Communication Skills

You’ve heard the old saying that you are what you eat. That’s certainly true. But it is also true that you are what you speak. What you choose to say or not to say, and how you choose to say it, accounts for much of your presence in the world.

For all intents and purposes your words are you. That is true for organizations and individuals alike, and it is true unless and until behavior and actions contradict the words.

At least initially, people will rightly presume you are speaking the truth as you know it. Their presumption of truth carries an institutional sledgehammer of accountability. The accountability is at the heart of our laws on libel, advertising, perjury, contracts, marriage, criminal assault, and commerce. All those laws reflect the need for truth to be stated. They all impose accountability, too, so as to insist on it.

In large organizations, words routinely convey official declarations, intention, and information. We label these words collectively (along with numbers and images in their service) as the organization’s formal voice. The formal voice is foundational to the perceptions and to the regard that people have of any organization. The formal voice also lies at the core of any organization’s capacity to change and grow. It must be managed effectively, for it is absolutely key to the future.

Yet all too often, organizations mismanage the formal voice. They render it as sweet talk, scare talk, and happy talk–in other words, spin. They deliberately mislead, or they inadvertently mislead others by misleading themselves. In doing so, they compromise their own effectiveness as managers and leaders, and they undermine the future of the organization they’re entrusted to lead. They do so for many reasons, some of them enticingly real and worthy. Whatever the reason, mismanagement it is.

What exactly does the formal voice look like and sound like? In a nutshell, it’s the talk of what eventually should be walking the talk.

On the outisde, the formal voice takes the form of advertising, news releases, branding, web sites, government filings, product information, slogans, and the like. On the inside, the formal voice may consist of all-employee announcements, town-hall meetings, intranet sites, newsletters, level-by-level cascading, closed-circuit television, laminated wallet cards, old-fashioned bulletin boards, and much more.

Often the external and internal sides of the formal voice cross paths, as in the case of a major quality certification, or a new commitment to customer service, or a product recall, or a merger or an IPO, or a yearly marketing blitz or retail sale. In those instances and many others, there is a need for coordinated internal and external communication. In any and all cases, though, the formal voice should be cohesive, and it should integrate with its cousins, the semi-formal and informal voices. (More on those voices in subsequent issues.)

For external stakeholders such as customers or investors, and for internal stakeholders such as employees, the formal voice is a window on the company’s thinking.

Ideally it is the verbal representation of reality. It should serve as a reference bank for factual information. When it is deliberately abused, its reliability plummets. The credibility of the company and of its leadership also dwindles. Better to jealously guard the credibility of the formal voice.

In the interest of managing the formal voice effectively, here are important things to keep in mind. Some will strike professionals as commonplace, but for executives and senior line managers, they may be revelatory. Let’s take a look:

• Insist on having and sharing a strategic focus. Much of the power of the formal voice is its ability to train everyone’s sight on a very few priorities. Without a strategic focus, you cannot point people in the same direction.
• Create an industry-specific, unique vision that can productively be drilled down deep into the organization. (We will share more ideas on good vision statements in a future bulletin.)
• Limit the proliferation of messages. Three or four strategic messages are the maximum; any other message should be subordinate to those at the core.
• Maintain those core messages over the long haul. People need a stake in the sand. The inevitability of change is no excuse for here-today, gone-tomorrow strategy.
• Build your mission around your customer’s interest. Making money is not sufficient. Think in terms of why your customers patronize your organization in the first place. 
• Minimize and clarify jargon, acronyms, and neologisms. Use jargon only to the extent that everyone in your company understands it. Even then, favor plain language. It has the advantage of actually working.
• Convey a consistent core message through as many of the formal-voice channels as you can. Just as aircraft have built-in redundancy, so should your formal voice. Say the same thing out of both sides of your mouth.
• Let the formal voice be the mouthpiece of leadership, and think of the role of leadership as akin to that of a teacher. Constantly educate the workforce on the changing reality of the industry, its markets, its customers and their expectations.
• Maintain a healthy skepticism toward “cascading” strategic information down through the organization one layer at a time. Cascading alone doesn’t work, and it teases you into thinking that it does. Electronic, mass communication is essential.
• Paradoxically, think of the formal voice ultimate as dialogue, not mere monologue. Ultimately it must move through managers and supervisors, who must initiate and sustain a conversation with ground-level employees about the implications of the strategic messages. Without that conversation, the formal voice is effectively mute.
• Speed counts. Do not wait to “cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s.” Nothing is ever final. Convey information promptly. Otherwise the rumor mill or the news media will rush in to fill the void. Don’t let that happen. Any rumor or news dispatch may or may not be true, but rumors always and news reports usually represent a missed opportunity to convey the context and rationale for a decision.
• Use numbers. Establish clear-cut metrics for performance (and consider developing a “balanced scorecard” if you don’t already have one). Then convey the relevant data in a longitudinal perspective, with historical trends. Represent the data in metaphorical terms, in the way that the late Ronald Reagan did so effectively.
• Be creative. So-called dashboards are efficient, colorful ways to illustrate progress. Strategic maps are likewise effective. Messages need not be verbal. In fact, in most instances, verbal messages are noticed and remembered at significantly lower rates than visual messages are.
• Tell stories. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a story is worth 1,000 pictures. That’s what a good story is, after all: a motion picture in the mind’s eye. Leaders throughout human history have told relevant, brief stories to illustrate their points. People will always digest and remember a story in ways they can never digest and remember a report or a chart.
• View the formal voice in the context of metamessages. No message stands alone. All messages rely for their whole meaning on their environment, expectations, and ultimately their related experience. It’s the metamessage that people receive and remember.
• Strike a balance between simplicity and complexity. Don’t be so reductionist as to ignore important facts and ideas. On the other hand, don’t resort to data dumping just to impress others with your command of detail.
• Periodically audit the content of your formal voice, so that you have assurance it reflects your core strategic messages. If it doesn’t, it is just more ambient noise diluting the impact of your messages.
• Recognize that serious and complete information and ideas rarely move rapidly through an organization. Rumors move fast, but they are simple, anecdotal, and speculative.
• Do not speculate about the future. Discuss alternatives and their implications, but don’t lay odds. Things change too quickly and unpredictably.
• Be prepared to translate the general to the specific. Explain in simple, memorable detail what you hope and expect people in your organization will do with new information as it becomes available.
• Leave the spin cycle to your washing machine. Avoid scare talk, sweet talk, and happy talk. Just tell it like it is. Say what you think, and believe what you have said. When you no longer do, say so.
  

Above all, proceed to integrate your formal voice with your semi-formal and informal voices. Left to itself, the formal voice will usually fail even at creating simple awareness, let alone the understanding, acceptance and commitment you need to realize your vision for the future. Only through the full integration of all three voices can leadership speak with compelling clarity and credibility.

Thomas Lee has been benchmarking best-practice companies in organizational communication for almost 15 years. To date he has personally benchmarked almost 30 leading American corporations, including 3M, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, Levi-Strauss, McDonald’s, Shell Exploration, Duke Energy, and many others.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sachs describes how a group of his patients with lost cerebral functions were unable to understand spoken language, yet were highly adept at picking up the subtleties of body language. Sachs recalls how these patients broke into uncontrollable laughter while watching a politician on television, because the politician’s nonverbal communication was clearly stating: I’m a liar! These cues were totally missed by most of the rest of the audience – focused as they were on what was being said.

But what if those body language cues weren’t really overlooked by the audience? What if all those silent signals were being picked up and processed beneath consciousness awareness?

That’s exactly what I think happened.

The ability to decode nonverbal signals is hardwired in all of us. Human beings are genetically programmed to look for facial and behavioral clues and to quickly understand their meaning. Our ancestors made survival decisions based solely on intricate bits of visual information they were picking up from others. Survival of the fittest was not only about physical strength, but also about how quickly they could interpret the intention of others and how accurately they could send appropriate signals in response. As a species we knew how to win friends and influence people (or avoid/placate/confront those we couldn’t befriend) long before we knew how to use words.

So, even if audience members weren’t aware of exactly what they were picking up when they watched the politician, most of them would still have felt that something wasn’t right. That’s how body language works. You may think “It’s only a hunch,” but in reality, your hunches are based on a multitude of subconsciously noted nonverbal cues. And, when someone’s facial expressions and body gestures aren’t congruent with what is being said, you instinctively question the verbal comment.

Which brings us to business leaders I have observed . . .

I’ve noticed that there is often a disconnection between executive body language and the messages they are trying to convey. Last year I was on a panel of speakers and watched the man before me (representing a Fortune 100 company) finish his presentation and ask for questions – standing with his arms folded across his chest. Not surprisingly, the audience had nothing to say.

