How to talk to non experts – Tip 3: Know the business level gap between you and your audience

Hi and welcome to the How to Talk to Non-Experts tip series. Let's take a look at tip number 3: know the business-level gap between you and the audience. Now, what do I mean by this? In any organization, people work at different levels. At the very top, you've got the CEO and the executive teams, and then there's a hierarchy structure throughout the organization. Even in very flat organizations, there's still somebody who is a manager, an associate, and so on. And so when you are preparing to talk to a non-expert, you need to take a moment and think about the business-level gap between you and your audience. Are they perhaps 2 levels above you, 1 level above you? Are they the same, or are they lower than you in the organization? Now, this is not about who is more important and powerful. It's about considering the perspective, what people care about, and then how you can deliver your expert information in a way that's relatable and understandable to them at the level they are at in the organization. Remember, people at different levels care about different things. For example, managers talking to executives would deliver a different message from a manager talking to an associate. The manager talking to executives might focus more on business impacts, strategic impacts, whereas a manager talking to an associate might focus more on what does it mean for the individual or changes in day-to-day activities. So these different levels have different perspectives and a different way of needing to receive and deliver information. So what happens if you don't do this? Well, first of all, it means you can't adjust your message to be relevant to the audience. If you don't think about the difference in business level, you're not going to be thinking about what do I need to change to make my message more relevant to that particular audience? You just can't do it if you haven't thought about it. And what does that lead to? Well, frustration and confusion. We're seeing these results time and again throughout these tips. And when you have frustration and confusion, generally you're not going to get what you need. So if you're talking to a non-expert, you're looking for a particular outcome. You look— you're wanting them to do something, to understand something, make a decision, agree to fund your proposal, whatever it happens to be. If they are frustrated and confused, you're not likely To get the positive outcome that you need from that interaction. So how do you do this? It's all very well to say consider the level, but how do you actually do it? Well, fortunately, it's quite simple. First, count the levels between you and the individual. And if it's— is it 1? Is it 2? Is it more than 2? And then adjust your message. Seems a little simplistic, but this simple act of stopping for a moment and saying, They are higher than me in the organization. They will probably care about different things. And then adjusting your message to take that into account is going to increase the chances that you'll deliver your message successfully. Now, let's take a look at an example. If a developer is talking to a CEO about a bug or an issue with a particular piece of software, they probably shouldn't talk about the specifics of the issue and what the coding problem is. What they should think about is, well, the CEO over here is going to care about strategic impacts. So what does this bug mean? It means a delay to the software release, which means the new product can't launch on time. That's more likely to be something the CEO cares about. Or we've discovered a problem, all our users can't log in and the business is shut down for the whole day. That's going to be a CEO-level problem rather than a let me talk to you about the specifics of the bug. Now, the alternative or the flip side is also true and relevant. So a CFO, a chief financial officer, talking to a sales agent. If the chief financial officer was talking about poor revenue, not enough income from the previous quarter, it wouldn't make a lot of— wouldn't be very meaningful for the sales agent if the CFO focused on what it meant for the EBIT and what it meant for long-term stockholder options. What the sales agent probably wants to hear is, we're going to have to work harder to sell more in the next quarter, or bonuses are going to be smaller because we earned less in the last quarter. So the CFO would need to adapt the message to make it more relevant and relatable to the sales agent because they're at a different level in the organization and care about different things. So for this 3rd tip in the Talking to Non-Experts series, make sure you know the business-level gap between you and the audience, and then adapt your message to take it into account.