Twice a week, The Latimer Group’s experienced facilitators deliver clear, succinct, and actionable lessons about business communication to tens of thousands of readers worldwide. Here’s the latest entry:

The best preparation involves getting fully immersed in what the other side/person/group is going to say, and to try to see their point of view.

Meetings, conference calls and presentations are the blood cells that regulate the blood flow of your business. In a healthy organization, the meetings, conference calls and presentations are well run. In other words, the “informational blood flow” is healthy, because the “meeting blood cell” is healthy.

In any organization, leadership is built on credibility—a foundation of trust, expertise, and consistency that allows a team to work together with confidence in the organization’s overall decision-making and strategic vision.

The single most frequently asked question I hear regarding public speaking is this… “Dean, how can I be more confident as a speaker?” I’ve been in this line of work for more than 15 years, and every year, I hear that question more than any other.

And throughout my time leading The Latimer Group, my answer has remained essentially the same:

Your people will follow you for one of two reasons: because they want to, or because they have no choice. One of those is better than the other. How will you choose to show up?

When you stand up to speak in a professional setting, there are three primary ways you are interacting with your audience: the message you have developed, the slides you have created, and the delivery skills you exhibit. All three matter, because all three impact your audience’s experience.

The decision on what not to say may be driven by many factors: time, sensitivity, politics, detail-driven “rabbit holes,” among many others. But those decisions on what to leave out are often, in my experience, just as important as the decisions on what to include.

One of the best ways to make sure we are competitive in this world is to make sure that our employees, the people on our team, the people we invite into our organization are set up and equipped to succeed.

What if we took the same approach to how we present, lead meetings, and engage with our teams? How do you ensure your communication is clear, impactful, and continuously improving?

Sometimes certain phrases get repeated so often, they become more than cliche. They become indisputable fact. But that doesn’t mean such statements are always correct.

Have you ever worked with someone who seems obsessed with taking credit for everything? I have, and it… is… awful. It is unmotivating, frustrating, and exhausting to be around someone who is constantly trying to remind you how great they are. All you ever hear from a person like that is some version of “look at me,” “look what I did,” “I created that,” and “I’m fantastic, don’t you agree?” Even when it is more subtle than that, it is unmistakable.

The hardest thing for any subject matter expert (SME) to do is to explain his or her area of expertise in simple and clear ways. When we are “in” it, when we are living the topic every day, and when we know a lot about it, it is really hard to distance ourselves from it and make it simple. When we are in it, everything seems important, and since we understand every nuance, natural human reaction is to want to explain that nuance.

The disconnect is between our own perception of what is “clear” and what others think about that clarity. When we have an idea or a strategy or something in our head, and we have thought it through and worked it out, in our own minds it is very clear. And then we explain it, a little bit (if at all), and we expect everyone else to see it just as clearly as we do. And we expect them to get it quickly. Some quick explanation from us, and everyone else should get it easily, right?

I love thinking about teams. I love considering the best ways to get a group of people on the same page, and working together towards a common goal. I love thinking about how to create an environment that will make great people want to be on the team.

And here is one of my favorite team concepts: the sign of a great team is NOT the absence of conflict.

Do you want to be seen as “essential” by your manager, leader or executive? I will assume for a moment that your answer is “yes.” So let’s talk about what that will require.

We now live in an “information overload” environment. We have too much information, and it flows at us in overwhelming ways.

In this sort of an environment, the best organizations need to be very clear about what information is most important to their success, and then make sure that it is flowing in the healthiest ways possible.

Twice a week, The Latimer Group’s experienced facilitators deliver clear, succinct, and actionable lessons about business communication to tens of thousands of readers worldwide. Here’s the latest entry:

Next time you’re getting ready to meet, speak, call or present something, simply ask yourself: Am I prepared to make my message clear for them, or am I leaving gaps they will need to somehow fill in on their own?

We recently had a conversation with a good friend of The Latimer Group, who said something really powerful to us. Our friend shared that her firm no longer calls communication a “soft skill.” Instead, they refer to communication as a “power skill.”