How To Prewire a Meeting - Part 1 (Hall of Fame Guidance)

0:00Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, How to Pre-Wire a Meeting, Part 1 of 2. As always, our content has been crafted by humans, and we're now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, what is pre-wiring? How does it help to pre-wire meetings? Whom should I pre-wire to? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Imagine every manager in your organization starting next quarter with the same tools, the same language, and the same behavioral system for getting results and retaining people. The effective manager conference can be delivered virtually for your entire leadership team.

0:48No travel, no logistics, no excuses. ask about virtual organizational delivery at manager-tools.com forward slash EMC. Hey folks, we have got a treat for you today on Manager Tools. Yes, we do. Those of you that are familiar with or that listen regularly to our Career Tools podcast, you may know that we are doing some re-records of late of some of our classic Career Tools content. And today is a rerecord of a classic Manager Tools release. One of my top 10 personal favorites. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would, I mean, I'd venture to guess. And folks, you know our email address, customerserviceatmanager-tools.com.

1:36And you're welcome to write us in and let us know what your favorite podcast is. And maybe we will rerecord that one for you in honor of you. Get your name out there. Today, we're rerecording how to prewire a meeting. I think this is a community favorite, if I had to guess. Yeah, I mean, basically, PreWire is in my top 10 because everyone knows there is the time before when you didn't know it, and then the aha you go through when you realize it, and your career after that. And it's a fundamental watershed moment. People are going, oh my gosh, you mean what I thought was happening wasn't happening?

2:18Yeah, exactly. You mean that's not why that happened? Yes, that's exactly it. It's too good. When I learned it, I remember learning it at Procter & Gamble. And I was like, nobody told me this. Why isn't this in a class? Right, exactly, exactly. So for those of you that don't know what a pre-wire is, instead of us just calling it it, Let me set the scene for you a little bit. So essentially, you got a meeting coming up. Not only do you need to make a presentation, you need to make a presentation to like the boss's boss. Maybe you need to present to your boss's boss, but also to all of their direct at an upcoming staff meeting, for example.

3:02So today we're talking about how you prepare for that, how to make sure you don't walk across any landmines during your presentation, how you can make sure that your presentation is a slam dunk. That's what today's cast is designed to show you, to help you with. Yeah. So let's get right into the outline. We have four major points, but we have many sub points. So number one, why prewire? Actually, that's also includes what a prewire is. Yeah, exactly. An elaboration on what we just said. Yeah. And many of you, the moment you hear it will go, oh my gosh, that's so easy. I know what they're going to tell me the rest of stuff to do.

3:44And you can probably stop listening for you IDs. So what and why pre-wire? We're going to talk about introductory points, know your time limit, know the layout, one slide every five minutes, go for a slam dunk. Number three is key steps. You got to know your key message, prep your slides, brief your boss, request time for other attendees at the meeting, brief those attendees, rebrief your boss, finalize your slides and rehearse. And then we have some closeout comments. Your goal is no surprises. That's the problem with not doing a pre-wire is getting surprised. And of course, the goal is getting agreement from all.

4:25Absolutely. So beefy intro today. Okay. So we're going to start with obviously, why pre-wire. So first, I'm going to explain what pre-wire means and where we think the word comes from. So I think many of you have probably heard the phrase, they had it wired. Wired in. Wired in. Exactly. Exactly. And it's used to explain a situation where an individual delivers a great presentation that goes super well. And the fact that that individual seemingly had that situation completely figured it out. It was organized. They had it perfectly under control. It went so smoothly that it's wired. Yeah. And the audience was blown away by the level of prep and everything else.

5:15And so they had it wired. But here's the lesson. The way you actually have, quote unquote, something wired is to do so in advance. Okay. It's just like all the preparation teams make before they actually go on the pitch or the football field or the baseball field. Practice, practice, practice, practice. I'm always reminded that every spring training, every major league baseball team, shortstop and second baseman practice 10 ,000 double play balls. These are the best 50 people or 100 people in the world at this particular skill, and they still practice it 10 ,000 times every spring before they're going to do it 100, 200 times during the regular season.

