless PowerPoint presentations.
But ask their team what’s going on and they’ll tell you, “It’s a total waste of time. No matter what I present, they’ll tear it apart, tell me I’m an idiot, and go in a different direction. Why waste my time? I don’t need the grief and will just to have redo everything I’d already done.”
When your team doesn’t bring you useful information, of course it’s frustrating. But you can avoid this negative spiral and help them do better next time by choosing a helpful response.
Here are tools to handle the two most common problems:
1. When They Didn’t Do What They Agreed
You asked for a one-page summary with bulleted recommendations you could include in the Board presentation. Due Thursday at 5:00. You checked for understanding and everyone agreed.
But you got a massive PowerPoint presentation with four spreadsheets of data in a microscopic font—on Friday morning.
Your best response here is an accountability conversation. You can use our I.N.S.P.I.R.E. method to have this conversation. Your part of this conversation could look like this:
I – Initiate: “My intent here is to help you prevent rework and for you and the team to be as effective as possible.”
N – Notice: “We agreed that you would present this information in a one-page summary with bulleted recommendations. This isn’t that.”
S – Support: (not really needed here as the problem is self-evident)
P – Probe: “I’m curious what happened?”
I – Invite: “Can you please get the one-page summary we agreed to done today? How can we ensure you do these presentations accurately going forward?”
R – Review: “I’m hearing that you just forgot and scrambled to get it done at the last minute. And that your solution will be to get it in your calendar with the details going forward. Do I have that right?”
E – Enforce: “We have another one of these reports coming up in two weeks. Let’s schedule time on Friday afternoon. I’ve just sent you a calendar invitation. We’ll spend ten minutes to go over that next report and fine-tune it before you submit it.”
2. When You Disagree or Can’t Use Their Recommendation
Your team gave you the information exactly as you requested. But just this morning, before their presentation, you got some information that changed the strategy. Now their recommendation doesn’t make sense.
Or maybe, now that you see their data, you disagree with their analysis.
How can you respond in a way that doesn’t discourage, disempower, or deflate?
The answer is to Respond with Regard. There are three steps to respond with regard: gratitude, information, and invitation. You get more of what you celebrate and encourage. So here’s how your part of this conversation might sound:
Gratitude: “Thank you so much for putting this together. I really appreciate the thought you put into it and for caring about where we’re heading.”
Information: “So this morning we learned that the joint venture that would help this project work isn’t going to happen. As I look at your analysis, that understandably played a big role.”
Invitation: “I would love to get your thoughts and recommendation knowing that this partnership isn’t happening. Let’s talk through when we can do that.”
Or, where you see things differently, your information step might sound like:
“Looking at your data, I’m coming to a different conclusion than yours. Here’s what I’m thinking. What am I missing? How do you see it differently?”