Persuasion

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, November 2019. Have you ever gone into a presentation or a sales meeting convinced that you were about to deliver a slam dunk, only to come out feeling like you threw brick after brick? Have you ever introduced a new initiative to your team with great confidence that […]

Have you ever considered mapping your progress as a communicator? In short, the only way to REALLY be sure you’re improving as an effective communicator is to have some way to measure that improvement. When we work with clients at The Latimer Group, we use a three-stage rubric of Professional-, Leadership-, and Executive-Level communication… So how do we […]

Communicating with empathy might be the most important skill you can master. Why so?  Because it’s quite possible that machines are going to be dramatically better at almost – almost – everything else, and maybe much sooner than we expect. What we know for sure is that artificial intelligence (AI) is already very much woven […]

Today’s post was written by Brett Slater, Chief Social Media Officer at The Latimer Group. In addition to my work with The Latimer Group, I also work in the tap room of a local craft brewery in the tourist town of Boothbay, Maine. On any given summer Saturday, I interact with literally hundreds of people […]

At The Latimer Group, we speak with our clients and friends all the time about the “New Communication Age” that we live in. Today, communication is not just about having or controlling information. Years ago, in an era when not everyone had access to all the information they needed, the best communicators were, in fact, […]

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 […]

It takes less than 30 seconds for people to decide what kind of person they think you are. What a quaint idea! In fact, Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov have demonstrated that study participants make judgments about a person’s competence and trustworthiness in as little as a tenth of a second. One of the […]

Does you message stand out? Do you make it easy for your audience to remember what you say? Does your message make an impact on the mind of your listener? You need to care about this, because there is so much competition for the mindshare of your audience. There are so many things that come at each […]

[Author’s Note: This post was originally written in September 2019, right as my son was starting fourth grade.] My son started fourth grade this week, and on his first day he brought home something from his teacher that I found profound and inspiring. As he was excitedly recounting his first day, and telling us about […]

Clients of The Latimer Group have heard me say, many times, that the hardest thing for any organizational leader to do is to change the way his or her people actually behave. If you want to reinvent your organization, you can add or subtract business units, product lines, services, locations, etc, etc, etc. You can make yourself […]