When a leader stands in front of a thousand employees and talks about how much he welcomes their input, the message gets derailed if the executive hides behind a lectern or leans back or puts his hands behind his back or shoves them in his pockets – or folds his arms across his chest. Such nonverbal signals are closed – while the message is about openness.

Then there is the matter of timing. If a person’s gestures are produced before or as the words come out, she appears open and candid. However, if she speaks first and then gestures (as I have seen many executives do) it’s perceived as a contrived movement. And at that point, the validity of whatever is said comes under suspicion.

So what’s a leader to do?

If you want to be perceived as credible and forthright, you’ve got to think “outside the speech” and recognize the importance of nonverbal communication. I’m a professional speaker and the author of nine books. I love words. But, oh, how I’ve learned to appreciate the power of body language!

Professor Albert Mehrabian at UCLA established this classic statistic for the effectiveness of spoken communications:
o 7% of what you communicate is conveyed through the words you use;
o 38% of what you communicate is conveyed through the tone of you voice; and
o 55% of what you communicate is conveyed through nonverbal gestures-body language.

Remember that Mehrabian was only studying the communication of emotions and attitudes. Obviously, an audience can’t watch you speaking in a foreign language and understand 93 percent of what you’re saying. They can, however, hone in on how you are feeling about what you say.

People both consciously and unconsciously notice how you look and how you present yourself. Then they filter the content of your presentation through that judgment.

They are pretty good at it. And pretty fast!

In one study, students were asked to view a two second video clip of a professor teaching and to say whether or not they liked him. At the end of the semester, students who actually took the professor’s class also reported on whether or not they liked him. With incredible accuracy, the two sets of evaluations matched up.

There is no doubt that you can gain a professional advantage by learning how to use nonverbal communication more effectively. Fully facing the audience, making eye contact, keeping your movements relaxed and natural, standing tall, using open arm gestures, showing the palms of your hands – all are silent signals of confidence and candor. And a good coach can help you find the gestures and facial expressions that are most congruent with the messages you want to convey.

But body language is more than a set of techniques. It is also a reflection of a person’s internal state. In fact, the more someone tries to control emotions, the more likely they are to leak out nonverbally.

Here’s a recent example: The corporate communicator who brought me into her company to coach an executive warned me that he was a “pretty crummy speaker.” And, after watching him at a leadership conference, I was in total agreement. It wasn’t his words. They were carefully chosen and well rehearsed. It was how he looked when he spoke. Mechanical in all his gestures, this man’s body was screaming: “I’m uncomfortable and unconvinced about everything I’m saying!”

The question: Could I help?

The answer: Not much.

Oh sure, I could find ways to make his movements less wooden and his timing more fluid. But if a person doesn’t care about (or believe in) what he is saying, his gestures will automatically become lethargic and restricted. What the executive needed most was genuine enthusiasm and passion about the company’s new strategic direction. Because, just like Sachs’ patients who decoded the politician’s authentic emotional state, what audiences saw when this business leader spoke was exactly how he really felt! 

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. is the author of nine books including CREATIVITY IN BUSINESS and  “THIS ISN’T THE COMPANY I JOINED” — How to Lead in a Business Turned Upside Down. She delivers keynote speeches and seminars to association and business audiences around the world. For more information or to book Carol as a speaker at one of your events, please call: 510-526-1727, email: CGoman@CKG.com, or visit her website: http://www.CKG.com.

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. is the author of nine books including CREATIVITY IN BUSINESS and  “THIS ISN’T THE COMPANY I JOINED” — How to Lead in a Business Turned Upside Down. She delivers keynote speeches and seminars to association and business audiences around the world. For more information or to book Carol as a speaker at one of your events, please call: 510-526-1727, email: CGoman@CKG.com, or visit her website: http://www.CKG.com.

You’ve no doubt seen them tromping through the halls of your company, or at least hiding in the corner of the room. Elephants. These elephants have two characteristics: They’re something big that your organization knows is there and finds impossible to ignore. They’re also something no one talks about—because nobody knows what to do about them.

Some companies have lots of elephants; others have fairly few. But there’s one elephant that resides in nearly every organization (and that communicators should be helping to hunt down)—e-mail overload.

