Do you ever find it hard to be concise when you report to your managers?
Maybe that's even the executive team.
Well, today I'm going to show you a really easy framework you can use to report to executives in under one minute.
Let's crack on then, shall we?
Hello and welcome back to Confident Business English.
You're here with me, Ana, your neuro language coach. So this episode is inspired by a lot of my clients who have to report to their executives on specific issues or topics.
And some of the biggest problems here are, and I haven't got a lot of time to do it.
I've only got five minutes.
How can I make sure I'm concise in English?
This is one of the biggest worries that people have. And also, how can I make sure that I sound good?
These are potentially executives.
Maybe they're in charge of making promotional decisions.
You know what it's like, right?
You want to communicate well.
My suggestion here is to use a framework.
If you've been listening to the podcast for a while you know I love a framework because it makes your life easier.
You can use this type of framework in any language whatsoever but a big benefit for you is that it just takes something else off your plate and it helps you be concise.
It is harder to be concise when you're working in your second or third language because you're just not as agile.
Here's the framework we're going to work with today and it's called BLUF, which stands for a Bottom Line Up Front.
Now, if you have any military connections, you may have already heard of this.
It actually originated in the US military.
And of course people had to make difficult decisions and they had to get through tons of information so they needed the key messages quickly so they could make decisions.
And essentially it flips communication on its head.
So rather than giving all the context and all the situation first, it's like, let's focus on the most important thing.
This framework sits in the family of the first minute, which is another framework I really recommend.
However, this one really shines for this.
I've got one minute and I need to tell the executives what's going on.
You don't need to use it all the time.
It's just another tool in your toolbox.
Let's have a close -up look at the structure then, which is number one, the bottom line.
And this means that you state the result immediately.
The second part is you give some supporting data.
This could be a couple of key facts that back up the results.
The third point is to give the implications to explain what this means for the business.
And finally, next steps.
Outline any required actions.
I'm going to show you now some examples in different contexts.
They're all going to be under one minute.
Just to prove to you that you can do this, I'm also going to highlight some of the vocabulary afterwards and really listen out.
What are some of the verbs that I'm using?
What are some of the prepositions?
Some of the phrases as well.
The first example here I'm going to imagine is in a finance context.
I'm going to go through this slowly, and then we'll review some of the vocabulary afterwards.
I'm going to imagine as well, that somebody has passed over to me, another manager in the meeting before I start.
Thanks very much Jon, cheers for that.
Well, I'd like to be really brief with my update.
First of all, revenue increased by 12 % this quarter, which is a great result.
This was driven mainly by a 20 % rise in online sales and also a 5 % reduction in operational costs.
And this puts us ahead of our yearly growth target, which is really positive.
And finally, we recommend reinvesting the savings back into expanding our customer acquisition strategy.
Happy to answer any questions.
That was just under 45 seconds, I think.
And we squeezed in all the parts, bottom line, supporting data, implications, and next steps.
Let me highlight a couple of pieces of vocabulary there.
Firstly, a preposition.
Whenever we're talking about how much something has changed, we say buy.
Revenue increased by 12%.
If you want to give the final point, we would use two.
So if you said, for example, revenue increased to 12%, that's the final end point.
So you can see how those two things are not the same.
Buy is the amount, two is the end point.
A really nice phrase there as well is, this puts us ahead of our target.
So this is a really nice one for you.
If you work in sales or anything to do with targets, this puts us ahead of our target.
Thirdly, and lastly, when we're using the verb recommend or suggest or propose the structure, one of the main structures is to use the gerund.
We recommend reinvesting our savings.
We suggest cutting back on costs.
We propose doing an analysis.
So that's quite a nice pattern that you can remember there.
Let's move into a different context now and have a look at IT.
And we're going to imagine a situation where we've implemented a new software system and we're at an executive meeting, and we need to give a very brief update about it.
I'm going to put it through the bluff framework, and then I'm going to pull out some of the vocabulary as well.
Here we go. Hello everyone.
I'm just going to give a very brief overview of the project, and I'm really pleased to say that we deployed the system on schedule, which is great news, and we were able to mitigate quite a number of security risks by carrying out some additional testing.
