Seven Communication Mistakes Managers Make
February 9, 2010
1. Making controversial announcements without doing groundwork first
Any controversial decision can engender rumors, anxiety, and resistance. So rather than announcing a controversial decision to an entire group, prep people one-on-one. Learn who will object, and why.
Decisions about change are the most charged — reorganizations, changing goals, and the departure of key employees create uncertainty, and uncertainty generates anxiety.
To forestall anxiety, open a dialogue with the other person. Put a name to the problem: “This reorganization means we’ll be doing some things differently, and that makes some people apprehensive.” Then address the concerns raised in response to your statement:
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Teaching the Facebook Generation
February 9, 2010
Our goal as college professors is to open students’ minds to new experiences so they can grow intellectually while they mature through the traditional four-year process.
But we are also challenged to give students the immediate skills they will need once they graduate so that they can begin their professional careers and move away from the fry-o-later to the cubicle and beyond.
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Internet Inventor Tim Berners-Lee: Unlocking Our Data and Reframing the Way We Use It Together
February 9, 201020 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
Kevin Kelly on the Next 5,000 Days of the Web
February 9, 2010The Internet, the web as we know it, the kind of web — the things we’re all talking about — is already less than 5,000 days old. So all of the things that we’ve seen come about, starting, say, with satellite images of the whole earth, which we couldn’t even imagine happening before — all these things rolling into our lives, just this abundance of things that are right before us, sitting in front of our laptop, or our desktop.
The Need for News–Even Bad News
February 9, 2010
Employees thrive when information flows freely and seize up or become distracted when uncertainty replaces understanding. In fact, according to a study published in the Journal of Psychological Science, people who are mildly neurotic (and let’s face it, who isn’t mildly neurotic?) are more stressed by uncertainty than by a clearly negative outcome.
So, how should companies communicate with employees during uncertain times?
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Results of the Fourth "Annoying" PowerPoint Survey
February 9, 2010
The message from my biennial survey of what annoys audiences about bad PowerPoint presentations is that audiences are fed up with the overload of text on slides and how that text causes presenters to read the slides to them.
A total of 548 people responded to the survey over a six week period. Can we trust those who responded? I sure do. Over 65% of them said they see more than 100 presentations a year, so they know what they like and what is annoying.
Second article: More results
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Learn English Online: Exercises and Tests
February 8, 2010
Here’s a site with dozens of exercises and tests to help develop grammar, spelling, and vocabulary proficiency.
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The Age of Streams: Helping Companies Go with the Flow
February 8, 2010
When Steve Rubel (photo, left), senior vice president and director of insights for Edelman Digital, spoke at the Edelman Change/EE Best Practices in Change and Internal Communications Summit last week, he demonstrated how today’s digital realities are playing out in the workplace. Steve also reinforced the immense potential companies have to successfully embrace these realities in how they communicate with their employees.
Steve shared several key ways people are consuming digital information that have real and direct implications for how companies communicate internally:
- We are now a culture of “snacking,” meaning we like to consumer our information in small pieces throughout the day (e.g., Twitter, YouTube).
- The continuing rise of mobile technologies is causing even more digital distractions that spill into every place we go, including our workplaces.
- The increasing presence of digital technologies in peoples’ personal lives is carrying over into the workplace. Employees expect the equipment and capabilities they have at home to carry over to the office.
- The competition to capture peoples’ attention is at an all-time high and continues to grow. The average American now visits 111 different website domains each month and only reads about 20 percent of an email or Web page.
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Richard St. John's Eight Secrets of Success
February 8, 2010This presentation all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, “What leads to success?”
Could You Recover From These Personal Branding Nightmares?
February 8, 2010
Does your personal brand have what it takes to overcome one of these nightmares?
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