Persuasion

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 […]

There has been a LOT of content generated of late about the new challenges of communicating, running meetings and leading teams in a virtual environment. Much of it has been good, including several of the pieces posted here by our Latimer team. But just for a moment, let’s look at this another way. Sure, there […]

According to some sources, more than 30 million business presentations are created each day. And you know what? Most of them are terrible. We’ve all sat through the proverbial terrible presentation with no purpose, nothing memorable, no clear action items, too many slides, the monotonous drone of the boring presenter. There is a reason business […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Director of Assessment & Advancement at The Latimer Group. Names identify us and names connect us. When we use someone’s name, we acknowledge them, include them and show them respect. Using names is a powerful communication technique and an important element in building connection. This is not new information, but […]

This is one of those simple, personal stories that I love to share. Our four-year-old daughter Kate loves animated movies (who doesn’t?!?) and her stuffed animals… The Lion King movie and her stuffed Aslan from the Narnia stories are current favorites. One day a couple of weeks ago, Emily and I started to notice a […]

Frequently, one of the participants in a Latimer workshop will say something that totally grabs me. And I always will pause the workshop, write a note in my “ideas book” and then say, “That will be a blog post, and I can footnote you, if you want.” In this case, the participant politely declined a footnote. We […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal behaviors, especially in relation to how we “show up” in a professional setting. And here are five things that always seem to jump to the front of the line for me, as being the most important communication behaviors. Think about this… What would it be like if you […]

This post was written by Hannah Morris, Director of Assessment & Advancement at The Latimer Group. The first 30 seconds of a presentation are critical. This is the time when we establish elements of communication, connection and confidence, the three pillars of our Executive Presence Model. And this is when our audience decides how they feel about […]

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 […]

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. And […]