And we're pleased to say that user adoption has also exceeded our expectations by about 15%.
So we're really pleased with that as well.
Overall, much smoother operations, and it has already led to a big reduction in manual errors.
In terms of next steps, what we really recommend now is just expanding the training and rolling it out to more people across the company.
Thank you very much and happy to answer any questions.
That just came in around the 45 second mark as well so let's pull out some interesting vocabulary there.
You're going to hear some different phrasal verbs, which are very natural in this context, roll out, which is to gradually deploy something across an organization.
You can also have it as a noun as well, out, roll out.
You may also have noticed this adjective smoother, and smooth is an adjective we use to talk about operations and processes.
Things are going smoothly.
It's a really common thing to express in a business context.
Another one that pops up is seamless or seamlessly.
What's the difference between the two?
Well, they both operate in the land of working well without problems, but there is a slight nuance when we're talking about something being smooth or something going smoothly.
It means there weren't any bumps or disruptions.
And it's very common when we talk about operations, for example, you could say the onboarding process was really smooth or the event ran smoothly.
There weren't any disruptions.
Whereas on the other hand, seamless, I want you to think about your clothes.
Your clothes have seams on them and sometimes you can have things that are seamless with no lines.
In a business context this means though there are no visible gaps between the parts.
It's like a unified experience and it's very common when we're talking about integrations of systems. So for example, the software integrate seamlessly or the customer journey is seamless, meaning it's so well connected that the customer doesn't notice there's been any transition or handover.
So smooth, no problems or resistance, seamless, well connected.
Let's do another under one minute executive report.
And we're going to have a look at giving a little bit of bad news.
Now, unfortunately, sometimes this is the case and I've actually picked the example here to be from HR, No Shade.
Okay. If you're in the HR sector, it's just the first thing that came to my mind.
And we're going to talk about a situation where a company is experiencing high turnover.
This is an interesting term.
If you're an HR, you're going to know it already, but turnover has two meanings in business.
Turnover can be the revenue.
But if you're in HR, if you have a high turnover, it's rotation, I guess some people might call it, how many people are joining and leaving the company.
So I will pretend to be an HR manager reporting to the Executive Team about turnover.
Thanks Simon for that.
I'm just going to give you a brief overview of the turnover situation we have at the moment.
We have seen a noticeable increase in staff turnover this quarter and actually this is mainly within the more junior roles, the biggest thing that we're picking up from the exit interviews is basically workload.
People have too much work and they don't feel there are enough growth opportunities within the companies.
And in my opinion, I think we need to keep an eye on this because if the trend continues, we could risk losing more talent and maybe even disrupting the team performance.
So I suggest we fast track the mentoring program that we've got there in the and maybe revisit some of the workload distribution in the next planning session.
Thank you. That was the longest one so far.
That was just under one minute and let me cherry pick some of the vocabulary that I liked.
I love that adjective noticeable.
We've seen a noticeable increase.
It's like, it's not huge.
It's not tiny. It's just noticeable.
Also, you'll hear that phrase over at pickup, the biggest thing we've been picking up from the exit interviews.
Pick up is a tricky one, I've talked about it before.
It's got lots of different meanings but here what it means is learn.
The biggest thing we've been picking up or learning from the exit interviews is that people have too much work basically.
Finally when you're doing this type of thing and I didn't do it so much today, but I really encourage you to use in my professional opinion as far as I'm concerned from my perspective, you know, Give your personal view, your personal touch. This is what they're interested in.
What's your take on it?
Let's wrap up then.
The framework from today was bottom line up front, which is called bluff.
You can do some investigation if you like.
And I really encourage you to try it out.
As I said, it, it doesn't have to be every time you're reporting to the executives, but when you only have two, three, five minutes, you can whip this out of your And you can feel confident going into that meeting because remember that is what this is all about helping you feel more secure and confident.
If you loved that episode, but you want to go and have a look at all the vocabulary in depth, you can get a full transcript if you become a free member of Confident Business English, go to the link in the show notes of this episode to sign up.
Thank you so much as always for taking the time to have a session with me today.
I've really been looking forward to sharing that with you.
So I hope it was useful and I will see you again, very, very soon.
Bye bye.