Why is e-mail overload an elephant? For one thing, the costs are huge. A couple of years ago, the CFO of a professional services firm shared a startling factoid with his organization. If everyone spent an hour a day less managing e-mail, it would add $2 million a year to the bottom line. And that’s for just 500 people!

That amount strikes me as quite conservative: By my calculations, if you work in a 500-person organization where employees average $50 an hour, you can free up $2 million in productivity in a year by eliminating just 20 minutes of wasted time per day. Consider the amount of time employees spend simply handling (or mishandling) the mechanics of e-mail, and 20 minutes a day seems like an easy target.

Too much e-mail can bury vital information. According to IDC, knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out new information. Why can’t they locate the existing stuff? My theory: A lot of it was shared via e-mail. Then it got deleted to make room for more messages, or buried in folders with subject lines that didn’t do the job. IDC says chasing existing info can cost untold millions in a single knowledge company.

How about your IQ? What’s that worth to your company? Research by Hewlett Packard and the University of London shows that the IQ of an average employee falls 10 points when interrupted repeatedly by incoming e-mail – more than twice the four-point drop experienced by marijuana smokers. HP is striving to reduce “always on” communications among its own employees, and has created a “Guide to Info Mania” to help others.

Most organizations, however, aren’t sure what to do about the e-mail elephant. There’s no shortage of software, books, courses and other tools to help tackle the problem. The challenge—as countless communicators have discovered—is that no one offers an off-the-shelf solution that will address e-mail overload comprehensively.

So we have assembled a toolbox for you that will enable to you combat information overload on three fronts within your organization: Better tools for in-box management, changing sender behavior, and alternative technologies.

Try any or all of them and see what they do for your organization. Just as important, please let us know which ideas worked well for you—and which didn’t.

Use tools for in-box management

1. A good system—including self-discipline

There are many places you can turn for advice on how to deal with the 2,785 e-mails awaiting your attention. Which system you choose is not nearly as important as having a system of some kind.

Productivity consultant and executive coach Sally McGhee teaches courses on the Microsoft campus on how to get the most from Outlook. You may want to consider something similar for your organization.

Like many e-mail gurus, McGhee prefers an empty inbox. She recommends that you start at the top, tackling e-mails one at a time, and do one of four things with each:

• Delete it—you can do this with about half your e-mail
• Do it—if you can accomplish that in two minutes or less
• Delegate it—this should take no more than two minutes
• Defer it—this should be about 10 percent of your e-mail

McGhee says power e-mail processors can go through about 100 messages an hour. She also recommends you build a simple e-mail reference system. Read McGhee’s article at http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/manageinfo/e-mail.mspx

Consultant Bill Jensen, author of several books on simplifying communications, advises you to delete 75 percent of your e-mails. “They bring the noisy, unfiltered, unfocused, and undesired world to you!” he says. “You need to get disciplined about closing your virtual door.”

In The Simplicity Survival Handbook, Jensen says the first step in eliminating most of the noise coming at us is admitting that we own part of the problem. Advises Jensen: “If BOTH the Subject and the Sender fail to create this reaction ­– I have to read or at least scan this today – DO NOT open or scan the message. Hit Delete immediately.”

Then, he says, scan the remaining e-mails for two bits of information: Action you must take, and date or deadline for that action. “If the messages do not contain an action and a short-term date, delete them.”

Other e-mail experts advise you to touch every message only once. The success of any system will depend on balance – the balance between dealing with e-mail regularly enough to keep it under control, but not so often that you “live” in your inbox.

2. Teach employees to use more descriptive subject lines

When it comes to being able to handle e-mail, better subject lines are one of the most promising “quick hits” available. Sally McGhee advises her clients to include three elements: An objective or project name (which lets you know what the e-mail relates to), a requested action, and a due date. “Taking the time to create clear subject lines makes e-mail communication more effective and increases the chance that your e-mail will be responded to,” says McGhee.

Another little-considered subject line is the one attached to meeting requests. Instead of “SETI Project meeting,” how about “SETI Project: Responding to e-mail from aliens”?

You might also include one other category of useful info – who’s supposed to attend.  Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook’s calendar entries include where a meeting will take place, but not who’s invited.  Add Your name, Invitee 1, and Invitee 2 to the subject line – and you’ve undoubtedly saved time for all three people.  (No, this won’t work with 10 people – but how many of your meetings include 10 people?) 

