579: How to Pitch Your Manager, with Tom Henschel

Tom Henschel: The Look & Sound of Leadership

Tom Henschel of Essential Communications grooms senior leaders and executive teams. As an internationally recognized expert in the field of workplace communications and self-presentation, he has helped thousands of leaders achieve excellence through his work as an executive coach and his top-rated podcast, The Look & Sound of Leadership.

In this conversation, Tom and I explore the sometimes awkward moment of needing to get buy-in from your manager on a next step, proposal, or funding. We detail three considerations and how attention to them can help you frame this conversation better. Plus, we share tactics such as making the business case, telling a story, and past interactions — in order to help you get forward movement.

Key Points

• Three lenses of consideration are helpful when considering how to pitch you manager: purpose, preference, and protocol.
• When framing your purpose in making a pitch, it’s helpful to be able to change altitude. Consider “clicking out” on a map to frame the bigger picture.
• To be purposeful, make sure you are making the business case for whatever you are pitching. Anger and emotion can be sentinels that you might not have moved past thinking about it personally or framed the business context fully.
• Consider past interactions with your manager on how they prefer to receive information. The way you pitch them should begin with their preferences, not yours.
• Get intel in advance from other stakeholders, if practical. They can help you see the variables that might be clouding your judgement if you’re too close to the situation.
• Clearly frame the problem and examples of it. Consider strutting your pitch in the framework of The Want, The Obstacle, and The Resolution (see PDF below).

Resources Mentioned

• Storytelling: A Three-Part Model by Tom Henschel (PDF download)

Related Episodes

• How to Start Managing Up, with Tom Henschel (episode 433)
• The Way to Influence Executives, with Nancy Duarte (episode 450)
• The Way to Make Sense to Others, with Tom Henschel (episode 518)

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