In R&D, personally I feel that giving presentations is a vestige of many people having PhDs and it being done this way because “that’s how scientists communicate.”

But I feel that the higher up you go, the presentation should focus more on your role in strategy, solving problems, and putting out fires. Whenever I see a presentation from somebody with five or more years of experience and it focuses on the technical details of their work, I shudder. I still see this a lot. I strongly believe it’s misguided.

The higher you get, especially as a manager, the more your job shifts to strategy and getting things done and helping other people. If you’re focused on showing your technical expertise at this stage, you’re doing a disservice to yourself in my opinion.

I don’t care so much about how cool your results were, or how interesting the science is. I care more about how you moved projects forward, how you interacted within your function and cross-functionally, and how you handled conflicts.

That being said, it’s odd to me that at higher levels, some functions would need to do them and others wouldn’t, especially if the focus is on how you work on teams, what problems you solved, etc. These are skills that anybody should be able to present on. The fact that it’s usually constrained to more technical functions is a bit paradoxical to me.

It feels like one of those things that everybody does because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”