6:02And actually, we think that's where the term pre-wire came from, and it doesn't really matter where it came from. It just happens to be a name that a lot of people in the business world use to describe for the process that we're going to talk about, which is talking to people, briefing people whom you're going to present to before you actually present to them. Now, folks, if this is a new concept to you, some of you are probably thinking, wait a minute, what? Talk to people before I present to them? What is the point of the presentation then? for one, can't I just go and present my idea and have a discussion about it in the presentation?

6:44Aren't we collaborative? Aren't we open to feedback? All of the questions that you think of when you think of this situation. Yeah. Well, let's say, let's just posit that you have to present, not to your boss, but let's say to your boss's boss where the stakes really get high. And again, as I think Sarah mentioned earlier, and her directs, okay? Okay, briefing the boss's boss is very different than briefing your boss. You should know your boss fairly well. Your boss would probably tell you, you don't have to formally brief me or anything else. You know that because of staff meetings and one-on-ones and so on.

7:23But your boss has not told you everything she knows about her boss. You're not going to go casually to your boss's boss the way you would to your boss. Let's just be honest about that. just like you haven't told your directs everything you know about your boss. Yeah, that's exactly it. And folks, the most likely place that this will occur for you physically is you're going to be briefing to your boss's boss in her or his staff meeting. And so we're going to use that concept, that example, if you will, as a specific venue for talking about our guidance today. The fundamental topic here being airing your ideas in advance and spending time being willing to compromise and collaborate.

8:09That's the point of it all. It applies to whether you're presenting in a meeting or not. If you're going to get your ideas used in today's organization, you're going to have to have multiple people agree with you. What that usually means is collaboration and compromise. So we don't want to say that these ideas only work when you're briefing your boss's boss, in other words, when you're a skip, but we want to explain how to engage these ideas in a particular venue, which is, again, briefing your boss's boss. Right. But pre-wiring isn't limited to that by any stretch at all. In fact, there should be virtually no briefing you give that you don't pre-wire in advance.

8:55And if you're only briefing your boss in a staff meeting, the pre-wire should include your peers so that when your boss turns to everybody and says, what do you think? They'll all be like, yeah, I'm good with that. Because, of course, you've made changes to satisfy your peers' concerns about the project or the idea or whatever. The pre-wire is designed to help you go from the point at which you know you have to make that briefing all the way through to the briefing actually being called a slam dunk or a home run or whatever sports analogy or non-sports analogy you want to use to have, wow, he or she got exactly what they wanted.

9:36And I thought it was kind of a stretch, but it seemed like everybody in that room was already on board. Well, it's because they were. And I remember the first time I experienced it, I asked this guy, he says, well, you got to pre-wire that. I'm like, I don't know what that is. I felt like an idiot. I felt like an idiot a lot at Procter & Gamble, actually. And he said, but by the way, about a month and a half ago, didn't you see that thing where the phone call where we did that thing and this guy briefed on this? I said, yeah. He says, oh, yeah, we were all pre-wired. We all knew. I said, no, no kidding.

10:16I just thought it was a great idea that everybody loved. And he says, no, dude, I could almost feel my boss patting me on the head like, no, that's not how things work. And then when I actually used it the first time, I'm like, the briefing was actually way easier, 50 % easier because I had already canvassed the audience. So, yeah. Okay. So let's get to introductory points. The first one is know your time limit. Yeah, absolutely. Folks, it's too common for people to assume that they're going to get the entire length of a meeting or of a staff meeting in this case for their brief. Here's a clue.

10:57Yours is not going to be the only topic discussed during someone else's staff meeting, especially if the staff meeting is that of your boss's boss. Yeah. So when somebody says you need to go in to brief the boss, the first question you have to ask is, OK, how much time do I have? And you have to know that because knowing how much time you've got is more critical almost than knowing the goal of your briefing. I mean, think of it this way. The worst thing in the world is to correctly get to your purpose in 30 minutes when you were supposed to get there in 10 minutes. You've just, I mean, you've just blown any chances you've had about maybe people agreeing with you.

