Selling Momentum While the Deadline Eats You
My manager asked me to make a Friday leadership slide about our team’s biggest wins this year. The project is late, the budget got cut twice, and the numbers we have make the whole thing look worse, not better. I was told to focus on momentum and not get stuck on negatives. Do I polish the story or say this is not a success yet?
Terrified Of Spin Slides,
PowerPoint Dry Cleaner
PowerPoint Dry Cleaner, they did not ask you for a slide. They handed you a stained suit and said make it look like leadership wore it to church.
This is the modern company trick. Spill coffee down the front. Cancel the cleaning budget. Lose the ticket. Then find the one employee who still knows where the semicolon goes and tell them to highlight the garment’s exciting journey toward presentability. Momentum is what a sock has when it is bouncing around a dryer with a gum wrapper. Motion is not cleanliness.
Your manager wants the suit returned in a garment bag with your fingerprints on it. That is the important part. Everybody loves a success story until some director asks why it smells like diesel and missed dates. Then suddenly the slide was not a leadership narrative. It was your work product. Funny how ownership appears only after the gravy dries.
Write the slide like a dry cleaner’s tag. Received with stains noted. Original goal. Current status. Budget cuts. Dates missed. Numbers available. Risks still open. Work actually completed. Use plain words with no perfume. If you must give it a title that can survive the conference room, call it “Progress Under Constraints.” That is boring enough to pass security and honest enough that nobody can use it to sew you into the lining.
Do not write “biggest wins” unless the win is that the jacket still has both sleeves. Do not add “strong momentum” unless something measurable is moving besides the deadline. Do not sprinkle enthusiasm on a grease spot and call it culture. That is how employees become the human dryer sheet in somebody else’s load of hot garbage.
Then do the part civilized office life trains out of you. Take the slide to your manager, put it in front of them, and say, “This is the factual version. If you want the parade version, you approve every word, and your name goes on it as the owner.” Not collaborator. Not reviewer. Owner. Make them put their hand on the hanger.
If they say to soften it, ask which fact is wrong. Not which fact feels chilly in front of leadership. Not which fact needs a warmer tone and a tiny cardigan. Which fact is wrong. Watch how fast the room discovers feelings after spending all year murdering numbers.
If they rewrite it into a victory lap, fine. Let them wear it. Keep the approval. If they will not approve it, they were never asking for communication. They were asking for a mannequin.
Send back the suit with the stains circled. If management sat in the gravy, management can initial the tag.
– Uncle Bobby