How can a team better influence senior management?
Teams frequently need to process data and make recommendations to senior managers in order to get decisions made. However, many overload recommendations with data, fail to sell direct benefits up the line, and misunderstand senior management requirements. A team's influencing skills can be developed as well as an individual's!

Case Studies: Helping a team influence senior management

We ran a development event for a project team that had this as its main focus. They identified their senior management as authoratative, impulsive and critical -very difficult to persuade. A case study exercise was designed for the team to work on - and a simulated presentation to management, where the facilitators would test for weaknesses in team solidarity, any flaws in arguments, be impatient with long explanations (!) and so on.

They ran this presentation through several times, and the team generated valuable understanding about the sort of discipline they needed in order to make powerful, watertight cases to present up the line.