You’ve been in that moment. An important exec-level meeting or maybe even a job interview. That moment. The scary one.
You prepared a lot. Trying to go over any topic that could possibly come up. Now, an executive at your company — or an interviewer — asks you a question you hadn’t quite thought about in that exact same way.
That’s when it hits. Your attention shifts to how you’re handling the question. You’re thinking less about the question itself and more about how you’re feeling judged. Evaluated. You freeze — for a beat. Your breathing shortens and your heart beats slightly harder than normal.
As your nervous system reacts, you begin to answer the question. You feel slightly out of body as you speak — you can hear yourself talking faster and with more words than usual. You’re worried about the impression you’re making as you speak.
Afterwards, you can’t exactly tell how it went, but you feel a vague sense it wasn’t as good as you wanted.
One underlying fear in executive communication is: “What will I do when somebody asks me a question I don’t know the answer to?” What will they think of me?
I hear descriptions of this type of moment in conversations I have with product leaders. I’ve felt it myself.
It’s often framed as “I want to be better at communicating with the execs at my company.”
But how do you get better at these moments?
There are some tactics that can help you communicate better in these contexts. Thinking about how you’d structure what you say so you’re crisp and organized mentally is helpful. At times, I’ve found breath work useful before important meetings. It would help me more easily notice when I’d react, pause, and bring my attention back to the conversation.
The understandable response: prepare harder.
Past those basics, though, the usual instinct for improving exec communication is to just prepare harder. The problem is this can lead to overdosing on prep. Preparation, after all, gives you confidence, right? More is better.
Not always. There are certainly helpful levels of preparation. Paired with some practice, this helps create familiarity with the material, priming your mind to speak more clearly and improving your confidence. This is about knowing your work and your business, and spending time anticipating a few key scenarios that could come up.
Where preparation is less helpful is when it becomes more about trying to guarantee you’ll never be asked anything you haven’t seen beforehand. Think about this: Are you preparing to lead and contribute to a productive conversation, or trying to make sure you never feel exposed?
Tactics and prep are not enough to address the whole problem of these moments under pressure. But what happens when you stop treating senior-level conversations — or job interviews — like exams, and instead imagine them as opportunities to share your thinking?
Moving from answering to contributing
As you move into or interview for more senior roles, more of the questions teams deal with involve incomplete information, competing priorities, and tradeoffs. You’re being asked for some perspective before an outcome is clear. Often, no one knows the best course of action yet — so what should we do?
This means effective answers are more about being willing to offer your view without knowing whether it will be welcomed, and being open to what you hear back.
A quick example:
“Why aren’t we moving faster?”
You could start listing everything the team has done or faced. Or you could offer your own assessment:
“I think we’re spreading the team across too many priorities. I’d pause two of them.”
The exec may disagree. But now you have something useful to discuss: which priorities, what it would cost, and what evidence might change your current recommendation.
Why is this so hard?
We learn to succeed in school and earlier years of work by being more focused on getting right answers. You learn later in your career that even better answers are different: sharp, opinionated points of view that are yours. Perspective when the path is not clear stands out. You’re saying what you think.
The freedom of that honesty comes in exchange for your own willingness to risk hearing disagreement. You can care about a discussion outcome without needing someone to agree with your first answer. In an interview, this means allowing the conversation to reveal whether the fit is right for both of you.
What you’re doing is letting someone see how you think, including how you respond when that thinking is challenged. You’re showing you care about reaching a sound answer as a team. You have clear perspectives, but you’re open to revising your first answer.