Speaking with Confidence to Leadership

From our September 9, 2026 Cappuccino Hour, Speaking with Confidence to Leadership, CAFAE brought together industry professionals to explore how operational knowledge can be communicated in a way that leadership will hear, understand and act on.

Moderator Marcia O’Connor was joined by SMEs Mary Byrne and Craig Adams, alongside professionals from facilities, property management, asset management, real estate, technology and consulting. Participants joined from across Canada and the United States, bringing perspectives from both the public and private sectors.

Key Themes from the Discussion

Confidence Starts with Understanding Your Audience

One of the clearest themes from the discussion was that communicating confidently with leadership starts before you enter the room.

Craig emphasized the importance of understanding the people you are speaking to by asking:

“What’s important to them, and what’s critical for their decision making?”

Mary built on this by noting that professionals can naturally become focused on the issue directly in front of them. But leadership is often balancing many issues at once. Making a strong case requires understanding not only your own challenge, but where it sits among the broader priorities of the organization.

That means thinking about what matters to the person receiving the message. Is their focus Risk? Cost? People? Service? Timing? The same operational recommendation may need to be communicated differently depending on who is sitting across the table.

As one participant reinforced, part of the preparation is understanding where leadership is coming from and learning to “speak their language.”

Preparation Builds Confidence

Confidence does not require having every answer. It comes from knowing you have thought through the conversation before you enter it.

Mary compared preparing for a leadership conversation to preparing for an interview. She writes out her thinking, considers different approaches and their pros and cons, and prepares to explain why she is recommending one option over another. She also thinks beyond the approval itself: if leadership says yes, what will it cost, when can it happen and who needs to be involved?

“I’m someone who likes to write things out in advance to focus my own mind.”

Preparation can also help identify what you do not know. One participant pointed out that trying to have an answer for everything can actually undermine confidence. Being prepared enough to recognize the limits of your knowledge makes it easier to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you,” and follow through with the right information.

Craig shared another way he developed confidence over time: gaining experience on the other side of the table. By volunteering on boards and eventually serving as a board president, he gained firsthand experience with how leadership decisions are made. He found that his own presentations to senior leaders became easier because he better understood the considerations behind their decisions.

His experience reinforced an important point: confidence can be practised. Seeking out lower-risk opportunities to present, participate in decision-making or take on leadership roles can build experience before the stakes are higher.

Evidence Helps Translate Operational Knowledge

Operational professionals often understand issues at a level of detail leadership may never see. The challenge is not always having evidence—it is sometimes realizing that the evidence you have is not telling the full story.

Mary shared an example of how traditional outage measures focused on how long power was interrupted. On paper, an outage lasting less than a minute looked insignificant. But for some customers, that same interruption could shut down an MRI, disrupt an industrial operation or create hours of recovery time that the original measure never captured.

Rather than accepting the existing metric, the team looked for a better way to measure what customers were actually experiencing. By finding evidence that reflected the real operational impact, the issue became easier for leadership to understand and better informed future investment decisions.

As Marcia summarized during the discussion, the takeaway was evidence. Data can challenge assumptions, demonstrate impact and give leadership something concrete on which to base a decision.

The discussion reinforced that professionals do not necessarily need to bring leadership every technical detail they know. Sometimes the most important step is identifying the evidence that best translates operational knowledge into why the issue matters to the organization.

Make the Work Behind the Outcome Visible

Facilities work can become most invisible when it is going well. The doors open, the lights come on, emergencies are handled and projects are completed, but leadership may not see the planning, coordination and operational knowledge that made those outcomes possible.

Craig captured the breadth of that responsibility simply:

“Our roles never end.”

He described the reality of responding when something happens in the middle of the night and how reporting those incidents can help leadership better understand the responsibilities behind keeping an operation running.

Participants expanded on that idea, noting that leadership often sees the successful outcome without seeing the many steps, planning and preparation behind it. One participant described this as the “complexity of the end result.”

Making that work visible does not mean overwhelming leadership with operational detail. It means finding meaningful ways to demonstrate the value behind the outcome: reporting on incidents, tracking activities, showing the planning behind successful projects and connecting that work to the priorities leadership already cares about.

What This Means for Professionals

In our industry, technical and operational knowledge is essential, but knowledge alone does not guarantee influence.

Speaking with confidence to leadership means understanding who you are speaking to, preparing for the conversation and translating operational needs into the language of the business. Risk, cost, evidence, service, resources and organizational impact can help leadership understand not only what you are asking for, but why it matters.

But the discussion also offered an important reminder: we are all human. Leadership may have different responsibilities and priorities, but that does not make the people across the table unapproachable. You do not need to have every answer or deliver a perfect presentation to have a valuable conversation.

Questions, requests for more information or another meeting are not necessarily rejection. Each conversation is an opportunity to learn, strengthen your recommendation and build confidence for the next one.

Confidence grows through preparation, practice and experience. The more effectively professionals can connect what they know to what leadership needs to understand, the more confidently they can step into those conversations.

Continuing the Conversation

CAFAE’s Cappuccino Hour brings professionals together to share real experiences, practical insights and perspectives that can continue beyond the hour itself.

Join us for our next Cappuccino Hour, Key Ingredients to Be a Successful FM, on October 14, 2026.