I get a particular kind of phone call more often than you’d think.

It usually starts something like this: “We have a senior leader who is technically brilliant, but the Board is complaining after every meeting.”

I ask what the complaint actually is.

“They get too detailed. They lose the room. Nobody can follow the point they’re trying to make. They’ve lost credibility.”

Let’s call this person Tayla. That’s not their real name, but the situation is very real. Tayla is in their 50s and has given this organisation two decades of valuable contribution. Now they’re quietly looking down the barrel of retrenchment because nobody taught them how to present effectively to a Board fifteen years ago, and everyone is too uncomfortable to address the problem properly now.

Why does this happen so late?

Here’s the pattern I see repeatedly. The Board or CEO notices the problem early. It might come up privately at review time or after a particularly difficult meeting, but nobody wants to have the conversation.

Telling someone, “Your presentations aren’t landing and it’s affecting the way the Board sees you” feels personal. People worry that they’re criticising the individual rather than identifying a skill that needs development.

So, the problem is left alone.

Another Board meeting comes around and the complaints surface again. Over time, that leader’s reputation starts to become “the person whose updates we dread.” By the time somebody finally raises the issue directly, it’s being discussed as a performance problem.

And that frustrates me enormously because, in so many cases, it was a presentation skills gap that could have been addressed years earlier.

A good presentation skills course at the right point in someone’s career could make an enormous difference.

Please don’t call this a “soft skill”

The phrase “soft skills” has done us no favours.

It suggests that the way you communicate is somehow secondary to your technical expertise and years of hard-won experience. Yet the more senior you become, the more your ability to communicate that expertise matters.

It certainly isn’t optional at Board level.

If you’re 54 and being quietly managed towards the door because the CEO can’t remember your key message after a fifteen-minute update, there is nothing “soft” about the consequences.

Try telling someone who is suddenly searching for another senior role in their 50s, with another 15 or 20 years of valuable contribution ahead of them, that presentation skills are soft. I suspect they’d have a very different view.

What actually goes wrong?

In my experience, it’s rarely a lack of intelligence or expertise. The leaders I coach in these situations are often extremely capable people who know their subject inside out.

The problem is usually far more specific - which is good news, because specific problems can be fixed.

When you present to an executive team or Board, there are four areas I want you to think about.

What’s your actual objective? “Update them on the project” isn’t an objective. What do you specifically want the people in that room to know or remember once you’ve sat back down?

Does your message have a structure people can follow? When you know a subject deeply, it’s tempting to include everything. Unfortunately, all that detail can obscure the point you most need your audience to understand.

Are your slides helping you? Every piece of information you put on a slide competes for your audience’s attention. If something doesn’t help them understand the message you want remembered, ask yourself why it’s there.

How are you coming across in the room? You need to communicate with enough confidence and credibility that the Board can concentrate on your recommendation rather than becoming distracted by the way you’re delivering it. For someone like Tayla, this can be where individual feedback in a practical presentation skills workshop makes an enormous difference.

Why practice and feedback matter

Experience helps, of course, but years of presenting don’t automatically make you an effective presenter. If nobody has ever given you useful feedback, you may simply have spent years reinforcing habits that aren’t helping you.

This is one of the reasons I use people’s own work-related content in my presentation skills workshop in Sydney. If you regularly present to the Board, I want you practising the kind of Board presentation you actually give. If you need to influence an executive team, let’s work on that. There’s far more value in practising the communication situations that matter in your real working life than delivering a pretend presentation about something you’ll never discuss again.

And sometimes the changes are surprisingly small. A clearer objective or a different structure can change the way an audience understands your message. Removing half the information from a slide can make the important point much easier to see. Changing the way you start can help the Board understand from the outset why they should listen.

It’s never too late to improve your presentation skills

If you’re a senior leader reading this and some of it has landed a little too close to home, I want you to know that these skills are learnable.

I’ve watched executives in their 50s and 60s change the way they present and, importantly, the way senior audiences respond to them. Sometimes the improvement happens remarkably quickly once somebody shows them what’s getting in their way and gives them the opportunity to practise doing it differently.

You don’t need to become a different person. You need practical techniques that allow the expertise you already have to come through more clearly when you speak.

Nobody should lose a role they’re capable of doing because of a skill nobody ever properly taught them.