11:40Exactly. Because what happens if you saved your punchline until the end and you never get to do your punchline because they cut you off after 10 minutes and the last 20 minutes of your briefing, which were the most important, you don't ever get to say. And that's exactly what can happen when you build your briefing first around the purpose without nailing down some of these details in advance. If Mike were here, Mike would vouch for this. I was at one of Mike's staff meetings when he was a client of mine. This is 35 years ago, more than that, actually. And we had a bunch of engineers coming in to give us briefings about potential projects for a new quarter or a new fiscal year or whatever.

12:20and when this one engineer came in he had a 15-minute slot and we were doing a bunch of 15-minute briefings he comes in and two of his buddies are carrying uh banker's boxes you know the things they store files the kids listening to this today do not know what a banker's box is but it's a lot of paper folks it's those boxes you see that have the tops that you can fold up and make them into boxes and they have the handles and so on and people carry around files in them and so on And there were only like eight of us at the table, Mike's directs and Mike and me. And they said, what are the boxes?

12:55He said, oh, that's my presentation. And they took out, I think it was over 300-page decks for each person in the room. And Mike was like, what's this? He says, that's my presentation. He says, you only have 15 minutes. He says, well, I'm going to try to get through it. I'm like, no. I'm pretty sure Mike just said, no, you can't present and no, the answer is no. Senior people in the meeting, folks, when you're briefing, the higher you get up, their big resource is time and not money. So you've got to know your time limit. If you're given 15 minutes, that actually a sign that you've got a pretty big topic there and we're being generous.

13:35Five minutes is not at all unusual. Don't get your feelings hurt if you only have five or 10 minutes. It's not a reflection on you. It's a reflection on time and relative priorities. And what you cannot do is be two-thirds the way you're through your presentation, even if you've got questions, when your time runs out. Managers in Europe, now is the time. Manager Tools is heading back their way in late November and early December. And if you've been thinking about bringing our on-site training to your organization, now is the time to act. Effective manager, effective communicator, hiring manager, senior manager, all available at our standard training rate with zero travel fees.

14:20Reach out to Maggie at customer service at manager-tools.com to lock in your dates before they're gone. And join us in London starting November 24th for our public conference, including the effective Senior Manager Conference on the 26th. Okay, so then next up in terms of our preparatory steps here is know the layout. Folks, the physicality of your presentation makes a difference. Most meeting rooms, assuming of course you're presenting in person, were intended for meetings, not for presentations. That is, they have tables, they've got chairs, there's a limited amount of space for walking around.

15:01They're often not overly conducive to presenting. And what we end up doing as a person that's delivering a presentation, most of us anyway, end up standing up in a room that was not intended for people to be standing up in. We were all meant to be sitting down at this table together. And thus, the people presenting or the person presenting is uncomfortable. Never mind the fact that they're not 100 % comfortable with their own presentation skills. And so because of this, they've got a couple of trips or inadvertent bumps against the slide or projector or a flip chart stand or somebody's chair or moving from left to right.

15:40Anyway, all of these activities, this jostling around uncomfortably rattles them. And that rattle carries over into the content and therefore into the credibility of that person's presentation. Yeah. And sometimes when you're nervous going to these kind of briefings, the key is to eliminate problems versus creating excellence, okay? For example, maybe you move the table eight inches in one direction to give you more room for walking, or you decide I'm only going to stand in one location for the entire time. May not be your natural style, but it may be a function, a necessary function of the room you're in.

16:18I tell people all the time, the worst place to give a presentation is in a conference room because the conference room table takes up 90 % of the space. Nobody can move around. Everybody feels pinned in. It doesn't help them be in a good decision-making mindset. So when you go in there, you don't want to be discovering the layout for the first time as you're walking in. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it. You want to have planned that out in your mind well in advance so you know what you're getting into. Okay. Next up is number of slides. Back to Mark's example about the banker's boxes full of slides.

