Should you tell a senior executive what they want to hear? For Loretta Nelson, who briefed some of technology’s best-known leaders, the answer is no.
Should you tell a senior executive what they want to hear? For Loretta Nelson, who prepared and briefed leaders including John Chambers, Bill Gates and Michael Dell, the answer is no. Her conversation with Anthony Bay on Zero to Prove sets out how she learned to bring executives the truth, crisply.
Loretta says many people briefing executives want to say the nice thing or the right thing. She did not. She arrived with her facts and her relationships in order, and she gave leaders the landscape: where things stood, where the gaps were and where the companies were competing as well as cooperating. She did not pretend to tell them what to decide. Her job was to give them what they needed to decide well, and she asked the same of her teams. Being closest to the business, she told them, it was their responsibility to tell the truth, not to say things were getting better.
Organisations often make that harder. Loretta describes how information gets edited as it moves upward. By the time a dying weed reaches the executive, it has become a thriving flower bed.
John Chambers taught her the alternative. He liked everything on one page, and she and her colleagues would spend hours debating every word. Some asked why they did not simply use a template. Her answer was that the debate was where she learned what was really going on, and where she asked whether they were sure. When she finished her last role, colleagues made her a diagram with the word “crisp” in the middle.
Bill Gates taught her a different lesson. She had coordinated a meeting between Gates and Chambers and had everything lined up. Then Gates asked whether they were going to talk about networking, and she realised she had avoided the elephant in the room. They talked about it, and she took the lesson early in her career: you have to raise the difficult subject.
She is wary of templates for the same reason. A framework is useful, but a template can end up controlling the outcome. People fill in their small pieces, mark a project green, yellow or red, and move on. The real conversation about what sits behind the information does not happen, and with AI now generating those updates, she worries leaders will spend even less time on the nuances.
The best leaders she worked with also had a process. Michael Dell wanted the facts, then alternatives, then choices, then commitments, which she says removed pocket vetoes and left no loose ends. She helped set the strategic agenda and multi-year outlook across VMware, EMC, Dell, Pivotal and Boomi, and prepared the executives presenting to him. Sue Bostrom gave her advice she still uses: decide how you will show up to each meeting, take a beat before you join, and resist the urge to jump in and fix. Sometimes that means more levity, sometimes being definitive, and sometimes sitting back to read the room.
For leaders and the people who brief them, the takeaway is practical. Bring the truth, keep it crisp, raise the elephant in the room, and look behind the template. Loretta and Anthony agree that as analysis becomes easy to produce, judgment matters more.