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Category: Communication (Page 8 of 14)

5 tips for novice public speakers

16/04/2015 /

Dananjaya Hettiarachchi, the winner of the World Championship of Public Speaking 2014 organized by Toastmaster International, interviewed by Richard Feloni for The Business Insider Australia, suggests 5 tips for novice public speakers.

Tip 1: Always start with a message. A common mistake is to start with a topic, instead a speech should begin with a message, as concise as possible. This message is whatever you want your audience to be thinking about when your presentations concludes.

Tip 2: Be confident enough to yourself. You need to sell yourself before to sell your message, the way to do that is to be genuine. A speech should be conversational, not theatrical. The only way to go in front of an audience and to present in a way that isn’t simply miming is to practice again and again, pretending (if need be) that you’re talking to a room full of your closest friends.

Tip 3: See yourself through your audience’s eyes. Speakers tend to become wrapped up in themselves, which may just be because they’re afraid to acknowledge a room full of listeners. But if you’re going to speak, you need to realise that you’re doing it for the benefit of others, not yourself.

Tip 4: Have a forum to practice. Eighty per cent of the path to becoming a great speaker is trial and error and the only way to learn is by speaking in front of an audience that will give honest feedback.

Tip 5: Find the right coach or mentor. You should find someone willing to help you grow as a public speaker. This does not need to be someone who can teach you advanced speaking techniques; they just need to be someone who gives you permission to explore possibilities, who gives you permission to fail.

Read here the full article

Speech

Image: flickr – Brian Talbot – (CC BY – NC 2.0)

 

15 Best Leadership Books a Leader Should Read

26/03/2015 /

According to John Coleman, ‘broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders’. Actually reading has shown to lead many benefits in leadership development: it improves communication, emotional intelligence and organizational effectiveness and reduces stress.

Unfortunately, nowadays business people seems to be reading less, maybe because they are not sufficiently convinced of the importance of reading, they don’t know what they should read or because they think they don’t have the time.

In this article on Lifehack, Joe Vennare identifies some 15 best leadership books  especially would-be leaders need to read to define leadership and how applied it, communicate and motivate teamwork, and keep going on.

The Bus Metaphor

24/03/2015 /

The right people in the right seats on the bus: this is the metaphor from the first Jim Collins best-seller ‘Good to Great’. In that book – published in 2001 – the author identifies what leaders need to do, in order to see their teams and organizations excel. And he uses the power of an image to communicate the following concept.

According to Collins, leaders who are able to transform their organizations begin not by setting a direction, but by getting the right people on the bus – and the wrong people off the bus.

Actually great leaders understand the following three simple truths:

1. If you begin with “who,” rather than “what”, you can more easily adapt to a changing world.

2. If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away, because they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.

3. If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company.

Assembling the team is the first crucial point. Then a leader has to develop a vision (the direction of the bus), to remove obstacles to high performance (that is, maybe people are not exactly in the right seats and need to be assigned to the right role) and to help people with diverse talents and interests building trust in each other.

It is an hard work, but leaders need it to accomplish objectives with the right people.

Bus

Image source: http://bit.ly/16TU0QU

 

Top Team Building Activities

17/03/2015 /

Team building activities are essential in creating a productive team, since they serve to increase communication among team members in a positive working environment. Actually staff are most productive when they are happy within they role, and feel that they are making a valued contribution to the team’s goals.

Team building does not have to be painful, annoying or even embarrassing. There are many valuable team building exercises that can be effective in uniting groups, developing individual skills and collective strengths.

There are four main types of team building activities, which includes:

1. communication activities and icebreakers;

2. problem solving and/or decision making activities;

3. adaptability and/or planning activities;

4. building trust.

If you want to learn more on team building activities, read here: http://www.huddle.com/blog/team-building-activities/

teamwork concept on blackboard

Image source: http://bit.ly/1uEy4E9

How to Learn a New Language in Six Months

10/03/2015 /

Chris Lonsdale is a psychologist from New Zealand who runs a company in Hong Kong. After spending many years assessing all of the research available on language learning, he was able to formulate five principles and seven actions that will allow any adult to learn a new language and speak it fluently in six months.

Discover Lonsdale’s approach in his TED Talk.

10 Leadership Techniques That Do Not Work

12/02/2015 /

John Rampton, from Inc.com, lists 10 leadership techniques that definitely don’t work:

1. Lack of Vision
2. Failure to Communicate
3. Intimidation
4. Micromanagement
5. “No Tolerance Policy”
6. Being a Know-It-All
7. Offering Incentives
8. Withholding Helpful Information
9. Taking Credit for Others’ Work
10. Management by Walking Around the Office

The more you learn from your mistakes and improve, the more you truly will become a leader.

