Email Communcation

A colleague pointed us to a recent episode from the BBC Business Matters podcast. The subject: Has email made us more passive-aggressive at work? Here’s the excerpt: Passive aggression, defined, is behavior characterized by indirect resistance to the demands of others, and an avoidance of direct confrontation. Both of which are much more easily done via […]

My colleagues and I speak and write all the time about the importance of getting to the point. We talk about the importance of respecting your audience’s time, managing their attention span, and how our fast-paced 21st century world makes this skill a critical one. It turns out that a pretty famous guy, Winston Churchill, […]

Last week I spent some time speaking with someone I occasionally coach. Last week’s problem was that he and a close colleague were in a tough spot, not communicating well. Apparently, the colleague was doing some things that were intensely frustrating for my client. The details are not important to the story, but there was […]

We had a great interaction this week, a story worth sharing. We heard from a guy who had been in one of our workshops in 2005, back when he was with one of our biggest client companies. He left that company in 2007, which is probably the last time we had any contact with him […]

I had an interesting conversation with my five-year-old son over the holiday. He asked me to explain something about sailing (which, of course, made his Dad smile). He doesn’t yet know how to sail on his own, but I’ve taken him out many times, and he loves it. He talks about boats all the time, […]

Have you ever written or sent something to a friend or a colleague, perhaps something important, that you worked hard on, and then been surprised when no prompt response came? It is hard in this situation to know what to think, or how to feel. Did I say something wrong? Did they not like it? […]

We’ve done a couple posts recently about some things you’ll never hear anyone say in the workplace. You can read those posts here and here. But our point in today’s post is that as you go about your communication in the workplace, be it with colleagues, clients, or teammates, there are a few things that […]

In nearly every workshop I teach, I ask a question that sounds something like this: “How many of you attend too many meetings that run long?” Nearly every hand goes up, every time. “How many of you get too many emails that are too overwhelming to read?” Nearly every hand goes up, every time. “How […]

Do you want to be an effective communicator? Do you want people to follow your lead, support your idea, or buy your product or service? Of course you do. When I say “be memorable,” I’m not suggesting that you do something outrageous so that they remember that crazy person who did “x.” I mean figure […]

I just returned from a two-week trip to Shanghai and Singapore, where we conducted several training workshops for two different top clients. Our workshops were full of people from China, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Britain, India, Belgium, Turkey, and Germany. It was a global group, with all of them reporting to global executives. Work […]