4 strategies for board presentation success

Ask any CIO about that very first time presenting to the board, and you’ll hear a deep sigh of relief that it’s in the past. 

“When I worked at a publicly traded company, I referred to board presentations as my personal professional development opportunity, because I learned from each experience,” recalls Diane Schwarz, chief digital and information officer of Hunt Consolidated in Dallas. She credits her former boss with boosting her confidence for her inaugural board presentation on cybersecurity by reminding her: “You know far more about this topic than any of them.”

Yet presenting to the board is something of “role reversal” for CIOs used to spending their time meeting with their teams or interacting with peers, adds Schwarz, who served as CIO at Textron before her current role. “In the boardroom, you are presenting to a highly prestigious group of experienced executives. It’s a very structured meeting in which you participate only during your section on the agenda.”

Her advice: Join the meeting with a different mindset. “It’s not a collaboration session. You’re reporting up and out on aspects of your enterprise responsibilities.”

Here, Schwarz and other veteran execs share their best advice for boardroom success.

Know the board’s needs

When he was CIO at Kaiser Permanente, Phil Fasano made a point of teaching his team about how to present to a board. “Tech people think the board wants to hear about the great stuff they’re building, but it’s nothing to do with that,” says Fasano, who serves on several boards as CEO of Bay Advisors, a strategic advisory firm in the Washington, DC area.

Enhancing the value of the company for shareholders and customers is what the board cares about, he adds. “I would coach IT people (who like to give a precise number to a decimal point) to understand that giving a number like that is an immediate tipoff to the board that you haven’t thought through all your challenges,” Fasano notes, stressing the importance of sharing both the upsides and downsides with the board.

John Murray, a former CIO and CEO who is currently a member of two private boards, agrees that CIOs need to focus on the board’s business-focused interests. “Give me milestones to measure. Show me how what you’re doing contributes to EBTDA,” he advises, referring to Earnings Before Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization.

Be brief

One of the most challenging aspects of CIO-to-board communications is shearing away the complexity in your technology update without glossing over the challenges ahead. 

Murray has coached a few CIO colleagues on the importance of brevity in their board communications. “The classic (complaint) is a CIO presenting for 35-40 minutes on something that should’ve been 10. Once he leaves, everybody sighs with exasperation.” 

A far better strategy: “Deliver useful, actionable insights, packaged in a way the board can absorb,” Murray recommends. “Communicate to me about any risks I’m taking. Show me how you’re going to manage them. Then get out of the room.”

When it comes to deciding how much tech detail to share, find a balance between oversimplifying and over-complicating. “Most board members are on multiple boards, or have been CEOs and had technology reporting up to them,” Schwarz points out. “They don’t come to their meetings with zero frame of reference, so don’t discount their baseline of knowledge.”

Mind the board dynamics

Understanding the dynamics of the board itself is one area that CIOs tend to overlook in their due diligence and advance prep, says Kristen Lamoreaux, president of Lamoreaux Search near Philadelphia. “You really have to lean on your CEO and CFO to understand the dynamics of the board,” she explains. “Find out ahead of time who will ask in-depth questions or who might derail you on a financial question.”

Kristen Lamoreaux

Most CIOs get the importance of backgrounding the board members as part of their board prep, Lamoreaux adds, but few consider the maturity of the board’s working relationships. “Have they been together for five years? Are there any new members? What are the politics of the room?”

Even a detail as minor as which board members may have skipped over their assigned reading before the meeting can help a CIO prepare for surprise questions. “Unless you’ve been warned, you’ll go in there believing they’ve all read the details in the board book,” she says.   

Earn their trust

“Board members generally peppered me with questions throughout a presentation,” recalls Hunt Consolidated’s Schwarz, who noticed that the nature of their queries often repeated each year. “I started noting the questions after each presentation and reviewed them as part of the prep work for upcoming board sessions.”

When Kevin Barnes was serving as CIO of E&J Gallo Wineries in 2014 and preparing for his first board meeting, he noticed one of the new board members had been the chief financial officer at another California company where Barnes knew the CIO well.

“I called up (that CIO) and did a little social engineering and networking,” he recalls. That led to an informal overview of Gallo’s IT strategy with the board member, who asked “good, tough questions” that gave Barnes a head’s up on topics he should be ready to address in the meeting.

Gaining the confidence and trust of your board members isn’t just about information sharing, however. Schwarz used what she jokingly calls her “Help Desk 101” strategy to encourage tech conversations beyond the boardroom. “As senior technologists, we should always be ready to help whomever needs it,” the CDO says. “I fixed one board member’s phone during an elevator ride. It took me about 10 seconds — and she was so appreciative.”