One of the many nice things about being a trainer is you get to meet people from different walks of life and different businesses. I see people from across the spectrum – banks, pharmaceutical and construction companies; from the police and public services; from insurance and technical companies, plus many more besides. Every delegate has a different tale to tell about how they came to be in the room.
Introducing yourself
It's just as well we do introductions at the start of the day, for one time it turned out a delegate was not only in the wrong room, but the wrong building. We had a bizarre conversation, talking at cross-purposes until the penny dropped. I tried to persuade him to stay for my “Effective Business Communications” course, but his financial planning meeting with a completely different company just wouldn’t wait. I still wonder if his PowerPoint graphics were effective in showing the figures he had to present – and more importantly, effective in getting his argument across – but I will never know….
Different backgrounds, common issues
Anyway, one thing always strikes me when we start to talk about improving our business communications: how similar the underlying problems are. We may come from different business backgrounds and departments, but the issues we face are fundamentally the same. Sometimes very general (“what am I trying to say and how can I say it effectively?”) and sometimes very specific (“how can I present my financial figures to a non-financial audience?”).
Looking ahead
So, at the risk of sounding like the Private Eye column “A Doctor Writes”, in my next few posts I thought I’d review some of the main questions and recurring themes and share ways in which you might tackle them. And, like Private Eye, my posts do come with a health warning: in the space available, I can only introduce topics and ideas, not fully unpack or resolve them. But if you’d like to see how these main themes play out time and again, then stay tuned.
Your challenge
For now, I’ll leave you with a challenge: get your editing pen out and cut down your word count. When it comes to business communications, less is almost always more. Why? Because fewer words force you to be more careful and exact about what you are saying, making your message sharper and more focused. (Ever felt the need to keep on explaining, and to keep on writing? It seems the less we understand our subject matter, the more explaining we try to do.) And of course, fewer words help our readers too.
So be ruthless: say it well once, rather than several times poorly. And I’ll write another prescription soon. In the meantime, make sure you repeat this one daily until the symptoms go away. But ok, I promise to drop the medical speak from now on.
