In previous issues, we’ve talked about the power and benefits of making informal conversation – small talk, chitchat – with people and various stakeholders prior to the meaty conversations that you’re likely going to have. Small talk breaks the ice a little, greases the wheels, starts to build a tiny ...
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Email is the most used communication device in the work world, right? If you’re anything like me, you use email far more than the phone; text might be catching up and video conferencing is now in competition. It’s easy to just take emails for granted, but it’s not smart to ...
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And as much as I want to think I’m an exception, I’m sure that I do, too. We all do. We’ve lost the art of brevity and if we want people with short attention spans to pay attention, we’d better be brief....
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One challenging thing we all face is recognizing the continual disconnect between what we intend to say or write, and how that intention is actually interpreted by the receiver. There is a lot of “stuff” that influences that exchange. For example, what specific words that you select to say, what ...
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We’ve said a lot in the past about the ramifications of professional propaganda and the weaponized BS that seems to permeate the culture wars and attacks on basic democracy in this country. If you’re not really concerned about it and don’t know what you can possibly do, consider the following ...
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Every large institution takes on some level of bureaucracy, which can be incredibly frustrating and infuriating to normal people who have to work with it. Almost every institution tends to adopt its own acronyms and language, in part to simplify internal communication but also, as I’ve seen, as a kind ...
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Clarity and Candor are the Batman and Robin, Lennon and McCartney, Bacon and Eggs or SpongeBob and Patrick of public engagement; the perfect pair and indispensable under the right circumstances. Clarity and candor are more often than not missing from much of the communication that organizations, both public and private, ...
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I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been in the audience in tough public meeting settings and watched the speaker lob verbal duds into the crowd without a clue that he or she is doing it. I don’t know of any institution that provides formalized training in ...
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I’ve always believed that fake news might just doom us all eventually unless we figure out how to deal with it. But it may be that we’re worrying way too much about that. What do you think?...
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Conversations are interesting social constructions – a give and take and turn-taking encounter. But it’s particularly interesting to dig deeper into who’s giving, who’s taking, how they start, how they continue and how they end....
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