Coaching

During work discussions with your colleagues, many (perhaps most) conversations come down to the following choice: Which is more important to you… the relationship or winning the discussion? When we are having substantive, work-related conversations with our colleagues, and the ideas are being thrown around, there almost always comes a point when we have to […]

This post was written by Dan Cooney, Director of Business Development at The Latimer Group. We were recently coaching a talented systems and operations manager (“Mike”) who previewed a presentation he was about to give on the importance of merging contact records in Salesforce for the sake of data hygiene. The intended audience for this presentation […]

In 1990, psychologist Elizabeth Newton asked her Stanford University students to play a simple game. Half of them were told they would be “tappers,” and their job was to tap the rhythm of one of several universally known songs, like “Happy Birthday.” The other half of the students were asked to be “listeners,” and their […]

Winston Churchill once famously said “the most important thing about education is the appetite.” We teach and coach communication skills all day, every day, here at The Latimer Group. And we see all kinds of people walk into our workshops. We see the willing, the unwilling, the motivated, the unmotivated… and everything in between. Some […]

There is a theme that comes up in every workshop we teach… we live in a really noisy world. The world is loud, there is endless competition for mindshare and attention, and everyone we speak to is drowning in too much information, too many meetings, too much access, too little time. This problem is chronic […]

In our coaching and training, we end up discussing the interview process all the time. Many of our clients interview regularly for promotions within their company. And almost all of our clients have to conduct interviews with others, for positions they are trying to fill on their own teams. Part of our coaching process is to ask […]

We spend a lot of time here coaching people on how to get the outcomes they want. And in some cases, the outcome is a sale of a product or a service. But in many cases, the outcome is the “sale” of an idea or a plan. The vast majority of persuasion that happens in the […]

So often in preparing to communicate, we make a fundamental mistake: we enter a messenger mindset. Rather than establishing a clear goal and aiming to persuade our audience, we set out to inform, to update, to share. On this path, we end our inquiry with a period: here’s what I need to say, full stop. But […]

Simple idea today, that comes up in our coaching sessions from time to time. My colleagues and I talk all the time about great communication skills, and all the things that help create those skills. We believe that when we take the time to prepare for our meetings, presentations and calls, we will do a much […]

“Get good at something, and don’t try to be something that you are not. Don’t try to do something that you don’t fully understand, . If you try to be something you’re not, it will come off as disingenuous.” ~L.J. Spinnato, varsity football head coach, Choate Rosemary Hall In this episode of The Message Makeover, […]