16:51Folks, this is not a typo. If you're speaking for 30 minutes, you've got exactly six slides. One slide for every five minutes of presentation. That's it. Yeah. And actually, some of you know that our guidance has been one slide for every 10 minutes, but we're making the exception for when you've done a pre-wire. Because if you've done a pre-wire, then you will not have as many questions. People will assume it's a foregone conclusion. Okay, so you can get away with one slide every five minutes. If you see your slides as a skeletal framework of a larger body of persuasion, if you will, you begin to realize that you're not trying to put everything up there.

17:32The process of getting your presentation down to one slide for every five minutes is a really powerful and helpful one in terms of your thinking and your preparation. If you're briefing two levels up, they don't care about every detail that you know. Now, the fact that you know it means they may ask about it and you will know it, but it doesn't need to be on a slide. You don't need to give them an encyclopedia of everything you considered. In fact, as we like to say, the presentation is not your slides. The presentation is you. Okay. You may think they need all this stuff, particularly if you're an engineer and you couldn't make a decision without all this information, but you're wrong, particularly if they're two levels up from you.

18:14They may even be engineers two levels up from you, but they don't need all the information they expect you to have. They may ask you periodically, but they don't want to know every detail. And they're going to rely on you to make value judgments about which details are most important. And if you can't make those value judgments, you're not smart enough to be in the presentation making it, period. And listen, folks, if you can't talk without slides or notes for five minutes, then you don't know your material well enough. When you're trying to communicate persuasively, you have to be intelligent about how you communicate.

18:50You got to choose which information to present in order to get your point across. If you do that poorly, we believe that that's an insight into how good you'll be when you get to our level of the organization. Yes. And choosing what you're going to talk about presents risk in this way. You could choose the wrong stuff, but we would rather you accept some risks in terms of what you choose to present and how long you present rather than us accept the risk of taking an hour to hear every single thing you have to say when it's not all that valuable. Yeah. From our perspective. it. I was just asked to give a half hour talk at a client executive meeting and the meeting, it was staff meeting and I was the last speaker and I got 10 minutes.

19:43And I actually said at the start, you don't, you know, I told the guy who was my contact, you don't need to put up the slides. I'm just going to talk for 10 minutes because I had slides for 30 minutes, but I'm not going to try to run through the slides in 10 because then we're just rushing through slides. And it was totally fine. I was in the meeting the entire time I heard what they were talking about. What they were talking about was legit, reasonable. They were supposed to get to me and they ran 20 minutes over, which is true of 90 % of the meetings I attend anyway. They're horrible. Meetings with executives are expensive in terms of the organizational and opportunity costs of all those executives doing nothing else but listening to somebody talk for 45 minutes because they have 70 slides.

20:24They cannot do it. And if you can't figure out how to simplify and elevate and pre-wire, which is a huge part of your ability to use one slide every five minutes, you're not ready for more responsibility. And generally, the only people who get to present at meetings at higher levels are people who are being considered for more responsibility to higher levels. Yeah, that's exactly it. Okay, so then let's take us into the last part of our preparatory notes here or introductory points, that is going for a slam dunk. And folks, going for a slam dunk is an exclamation point of, wow, that was done well.

21:03It was done so well, so perfectly. There's no opposition. It was immediate, obvious, quick. I mean, a no-brainer. That's what you're looking for. And the place where the slam dunk actually happens or the groundwork is laid for it is in the pre-wire work in advance. The reason we say go for the slam dunk in the introductory points is because the only way you can get a slam dunk where there are no disagreements and there's no surprises from the audience is if you pre-wire all of the attendees before the meeting ever occurred. If you've ever seen a slam dunk presentation, that briefing was a slam dunk before it ever started.