For more: 10 Leadership Techniques That Do Not Work

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Image source: Flickr – Olivier Carré-Delisle, Leadership vs management

 

10 Rules to Communicate Effectively

11/12/2014 /

“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear”

In “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear“, Frank Luntz breaks down the ten main lessons he’s learned from years of crafting political messages, lessons we can all learn from:

1) Simplicity: Use Small Words
2) Brevity: Use Short Sentences
3) Credibility Is As Important As Philosophy
4) Consistency Matters
5) Novelty: Offer Something New
6) Sound and Texture Matter
7) Speak Aspirationally
8) Visualize
9) Ask a Question
10) Provide Context and Explain Relevance

For the article: The 10 Rules You Need to Communicate Effectively

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Image source: Flickr – Communication, Joan M. Mas

Soft skills: the new asset for “digital” workers

27/11/2014 /

In the current labour market, deeply modified by social integration and economic and cultural globalization, the development of soft skills — skills that are more social than technical— is a crucial part of fostering a dynamic workforce. These skills can be gained from past jobs, responsibilities, life experiences and personal interests. They can be even hidden and, when identified, they can help people become better contenders in job search as well as in the daily-working activities.

International researches have made a list of skills a person should have to compete successfully in the global economy of the 21st century:

  • Creativity/innovation
  • Critical thinking
  • Information literacy
  • Problem solving
  • Decision making
  • Flexibility and adaptability
  • Learning to learn
  • Research and inquiry
  • Communication
  • Initiative and self direction
  • Productivity
  • Leadership and responsibility
  • Collaboration
  • ICT operations and concepts
  • Digital Citizenship

For the full study by David Finegold and Alexis Spencer Notarbartolo on the impact of 21st century competencies click here

Skills_27

Image source: Flickr by Yoel Ben-Avraham – CC BY-ND 2.0 

Post by: Omar Appolloni

The value of dissent

06/11/2014 /

Truly accepting dissent is one of the challenges of every human being.

Be it in the private sphere, in politics or in the workplace, the capacity to become enriched by other people’s opinions is crucial in anyone’s personal development.

This article reminds us that the weakness of many workplaces is precisely the fact that leaders rely too much on people who agree with them all the time. The simple truth of any hard choice is that if a decision is important and risky, it should be controversial.

In politics as well as in the workplace, real turning points are never smooth and include, indeed require, extensive and thorough debate. Even in the most heated discussions, one should remind himself of this elementary yet valuable truth.

NO_6

Image source: Pixabay by geralt

Post by: davidebrad

The “Creative” Benefits of Multiple Teams

04/11/2014 /

Serving on multiple teams can distract our focus, but it might be worth it.
Creative work is teamwork. As we push to solve bigger and bigger challenges, we seem to inevitably need more and more people to solve them. When it comes to organizational life, however, few people even find themselves a member of one team. Sure there’s your department, but there’s also the cross-functional team, the special task force, and the party planning committee. Many have found that serving as members of multiple teams at the same time is their new organizational reality. This presents a challenge for both team members and leaders: how do we allocate time to all those teams and how do leaders find the right people from the right team?
In a study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, two professors studied the inner workings of teams at a large, multinational corporation. When they analyzed the data, professors found that performance was higher for teams whose members committed more of their time to the team. Surprisingly, team performance was higher for teams whose members also served on a large number of teams at the same time. How could this be?

One explanation is that highly skilled individuals were more likely to serve on multiple teams. Those high performers may not have been the ones allocating lots of time to the team. Instead, they bring the benefits of expanded networks, additional knowledge, and greater access to resources…even if they don’t bring the benefit of allocated time. It’s worth noting there is an exception: teams whose members are involved in lots of other teams and are geographically dispersed don’t see a performance advantage.

If you’re leading a team or serving on one, the study has implications for you. To the best of your ability, try to allocate your time on teams who need your specific skill sets. If another team has a more important project, but has an equally qualified member, that should be your indication that you can spend time elsewhere. Likewise, if you’re recruiting new members to your team, make sure you know whether they bring an ability to allocate enough time, or enough connections, or enough resources to make it worth their minimal commitment.

Read more: The “Creative” Benefits of multiple teams

Team_4

Images source: Pixabay by geralt (CC0 1.0)

Post by: marisalerno46

 

 

 

The “Creative” Benefits of Multiple Teams
The “Creative” Benefits of Multiple Teams
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