3. Create a priortization code for subject lines

There’s yet another element to subject lines that—if widely used—could help everyone filter their messages more effectively. One of the problems with e-mails is that they seldom clearly indicate what you’re supposed to do with them.

“Imagine,” says McGhee, “if you could sort your Subject lines by action – Action Requested (AR), Response Requested (RR), and Read Only (RO) – or if you could sort them by objectives or due dates.”

I believe this system would work even better with unique four-letter indicators (I call them “O-Marks,” for Outlook):

URGT:        Urgent – respond or act ASAP

ACTN:       Action required

RSPN:        Response requested

UN2K:       You need to know

FYIN:         Read at your convenience

Other categories could include:

MTNG:       Pre- or post-meeting communication

BUSN:        Strategic business information

EMPY:       Information for employees – benefits, job postings, HR

TRNG:        Training-related communications

And, for your team or department, make up your own. Create O-Marks for projects, team updates, whatever your particular group is working on. Adding O-Marks at the front of your subject line can make e-mails – at least from your teammates – easier to process quickly. Just sort your in-box alphabetically to group like categories – or send each type of e-mail to its own folder.

Change sender behavior

4. Write some corporate e-mail rules

Most companies have rules—ranging from a few guidelines to thick manuals – on how to use the Web. Almost no one has rules surrounding e-mail (apart from the usual boilerplate about how We The Company can read every word of it – and if you violate one of the 50 rules, you’re history).

Why shouldn’t the rules include how to use e-mail effectively? E-mail is a business tool, and companies have the right to decide how it will be used to conduct business. That could mean, for instance, limitations on use of the “cc” line. Companies are very quick to identify the cost of producing communications – but they too seldom calculate the cost of consuming them. A low-value e-mail sent to 20 top managers can be very expensive, indeed.

The rules might evolve into a comprehensive guide to how to use all the company’s electronic channels. Technology consultant Shel Holtz says too often, the launch of technology is left to IT:

“Most IT departments do a great job at what they’re supposed to do: get the technology working. It’s not—and shouldn’t be—IT’s job to establish policies for the use of technologies, to market the tool, or to drive a cultural change around how the tool should be used in a business context. Whenever IT is the only department involved in the launch of a new technology, technology is all employees get. ‘Here you go everybody. We’ve installed e-mail for you. Godspeed.’

“As a result, employees figure out how to use the technology based on personal preferences rather than a companywide imperative.” Holtz envisions a joint effort between HR and Employee Communications – which he calls “Message Mission Control” – to set and communicate policies on the use of all messaging channels, from interoffice mail to SMS.

Holtz says this effort must include promoting behavior change through rewards and recognition. “Part of the culture change,” he says, “is knowing when NOT to use e-mail, but rather the phone, fax, IM, face-to-face or other channels.”

Part II of Taming the e-mail elephant

By Bill Boyd, ABC
Communications Integrator + Principal, Outsource Marketing
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of the Journal of Employee Communication Management (JECM) magazine, published by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. (http://www.ragan.com). It is shared with members of the Communitelligence portal with the kind permission of JECM’s editor, David R. Murray.

I have been intrigued by the subject of leadership for a long time. Like most of us I’ve worked with leaders good, bad and mediocre, inspired by some and bored by others.

Early in my communication career I found myself drawn to exploring the nature of business and that led me to discover more about the leaders who so profoundly affect organizational life. I was an absolute sponge for the stuff. Looking back, I realize my early interest probably had more to do with wanting to change the leaders I worked for. How successful do you think I was at that? It took a while but I came to understand the inevitable: When it comes to leadership, I could only change myself. Hmmm. Back to square one.

So now that we’re at square one where to begin? There are numerous great books on leadership to be read and inspired by. Here are just a few of my favorites:

Michael Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do

James Kouzes and Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge

I have also learned from the writings of William Bridges, Margaret Wheatley, Peter Senge, Dave Ulrich and others whose perspectives have further enriched my understanding. One thing is certain. There are more books on leadership than there is time to read them. That’s why recommendations from others go a long way to making the best of our reading time.

What about you? What books on leadership are at the top of your list? What would you recommend to this community?

by Elise Roaf 

Your workplace is filled with liars! How do I know? 

I’ve got this straight from one of the foremost authorities on body language in business, Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. Carol conducted an extensive survey to research her new book, The Truth About Lies in the Workplace (Berrett-Koehler).

