12.4. Preparing Information with Impact
As with most of the topics we’ve covered in this book, as the person supporting an executive or an executive team, you are usually in the background instead of the forefront. Progress reporting is no different. Your responsibilities will center mostly around gathering, organizing, and then formatting the data that your boss will share with their team.
Sharing Good News
What you can do to ensure that your boss is able to present the most impactful progress report is to anticipate what they’ll need. If you have been sitting in meetings to take minutes, you will know what is expected. For instance, is the team expecting budget updates? Do they want to know attendance projections? Are you expecting to see samples of what the deliverables will look like? You can remind your boss of these things as they are in the process of giving you information to include in the report that you will prepare on their behalf.
The video below shares some excellent tips for making your report very impactful, from the information included to its visual appeal.
Video: “Progress Report: How to Write, Structure, and Make It Visually Attractive” by Piktochart 👉 All-in-one visual communication tool [14:33] is licensed under the Standard YouTube License.Transcript and closed captions available on YouTube.
Communicating Challenges
While the goal is for a progress report to share the great news that a project is running on time, within budget, and exactly as expected – sometimes there are hiccups that must be shared with the team. Knowing how to include those less-than-stellar updates in the progress report is a valuable skill. There are some key behaviours to consider when sharing bad news.
- Be prepared – while it may be preferable to avoid a difficult conversation, it’s better to face the challenge head-on.
- Be honest about the situation. Most folks will admit that they would prefer to be told that something is not as expected than to find out on their own through less-than-ideal circumstances.
- Keep the tone neutral and unemotional.
- Propose solutions – this shows the stakeholders that you have given thoughtful consideration to how you can recover from this experience.
Another factor to consider is who needs to know. Is this an internal challenge that only the team working on the project needs to know about? Or is this something that needs to be shared with the entire stakeholder body?
Communicating Challenges is from “3.2 Sharing bad news” from Effective communication in the workplace is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
“Happy News” by Undraw, Undraw License
