Welcome to Work Tip Wednesday, where every Wednesday I get ready and talk about career, leadership and a piece of advice I've learned working for some of the world's biggest brands.
The fastest way to lose executive presence is to narrate every detail. The job is not to walk the room through your thought process. It is to get everyone facing the same direction with as few words as possible.
Most of us were trained to do the opposite. Show your work. Cover every base. Pre-empt the questions. That habit serves you well as an individual contributor. It works against you the second you try to lead.
I learned this the hard way. The first time I presented a recommendation to a CEO, I spent four minutes setting up the context and ran out of time before I got to the ask. He stopped me, asked one question, and gave me the answer I needed in eight words. I went home and rewrote how I communicate for the rest of my career.
The Real Challenge
Senior leaders make hundreds of decisions a week. They do not have the bandwidth to follow a meandering update, decode jargon, or sit through context they did not request. Every minute you spend warming up is a minute they spent waiting for the point.
That is the bar. The good news: you do not need a new vocabulary or a bigger personality to clear it. Three small communication shifts, applied consistently, do most of the work. Pick any meeting, email, or stand-up you have this week and run it through all three.
1. Lead With the Point First
The most common mistake I see across every level is burying the headline. People walk the room through the timeline, the options reviewed, the people consulted, and the constraints considered, and only then get to the recommendation. By the time the point arrives, attention has moved on.
Senior leaders want the headline first.
Tactical, not strategic: "Okay so we looked at a few different options, and after reviewing timelines and speaking with the team, we considered a few things…"
Strategic: "My recommendation is Option B. Here is why."
Then layer in supporting context only if the room asks. The more senior the audience, the more important headlines become. Treat your update like a news story. The headline carries the conclusion. The body is the proof.
A quick rule of thumb: if your update is taking more than two minutes, you have buried the lead. Restart with the conclusion and work backwards. It feels uncomfortable for about a week. Then it becomes the only way you communicate.
2. Strip Out Unnecessary Jargon
Plenty of professionals believe complicated words make them sound more experienced. In practice, jargon creates distance. It asks the room to translate before they can react, and translation eats every ounce of urgency you were trying to create.
Read these two side by side:
"We want to leverage this new tactic in order to resonate with our consumers' hearts and minds."
"We are going to try this new idea to get their attention."
The second sentence lands in less than a second. The first one sounds like a slide deck and triggers nobody.
Clear communicators are perceived as stronger leaders because people understand them immediately. There is real research behind this. Studies on fluency consistently show that easy-to-process language signals competence and confidence, while complex language signals the opposite. The goal is not to sound smartest in the room. It is to be the clearest.
A simple check before you send any email or kick off any meeting: read it out loud. If you would not say it that way to a friend over coffee, rewrite it. "Synergize," "operationalize," "circle back," "north star," "deliverables on a forward-looking basis." Strip them out and replace with the plain-English version. You will sound more senior, not less.
3. Bring It to Life With a Short Anecdote
Once your headline is clear and your language is clean, the thing that separates good communicators from the ones people remember is a tight, specific story.
Humans are wired for narrative. We forget bullet points within hours. We carry stories for years. A 30-second anecdote, a single customer moment, one detail from the field gives your recommendation an emotional anchor that data alone cannot deliver.
When I bring a strategic recommendation to my CEO, I almost always wrap it in one short story. "A mom in San Diego told our retail partner she switched to us because she could not figure out the competitor's stroller fold in the parking lot." That one line does more work than three slides of consumer research. It is concrete. It is human. It is repeatable in the next meeting he walks into, which means the recommendation travels with him.
Strong communicators do not use stories to entertain. They use them strategically. One story, used surgically, makes the headline stick. The framework is simple:
-
State your recommendation.
-
Anchor it with one specific anecdote.
-
Support with the data only if the room asks for it.
That ordering is what changes how people perceive you in the room.
The Bottom Line
Executive communication is not about saying more. It is about removing everything that gets in the way of the point. Lead with the headline. Strip the jargon. Anchor the recommendation with one short story.
Practice the three shifts on every update for one week. The shift in how people respond happens faster than you think.
