I came across executives, managers and in fact senior managers who just don't bother to vet through and validate their work before it is sent to their superior or worse, the senior management team. Data is not validated, summarised, and presented well. I would say avoid giving raw data to them (unless specifically requested), instead give insightful statistics. Something that your superior or senior management team could relate to and use to make informed decisions at one glance. That is how you could add value to them.
I seriously believe that you should be careful when you deal with your superior or the senior management team. Wrong impressions could be formed that would not do you good. I came across raw data with numbers and colour codes that I didn't understand. Documents with no headers or titles. Jargons that just made my eyes spin backwards.
What I would be looking for would be just a simple breakdown data by department, by categories, or just a simple percentage. A header or a document title would be very useful. Some analysis on the percentages would also be nice. And if the situation warrants, some recommendations would be great too.
Funny how some executives just cannot read their stakeholders well. What they would find useful in a report. They are not being fussy or difficult. They just don't have the time to massage the data given in the report. A dashboard type of report will be very appreciated by them as they could see the different trends, glaring issues that would need to be brought up, anomalies, etc. They could then use the intelligence that they have in front of them to make decisions, plan ahead, etc.
Other things that we could do to ensure our stakeholders are well taken care of include finding out in advance how they would like the statistics to be presented to them. In terms of the layout, font / font size, filtering, etc.
Just some of my observations... After all, our superiors and the senior management team would be the ones who would be looking at our performance at the end of the day. So, why would we want to give them the impression that we have low emotional intelligence?
Ieja
