Executive reporting best practices
Overview
Reporting to leaders and executives should be one of the most important components of your measurement and analytics strategy. You can’t just send an executive a report and expect to be successful; there is much more nuance and storytelling required. This guide highlights some of the main considerations you should take when building ‘reports’ (could be a deck, report, dashboard, scorecard, etc.) for your executive team.
What to Know
Before you even begin pulling together your executive report, you should have a basic understanding of the following:
- How does the executive consume information?
- Frequency of communication
- b. Format of communication (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Dashboard)
- What level of detail do they need to make decisions? Some executives love to get into the details and some do not. It’s important to understand where your executive sits on this spectrum and meet those expectations.
- Who influences this executive and who do they influence? It’s important to understand the network that the leader sits in as it may impact what you share or proposed actions.
- What’s important to the executive? What are their goals/priorities/agendas? Your report should definitely address what’s important but it doesn’t have to address everything. Make sure your story is relevant and important to them.
Options for Sharing Data
Options for Sharing Data
| Attributes | Best Used For | |
|---|---|---|
| Reports | - Mostly Static (from a system) - Point-in-Time | - Limited Data Mining (requires multiple reports) - Operational Decision Making |
| Scorecards | - Customized - Point-in-Time | - Comparison to Goals/Benchmarks - Operational Decision Making - Limited Strategic Decision Making |
| Dashboards | - Customized - Dynamic | - Highlighting Key Metrics - Lite Data Mining - Operational Decision Making - Limited Strategic Decision Making |
| Data Viz Tools | - Customized - Dynamic | - Highlighting Key Metrics - Heavy Data Mining - Operational & Strategic Decision Making |
| Presentations | - Customized - Point-in-Time | - Highlighting Key Metrics - Storytelling - Operational & Strategic Decision Making |
Crafting Your Story
You should be prepared with the story that you want to tell the executive as part of your report. Make sure your report includes the following:
- Call out themes and key metrics
- Create insight via a surprise or ‘a-ha moment’
- Share your recommendations
- These are actions you think should be taken. Action could even be just to monitor or to follow-up with additional analysis that you may not have been able to do yet
- State your request – what do you need or are you asking the executive to do?
- Share next steps, including when you will report back to the executive again
Be sure that you:
- Share business and L&D insights (be careful not to use L&D jargon)
- Share information that supports your recommendations/actions
- Focus on the future – the past already happened, so now what?
- Answer the question “So what?” – if you can’t answer this question, consider whether you really need that information
Quality Checklist
Before you share a report with an executive, go through the checklist below to ensure you will be prepared and the report is high quality:
[ ] Does it address the audience’s business goals/priorities/agenda? [ ] Does it inform decisions the audience intends to or should make based on the data? [ ] Does the information address expectations for “what success looks like”? [ ] Does it include both L&D and Business insights? [ ] Does it provide information that supports action? [ ] Is there a focus on the future, not the past? [ ] Does any of the data/information leave you asking “so what?”