You know your workforce. You’ve done the analysis, considered the risks and worked out what you believe the organisation needs to do next.
When you walk into the meeting room, knowing your stuff is only part of the job. You also need the people around that table to have confidence in you.
In my Persuasion Smart Profile®, I call this the Commanding Eagle approach to persuasion. Commanding Eagles persuade by conveying personal authority. They tend to come across as confident, credible, knowledgeable and comfortable expressing a strong point of view.
So, how can you borrow some Commanding Eagle behaviours when you’re presenting your workforce recommendations to senior decision-makers?
1. Know your subject deeply
Become the person in the room who really understands the workforce issue. You don’t need every piece of information on your slides, but you do need enough mastery of your subject to answer the questions that come your way. Think about what the questions will be and practice your answers in the mirror.
2. Don’t hide your expertise
If you’ve done the work, own it. If you have relevant experience, say so. If you’ve successfully dealt with a similar workforce challenge before, that’s useful context. You don’t need to boast, but you don’t need to make yourself smaller either. Back yourself!
3. Be a calm presence
You can know your material backwards and still undermine your authority if you appear flustered when somebody challenges you. Slow down. Breathe. Listen to the question and answer it deliberately. Calmness communicates confidence.
4. Use examples to prove your expertise
Don’t only tell the decision makers what you know. Show them. A relevant example, story or previous experience can make your expertise much easier to recognise and your recommendation easier to trust. pulling out a whiteboard and drawing it can be a fantastic way to bring your message to life.
5. Express your point of view
Boards don’t only need information from you. They need your judgement.
If you believe the organisation needs to act, say so. “My recommendation is…” is much more useful than presenting six possibilities and hoping someone else chooses one.
6. Use an authoritative voice
Watch the qualifiers that creep into your language: perhaps, maybe, I’m not sure but, I just thought…
You can be respectful without sounding uncertain about everything you say. Your language should reflect the expertise you bring to the room.
7. Make a case for action
Don’t finish with the data. Tell people what you believe should happen because of it.
What decision do you need? What needs to change? What happens next?
Your job is to help the decision makers move from understanding the workforce issue to doing something about it.
8. Don’t shy away from difficult issues
Sometimes the workforce message isn’t comfortable. Perhaps there’s a capability gap nobody wants to acknowledge, a succession problem that has been allowed to grow or a workforce strategy that simply isn’t working.
Personal authority means being prepared to raise the difficult issue respectfully rather than hoping somebody else will say it.
9. Be confident without becoming overpowering
There’s an important distinction here. In my experience Commanding Eagles can become dominant, overly critical or too forceful.
Authority doesn’t mean steamrolling the room. You want people thinking, “I trust this person’s judgement,” not, “Good grief, will they let anybody else speak?”
10. Stand behind your recommendation
This is the big one.
When you’ve done the analysis, considered the alternatives and reached a sound conclusion, have the confidence to stand behind it.
You’re not in the meeting room simply to deliver workforce information. You’re there because your expertise can help the organisation make better decisions.
Let people see it.
The Commanding Eagle is only one of four approaches in my Persuasion Smart Profile®, and none of us needs to become an Eagle all the time. The real skill is knowing when you need to dial up your personal authority so the expertise you already possess has the impact it deserves.
And if you’re coming to WOW on 13 October at Half Acre, I’m speaking and you’ll have the chance to assess yourself using the Persuasion Smart Profile!
Please come and say hi – I’d love to meet you.
Register here: https://wowconference.com.au/
©2026 MICHELLE BOWDEN is an authority on persuasive presenting in business. She’s run her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 1060 times for more than 13,500 people over the past 27 years and her name is a synonym for ‘presentation skills’ in Australia.
Michelle Bowden is a multi-million-dollar pitch coach to her client list that reads like a who’s who of international business: banking and finance, IT, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunications plus many more.
Michelle is the creator of the Persuasion Smart Profile®, a world-first psychological assessment tool that reports on your persuasive strengths and weaknesses at work, the best-selling internationally published author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley) and her new best-selling book is called How to Persuade: the skills you need to get what you want (Wiley).