How to Leverage Data to Influence Management Decisions
By Peggy Tierney Galvin, Chief Strategy Officer, Force4 Technology Communications
Picture this: you’re working through action items when your manager pings you. They want a check-in before the board meeting next week. They ask you to put together a deck with your quarterly results for the meeting.
On one hand, this is straightforward. You know the KPIs you’re responsible for. You can put them into a deck. Easy.
On the other hand, this is anything but straightforward. You have to think about: How is your company doing? Is it making its numbers this quarter? Or the year to date? Has the focus shifted since your KPIs were assigned, making them irrelevant; or worse, out of touch? What is your manager worried about? What is most important to them at this board meeting? Will they know how to present your slides? What if you haven’t made your numbers? How will you put them in the best possible light? Or even: what if you have made your numbers, but the goalposts have shifted?
Put another way, your numbers didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. They exist in the context of all in which they live and came before them.
To best prepare for results meetings in Q4, you have to balance the original goals of the business from the beginning of the year with the current focus of the company. That way you can thread the needle between what success metrics you have been tracking toward, and what is important to the company now. This way you can put your results in the context of the immediate “so what?” of your manager and the upstream stakeholders they are reporting to.
And bonus for Future You: by performing this critical analysis now, you can identify the areas, programs, campaigns and tools that are working well, and make strategic recommendations to your manager at this meeting for what the team ought to re-invest in for 2025.
P.S. Making you look good to your manager is our particular area of expertise. If you’d like a plan with strategic direction and specific recommendations for your business, reach out. We’d love to chat.
