Public Speaking Skills

I am out in Minnesota, teaching a three-day workshop on executive communication skills for our largest client. And over the course of the day yesterday, the group had a great conversation about the complexities of understanding audience perspective. Knowing your audience is critical to great communication… we all know that. But in 2014, the business world […]

I had an outstanding experience yesterday with a workshop participant from one of our major client companies. This young man had participated in one of our one-day presentation skills workshops about six weeks ago. And then he signed up for a different workshop this week, a two-day “executive communication skills” workshop. In the October session, […]

During the past year of client work, we’ve spent time with professionals from over 25 different countries… busy, ambitious, successful, intelligent professionals. They worked in finance, engineering, marketing, communications, procurement, and all sorts of leadership and management positions. Our client base is certainly a diverse group! And any time we have an intense period of […]

The recent election cycle in the United States has made one thing very clear to me… that we have now reached a critical breaking point in our tolerance for “spin” communication. What is “spin” you ask? Anyone who lives in the USA knows exactly what it is, because that is all we hear anymore in […]

Today’s post was written by Whitney Sweeney, Director of Client Relationships at The Latimer Group At The Latimer Group, we teach the importance of leadership communication. To be a leader people will want to follow, you must know how to deliver your message in a way that people will hear and internalize. You must be […]

I’ve been working in Paris, France all week, leading a series of executive communication skills workshops for our largest client. The participants have come from all over Europe and the Middle East: France, England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Finland and India. It has been a fantastic opportunity to test ideas on a global scale and enhance […]

It is very early in the morning in Paris, and I am preparing for day two of a workshop on executive communication skills and presence. The room will be filled again today with a culturally diverse group of executives from this client company, all of whom are serious about their communication skills, and this class. Over […]

Anyone who knows The Latimer Group knows that “Know Your Audience” has been one of our enduring themes since our founding thirteen years ago. We believe it is one of the fundamental rules of great communication. And the concept has lots of implications and manifestations. Knowing your audience means, in its simplest form, understanding what will […]

In the coming weeks, we’ll be doing some work with clients on three continents, and executives from 15 different countries. In planning business travel of this scale, it always gets me thinking about how we communicate in that global environment, and how we have to adapt what we do to an audience that may not have […]

When we say someone has a strong “presence,” what does that actually mean? I mean, specifically, what does it mean? Ask 100 different people (and we have), you might get 50 different answers. A strong presence means different things to different people. And when you push people to define what it actually is, you tend […]