When a board takes your presentation off script, follow it. Listen for what the directors actually want to know, answer it briefly and in a clear structure, and connect your answer to the decision in front of them. A board doesn’t need another presentation. It needs the clarity to make the right decision.
Handling board questions during a presentation is where most leaders win or lose the room. And boards go off script for a reason: usually the presentation was built to report, and they came to decide.
Why do boards take presentations off script?
They do this because the presentation gave them activity when they needed decision-ready information. There is a big difference between reporting activity and interpreting business implications.
Directors don’t want a tour of the past, the present and the future, or a rundown of everything your business vertical is doing. A board doesn’t need you to prove how much work you’ve done. They need you to demonstrate what you’ve learned. What does it mean to the business? What is the impact? What is happening next? And what are you proactively doing to advance what’s working and mitigate anything that’s not?
Lisa Edwards, executive chair of the Diligent Institute, put it this way to SHRM: “They don’t want to run your business. They want to get assurances that you’re on top of it.” When the deck doesn’t give them that assurance, they go looking for it in their questions.
What should you decide before you build the deck?
Decide the outcome first. Preparing the information before clarifying the outcome is where most board presentations start to go wrong.
Discussion leaders who start with slides and include everything they know never identify what the board members actually need from them. It drives me nuts. When I was in corporate, the VP I reported to would sit there and look at her slides, and look at her slides, and look at her slides. I remember thinking, “Why do you keep looking at your slides? These are no different than the slides you presented last time.” She knew her subject inside and out. She hadn’t done the work of deciding what the board needed to understand right now, or of telling the story of where her group was beyond the numbers.
It also helps to remember that not every board presentation is meant to secure approval. Some are about monitoring performance. Some are about surfacing risk. Leaders get into trouble when they try to do all of it in one moment. Decide which one this is, and build for that.
If you have a board presentation on the calendar and you are not yet sure what you need the board to do, that is exactly where Be Bold starts: focused, strategic preparation for one high-stakes presentation moment, beginning with the outcome. See how Be Bold works.
What does a board expect to hear?
A clear line from your work to the company’s direction, an honest view of risk, and a specific ask. Before every board meeting, ask yourself one question: what am I bringing to the board?
- Strategic direction. What you are doing and how it ties to company goals, whether those are Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or SMART goals.
- What is working, and how you are doubling down on it.
- What isn’t, and how you are mitigating it.
- The risks. This is what I call wearing the black hat. You can’t be all Pollyanna in front of a board.
- What you need from the board right now.
How do you answer a board question you didn’t expect?
Listen to what the director really wants to know, then answer it succinctly. Resist the pull back to your slides.
Someone loses the room when they get a question and the connection breaks, because they don’t know how to answer it with confidence. Or they are so committed to their slides that they say, “Well, on slide 15, here is how I answer that,” when the person asking wanted a direct answer.
Much of what I do with leaders before a board meeting is practice exactly this: when you get a question, how do you answer it in a brain-friendly way? The research I’ve been reading points the same direction. Boards are tired of slide decks and want a meaningful conversation, so your job in the room is closer to facilitator than presenter. Directors interviewed by SHRM suggest speaking for about 10 minutes of a 30-minute slot and leaving the rest for discussion.
| Traditional presentation | Board presentation | |
|---|---|---|
| Who drives | The presenter | The board, through its questions |
| Shape | Give, give, give | What we’ve worked on, how it ties to company goals, what’s working, what isn’t, what I need from you |
| Questions | Held for the end | Expected throughout, answered in a clear structure |
| Measure of success | The content was delivered | A decision was enabled |
For more on structuring your answers, see our guide to responding to questions during a presentation.
What if you don’t know the answer?
Say so. Confidence doesn’t mean having an answer to everything.
A leader who can acknowledge that they don’t have the exact answer, or that they need to do a little more research, is wise. Improvising in front of a board puts your credibility at risk on everything else you said.
For example, when you get a question you can’t fully answer, you might say: “I appreciate that question, and I want to answer it in two ways. There are parts of this I know, and I have the data to answer now. There are parts I’m not certain about, and I need to go back to those. Let me talk about the parts I’m certain about first, and then the parts I’m not.” You’ve just chunked your answer in a brain-friendly way.
Clarifying what you need the board to decide is the first step of the Resultations Method.
Frequently asked questions
Shorter than the time you are given. Directors interviewed by SHRM suggest speaking for about 10 minutes of a 30-minute slot and leaving the rest for discussion. As Peggy Foran, chief governance officer at Prudential, told SHRM: “The biggest mistake you can make in a 30-minute presentation is to prepare a 30-minute speech.”
No. Some board presentations are meant to secure approval, some to monitor performance, and some to surface risk. Decide which one yours is before you build it. Trying to do all three in one moment is a common reason directors leave a meeting unsure what was decided.
Your strategic direction and how it ties to company goals, what is working and how you are doubling down on it, what isn’t and how you are mitigating it, an honest view of the risks, and a clear statement of what you need from the board right now.
In short: a board takes your presentation off script when it needs something your slides aren’t giving it. Decide the outcome before you build the deck, and when the questions come, answer the person who asked in a sentence or two and tie it to the decision.
