Meetings

Being a great communicator is about so much more than the sales call you’re about to make, the meeting you’re about to join, or the conversation you’re about to have… Beyond the immediate benefits of closing a sale, or contributing to a meeting, great communication skills create several significant realities that will benefit you in […]

Do you ever have to participate in a standard, regularly-scheduled meeting within your company, where you (or someone you work with) presents updated data and information on the business/project? (I am sure your answer is “yes.” Most of us have.) Do these meetings end up feeling like the same meeting over and over and over […]

Your audience will only remember a small percentage of what you say. Some studies suggest it will be less than 20%. Fact. Other studies suggest that the average adult attention span is now about 8 seconds. Bummer. So what do you do about it? We could simply surrender, and assume that this is the new […]

There is a theme that comes up in every workshop we teach… we live in a really noisy world. The world is indeed very loud, with a seemingly 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 […]

It’s a common occurrence in the business world. You prepare for a meeting or presentation, expecting that you will be able to speak for a certain length of time… only to find out that you will be allotted much less time than you planned for. Sometimes we even learn our fate as we are walking […]

Sometimes it is hard to know the right way to say or write something. Sometimes it is hard to know the correct tone to take. How should I speak to these people? How formal or informal should it be? The answers depend on lots of things: the nature and seriousness of the topic; the level of […]

We have clients across a range of industries and on five continents. And no matter where we go, no matter what the industry is, everyone complains about the exact same thing. Everyone wants their colleagues, customers, vendors or partners to simply get to the point. We, all of us, have a chronic business problem of […]

We spend a lot of our time with clients working on message development. We focus on delivery as well, but good delivery is almost irrelevant if you have not first worked out what the message will be. In other words: What you say is really more important than how you say it. When building a […]

My colleagues and I always talk and teach about the importance of knowing your audience, and preparing for your work communication correctly. And at the center of that work is the ability to clarify the message and “the ask,” to try to anticipate what the audience will care about, and the questions or objections they […]

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. […]