The foundation of communicating effectively with executives is to get a clear understanding of why you’re communicating with them in the first place. You might be used to communicating with folks to change their mind or inform them about your project, but that’s probably not the case here. When you’re communicating with an executive, it’s almost always one of three things: planning, reporting on status, or resolving misalignment. Although these are distinct activities, your goal is always to extract as much perspective from the executive as possible. If you go into the meeting to change their mind, you’ll probably come across as inflexible. Go into the meeting to understand how you can align with their priorities. You’ll come across as strategic and probably leave with enough information to adapt your existing plan to work within the executive’s newly articulated focuses or constraints.