Business Communication Skills Can Help with More than Just Business You won’t hear this at a job interview, but the fact is, there’s a lot of inter-personal emotion mixed into our daily business lives: People have trouble accepting feedback. People get annoyed with (and are sometimes rude to) their coworkers. Personal situations show up at Read More
business communication
The 3 Rules of Great Pitching
There are two kinds of great pitching: One happens on a baseball diamond. The other happens when employees, entrepreneurs — really, anyone in business — “pitches” a prospect, donor, influencer, or boss to get support for a project or an idea. If you work “outside the home,” you’ve probably given a business pitch, and you’ll Read More
How To Ask for What You Want
Public speaking — and effective communication in general — is always about preparation. So really, the title of this post should be… How To Prepare to Ask for What You Want I shared these tips at the annual conference of The Women’s Alliance of Xerox: When You Ask for What You Want, You’re Starting a Negotiation! You’re not asking Read More
How To Master Business Communication: Learn the Unwritten Rules
Groups Always Enforce Unwritten Rules Funny thing about human beings: We like to organize ourselves into groups, and we like to tell each other how to act. This means that every group of people — from a single household to a country of billions — has unwritten rules for how each member should behave. (Think of the statement, “In Read More
Be Brief, Be Bold, Be Gone When You Speak to Senior Leaders (and Everyone Else)
“Be brief, be bold, be gone” is a perfect description of how to talk to people who are high up in your organization’s food chain. That’s because many (perhaps most) senior leaders like their information sparse and have famously short attention spans. But senior leaders aren’t the only ones who value conciseness and clarity. That’s why “The Read More