Here are a few of the startling facts she uncovered:

• ·         67% of workers don’t trust senior leadership
• ·         53% said their immediate supervisor regularly lied to them
• ·         51% believe their co-workers regularly lied
• ·         53% admitted lying themselves

Lies and deception are running rampant in the workplace. Fortunately, Carol’s terrific new book explains in easy to understand language:

• ·         How to spot a liar and what to do about it
• ·         How men and women lie differently
• ·         How to deal with liars whether the liar is above, below, or on the same level as you
• ·         The one lie you better not tell  your manager
• ·         How to NOT look like a liar when you’re telling the truth
• ·         Ways to foster candor and decrease deception in your organization

Carol’s advice applies whether the liar is a co-worker, boss, customer, prospect or board member. Her tips will help you defend yourself and your company from backstabbers, credit taking colleagues, lying bosses, gossips, and cheating job applicants.

I recommend that you read The Truth About Lies in the Workplace. When you order your copy now, you will also receive over $500 worth of career-building bonus gifts from Carol’s friends (including Communitelligence). And that’s no lie.

P.S. If you think you are too sharp to be taken in by a con man like Bernie Madoff, you had better read Chapter 3: Why We Believe Liars and How We Play Into Their Hands twice. Get your copy now.

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D. is the author of nine books including CREATIVITY IN BUSINESS and  “THIS ISN’T THE COMPANY I JOINED” — How to Lead in a Business Turned Upside Down. She delivers keynote speeches and seminars to association and business audiences around the world. For more information or to book Carol as a speaker at one of your events, please call: 510-526-1727, email: CGoman@CKG.com, or visit her website: http://www.CKG.com.

Corporate communicators would do well to read and heed this advice from a Jan. 11, 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Best Beginning: Clarity:

“Meek or bold, a good beginning achieves clarity. A sensible line threads through the prose; things follow one another with literal logic or with the logic of feeling. Clarity isn’t an exciting virtue, but it’s a virtue always, and especially at the beginning of a piece of prose. Some writers seem to resist clarity, even to write confusingly on purpose. Not many would admit to this.

One who did was the wonderful-though-not-to-be-imitated Gertrude Stein: “My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear.” Oddly, it’s one of the clearest sentences she ever wrote.

For many other writers, clarity simply falls victim to a desire to achieve other things, to dazzle with style or to bombard with information. It’s one thing for the reader to take pleasure in the writer’s achievements, another when the writer’s own pleasure is apparent. Skill, talent, inventiveness, all can become overbearing and intrusive. The image that calls attention to itself is often the image you can do without.The writer works in service of story and idea and always in service of the reader. Sometimes the writer who overloads an opening passage is simply afraid of boring the reader. A respectable anxiety, but nothing is more boring than confusion.

You can’t tell it all at once. A lot of the art of beginnings is deciding what to withhold until later, or never to say at all. Take one thing at a time. Prepare your readers, tell everything they need to know in order to read on, and tell no more.

Journalists are instructed not to “bury the lead”—instructed, that is, to make sure they tell the most important facts of the story first. This translates poorly to longer forms of writing. The heart of the story is usually a place to arrive at, not a place to begin. Of course the reader needs a reason to continue, but the best reason is simply confidence that the writer is going some place interesting.”

—Adapted from Messrs. Kidder and Todd’s “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.” 

Regardless of your particular discipline, I believe that there’s much about communications – applicable to today – that we can learn from Mr. Lincoln:

1. Getting to the point – The Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches ever delivered.  It consisted of 10 sentences and took a little more than two minutes to deliver (by way of comparison, President Obama’s recent State of the Union address lasted well over an hour including the applause breaks).  In the time he spoke, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality as set forth by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as “a new birth of freedom” that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation. 

All of President Lincoln’s hopes to end the Civil War and the entire future of his presidency and, for that matter, the entire nation, rested on his shoulders at that moment. Yet he did not allow the importance of the moment to complicate his message, and that speaks volumes about Lincoln’s gift as a communicator.

By now, it is widely known that Mr. Lincoln labored mightily with this speech as opposed to the commonly-held belief that it was hurriedly written on the back of envelop in ten minutes. In choosing his words carefully, Mr. Lincoln delivered his messages cogently and succinctly (and, of course, without the aid of PowerPoint).