21:45It wasn't just verbally persuasive. It didn't just have the right information. It wasn't just smooth. It wasn't just effortless. Although I would argue the effortless, the smoothness and the persuasiveness was because they had already done the presentation so many times and made enough modification so that everybody was on board. They didn't feel any tension or pressure when they went in. It wasn't just effortless. It wasn't rehearsed 50 times. It was done long in advance before the curtain on the final presentation ever went up. And folks, to be perfectly honest, I mean, we have seen meetings get canceled because the person who was going to present at the staff meeting had done such good work on the pre-wiring that they were told, yeah, you know what?

22:30No need to meet. We know the decision. We know what your recommendation was. You don't even have to present. I mean, if you do the pre-wire stuff well enough, there might not even be a need to brief because it's all tied up. It's done. No need for the briefing, which in my opinion is the best case scenario, right? Right. It's like a self-licking ice cream cone. Why wouldn't you? And some people are like, well, I really wanted to give a briefing. No, you don't. What you want is the decision. The observer might think, oh, she didn't get a chance to present. That may not be good for her career. when all the executives are thinking, wow, she did so well.

23:08She's so good. We can trust her so much. She doesn't need to waste our time sitting in a meeting briefing us because we've already heard the briefing individually. She's made adjustments that are satisfying everybody. It's a done deal. It's a slam dunk without ever having to go into the air to do it. Yeah. Taking us back, Mark, then to the idea of, you mentioned earlier, time being our most important asset or our most valuable asset here. I mean, everyone gets time back. That's like win, win-win-win. The briefing is really window dressing and window dressing is nice, but window dressing is about making what's in the window look good.

23:44And you don't need to do that if it already is obvious, if it's a done deal. Everybody already agrees. It looks good. Exactly. It looks good. Exactly. So next steps then are how we do that. Yeah. So the first one is know your key message or put a little differently, know your key ask. Okay. What question do you want an answer to? Is it a budget dollar amount? Is it a restructure on who's going to work for whom? Is it a change in the priority of strategic objectives to move B in front of A or C in front of B? You have to know that specifically because that's going to be on the minds of all the people when you're in your pre-wire meetings before you go into the final meeting.

24:29And listen, folks, you might have a really big concept and think, ooh, this is big. I've got a lot of stuff to tell them about. And that's great. But if you violate your time limit, you'll not be considered successful. So again, remember you're working within your time limit, regardless of how much information you feel like you need to communicate or transmit. Yeah. When you get told that you're supposed to give an update Or, hey, they want a briefing on X. Or, hey, can you share with us a little bit about Project Y that you're working on? Or, you know, I think it'd be good to have everybody in the room get a heads up about what you're doing.

25:07These are all soft words for something is in play and you better pay attention. And the first word in your head when you hear these phrases ought to be wait. That should stop you enough to go, what is it that they want? and say, hey, what's my key message? Or what are they expecting me to ask? What's the decision? Or what's the issue? Now, it's possible that your boss doesn't exactly know. If you don't know what it is, you got to work hard at figuring that out. You can't know your key message if you don't know that information. So you got to find it. Right. And it's entirely possible that the pre-wiring will include you asking people for what you think is going to be discussed here.

26:00So this is not just pre-wiring to get a decision that you want. It's also pre-wiring to understand what the issues are so that you can craft an answer. You may have to do a set of pre-wire briefings and tell people where things stand and then say, hey, what are you seeing here? And what are you thinking? And then come back to people and say, based on everything I've heard, here's where I think we stand. And it won't be another full briefing, but you may have to do a round two, which is much shorter. So make sure you ask people, both yourself and others who you're pre-wiring with, what am I briefing on?

26:33What is the decision point? What's the issue? What am I asking for? And folks, don't believe your boss when he or she says, oh, it's just an update. It's just a brief. They just want to be brought up to speed on things. Because if they're just wanting to be brought up to speed, they would not ask you to take time talking to them during a meeting. They'd ask for an email, just a project status email. Thanks, folks. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow, rate, and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please.

27:18We'll be right back.