95% of boards will not tell you that they didn’t understand your tech strategy presentation. You might find out by chance, 3 or 6 months later. Here’s how you know that the board didn’t understand your tech strategy presentation: ✓ there are literally no questions or comments at the end …

“I was mistaken, you were right about X” said to me in my early 20’s a male manager who was 15 years older than me. — I was stunned! Up to that point, I’d never experienced a man more senior than me, both in age and status, telling me that I was right and they might have been wrong about something. This man gained my respect instantly and I valued his perspective and opinion above many others. This man…

Your team will feel attacked if you start interrupting them with questions *during* their presentation, rather than waiting to ask questions after. — Your team will feel attacked if (especially your first) questions or statements during (and even after) their presentation sound like this: ✓ why would you do THAT? ✓ you are going to create X problem with this approach ✓ your plan won’t work ✓ you’re focusing on the wrong things ✓ this is wrong…

Your Line Manager sits you in a one to one appraisal meeting. They say, “you are difficult to work with and you are not a team player because you gave John constructive feedback” and they carry on with a “shopping list” of things you did wrong in the last few months. As as a footnote they add: “Ah, and by the way, your KPIs have been achieved and your delivery has been marked as outstanding”. You feel like a rabbit in the headlights. You feel overwhelmed with emotion and you might even well up. You want to justify, defend and explain but you can’t get a word in edge-ways.

Have you been in a meeting when someone interrupted or stopped you talking by putting their hand up towards you / your face? Did you feel so shocked, you stopped talking and let them take over? Did you beat yourself up later for letting them do this and not standing your ground? You are not the only one! Most people (so far, it’s only been women) with whom I work experience this (usually from male colleagues) on a weekly, if not daily basis.

Your leader asks you to give “an update to the new team” or “share with us what you’ve been working on”. You are told you have 20 minutes and yet they interrupt you just after 5. Their question is answered later on in your 20 Min presentation, at slide 17, but clearly they couldn’t wait that long. You jump to slide 17 and the meeting spirals out of control and now they’ve turned facing and talking to one of your colleagues, fully ignoring you, despite you standing in front of the room with your slides feeling steam rolled and vulnerable.

This is a genuine email I received out of the blue from an engineering exec in a tech company in Cambridge which had “HR” as the subject line: “If you ever wonder what I have against HR (I doubt you ever wonder that!) this is an article (link to article…

Feedback is a sore topic for most people. No one likes to receive feedback which criticises (especially negatively) their work. This is why I would like to showcase here a perfect example of what superbly constructive feedback looks like and why I loved it so much. I recently submitted a…

If the title of this article sounds harsh to you, you probably already use the techniques within. :-) Do you give honest, useful feedback in meetings yet you have been pulled aside and told that people found you “aggressive” or “abrasive”? Have you been criticised for giving your opinion to colleagues on their initiative? Perhaps you found out later that people don’t ask you for help, even though you are the one with the experience to help them, because they are concerned about the directness of…