2. Listening – How often do we forget that listening is an important part of the communications process? Clearly Mr. Lincoln was a listener and this trait informed his opinions and shaped his understanding of the people he was elected to govern. He spent hours sitting and talking with people, asking questions and getting to know others. He talked with soldiers, widows of fallen soldiers, common people and more. Although known as a great storyteller, he was also known to take the time to hear complaints from people and listen to their stories. It’s hard for leaders of significant importance to take the time to slow down and listen, but it’s critically important.

3. Crisis communications – Given that Mr. Lincoln presided over a war torn country, he came to be an expert at crisis communications. More than telling the American public why the war was worth fighting, he gave them a sense of hope during a time when hundreds of thousands were dying in the Civil War. And he gave Americans a sense of purpose, that it was their duty to honor the dead by ensuring government “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Read full article by Gene Marback at ThereforeIAM

Seek first to understand, then be understood is habit five of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “What training have you had that enables you to listen so you really, deeply understand another human being? Probably none, right?”

Lolly Daskal, author of the Lead from Within blog and hostess of a Twitter chat with the same name, touched on this concept this week in her post, The Art of Listening.

Here are five suggestions to help you build your writing habit. (And, for even more help, here are seven ideas on how to seven ideas on how to ensure writing inspiration strikes.)

As an entrepreneur, you may find navigating large networking events overwhelming and even unproductive if you aren’t prepared.

Given our experience, below are five tips to make sure you are getting the most out of your time (as well as the time of the people you meet):

1. Do your homework. Utilize all the resources at your disposal to determine which events are relevant and interesting to you, given the topic as well as the people attending. After determining which event to attend, map out a plan to make the most of your time there. Leverage existing relationships for introductions to individuals who are attending whom you’d like to meet. Let your social networks on Twitter or LinkedIn know in advance that you’ll be attending–it’s a great way to turn online relationships into real-life connections. 2. Allow for spontaneity. Though it’s important to plan ahead, it’s also wise to leave room for meeting people you might not otherwise connect with or learning things you didn’t know. Maintaining an open mind–and an open schedule–has led to significant opportunities for our firm that we might not have even had on our radar a couple of years ago. 3. Get your elevator speech down. It may seem obvious, but being able to clearly articulate what you are trying to accomplish or what you have to offer is an extremely important part of the networking process. The key is to make every introduction memorable to ensure you’re not forgotten the minute you walk away. 4. Ask the right questions. You can gain a better understanding of each person’s needs and motivations by practicing active listening and asking relevant questions. By consistently looking to collaborate and create win-win situations, you might be able to help in ways you hadn’t planned. We often find that making introductions across your existing network to set up the right people is one of the greatest networking tools available.

Even the most eloquent of public and private speakers could always stand to tweak their communication skills just a little bit. After all, the ability to convey feelings and facts stands as essential to keeping the human species rolling along. Both the Internet and bookshelves sport advice a-go-go on how to get points across as clearly as possible, and the venerable open source lecture series TED does not disappoint in this regard. Its best offerings regarding human connectivity encourage essentials not always discussed in manuals and textbooks, so give them some consideration and use them to launch more exploration into how to grow into an effective, evocative communicator.

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When you get right down to the nitty-gritty, only two things really count when striving for the perfect tweet:

1. Maximum readability
2. Maximum retweetability

These are both vital, but neither should be tailored at the expense of the other. For maximum benefit, each needs to be perfect every single time.

1. Think Like Your Readers

This is a bit of a no-brainer, but it’s easily overlooked. For your tweet to be perfect, it needs to appeal most to your readers, to the majority of your network, and not to you.

Unless you’re a world-famous celebrity or brand with millions of devoted followers, adopting an attitude of ‘they’ll know what I mean’ or ‘everybody likes this!’ will almost always backfire.

You have to take the time to craft your tweet accurately and pleasingly, thus ensuring that it will be appeal to the highest number of readers.

2. Use Consistent Excellence To Stand Out From The Crowd

Take a moment to peruse your Twitter feed. Refresh the page. Who stands out? Why?

Through prolonged Twitter use we all become tuned into paying attention to certain things in our timelines, notably the avatars and usernames of our favourite profiles. But a friend or valued associate sharing new content isn’t always enough to make us click on that link. We trust their judgement, and we have liked some of the things they’ve shared in the past, but this hasn’t turned us into a robot, automatically clicking on everything they tweet.

Real full article via AllTwitter – The Unofficial Twitter Resource