Communication

When you stand up to speak in a professional setting, there are three primary ways you are interacting with your audience: the message you have developed, the slides you have created, and the delivery skills you exhibit. All three matter, because all three impact your audience’s experience. Many people think about their work presentations this […]

Five Ways to Make Email Great

Posted On November 11, 2022 BY

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Facilitator and Coach at The Latimer Group. With the rise in videoconferencing and collaborative channels such as Slack and Teams, the role of email in our daily work has changed. For some of us, email is taking more of a back seat, as our internal communication finds new life […]

How often do you sit in meetings and think to yourself “wow… this is a colossal waste of time“? My guess is your answer is some version of “far too often.” The next time you are feeling that way, do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations. Make an estimate of what you get paid by the hour. […]

We live in a world of distractions, constant and loud. We are expected to be available to everyone all the time, we compete for mindshare with unlimited amounts of content and entertainment, we have a social media landscape which can turn every day into an all-day conversation with friends all over the world. Quieting the mind, and […]

Must, Should, Nice to Do

Posted On October 28, 2022 BY

One of the key elements of successful persuasion and consensus-building is how you frame the choices for your audience. I spend time in every single workshop I teach, trying to help our clients think about a problem from at least two angles: what they want the audience to think/feel/do; and how much urgency they will […]

I ask the following question in every workshop or coaching session I lead: “Have you ever been to that meeting or presentation that was so disorganized, that you regretted accepting the meeting invite?” Of course you have. We all have. The Latimer Group spends a lot of time working inside large organizations, and all of […]

We all know that one of the most important questions to address in our communication is why. Why are we proposing this change? Why is this a problem? Why should you care? Along with what, how, when, where, who, and next, the why helps our audience see the relevance and importance of our communication and […]

It’s a fact of modern office life: We all have to conduct business remotely. Many of us lead teams of far-flung colleagues or reports. This has been true for a while, but especially so over the last 2.5 years. This isn’t easy. We all know that absorbing information delivered virtually is much more difficult than in […]

Making A Plan To Listen

Posted On October 10, 2022 BY

In business, we have all sorts of plans… strategic plans, sales plans, operations plans, marketing plans. Plans, plans everywhere. And for the last twenty years our clients have also heard my colleagues and me talk at length about message plans. There is no shortage of plans in the world of business. But how many of […]

I recently re-read a great article that discussed the four behaviors most responsible for killing relationships at home. The article quoted John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles That Make Marriage Work. And Gottman was quoted in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. Anyone quoted by Malcolm Gladwell is worth a few minutes of my time. In […]