No matter the medium, your ability to motivate and persuade rests on your ability to communicate. This is common advice. It’s not common practice.
Poor communication stunts great ideas.
Your leadership and your team’s effectiveness suffer when your best ideas disappear in five-page emails or three-hour meetings. Make these 10 promises to your team to ensure your great ideas don’t get lost:
1. I promise to tell more stories to communicate.
The easiest way to make a talk forgettable: Include nothing more than data and information. Even new policies can be enlivened by using hypothetical story-form examples of what to do and what not to do. When communicating a point, ask yourself, “Will a story get this idea across?”
2. I promise to drop vogue words and clichés.
Stand out from your colleagues: Refusing to write the tired, boring words that soak up white space on memos, words that fill the gaps between great ideas in many speeches. Ban the following words and phrases: Disrupt, low-hanging fruit, circle back, deep dive, synergy, move the needle, drill down … you get the idea.
3. I promise to cut communication—written or spoken—by two thirds.
Whether it’s a speech, meeting, or memo, whatever you try to say can be said in fewer words and in less time. Whenever you write, your first step should be to cut by two thirds.
4. I promise to be honest and admit mistakes.
Leaders often feel that if they admit their mistakes that they will lose power and respect. The opposite is true. Take responsibility and draw up a plan to fix the mistake. You’ll show humility and leadership.
Free download: 10 ways to enliven senior executives' communications
5. I promise to ask others for help with editing and feedback.
The only way to become a better communicator is by getting feedback. Find the person in your company who has a knack for communicating well and ask him or her to be your second pair of eyes for any important speech or written work.
6. I promise to stop putting up walls of text on PowerPoint slides.
This complaint was born with the dawn of PowerPoint, yet very few take it seriously. If you deface your PowerPoint slides with massive text blocs, give out that information in a packet pre- or post- presentation. One simple phrase, quotation, or idea per slide will go farther.
7. I promise to use more pictures and videos in my presentations.
Rather than making points with text, find a picture or video that gets the point across. It will break up the presentation and your audience will remember these moments better than ones filled with text.
8. I promise to listen more than I talk.
Good communication is less about the words you say and more about the audience you talk to. Know the needs of who you speak to. Listening first—find out their problems, questions, needs and wants, and then speak to those.
9. I promise to keep my message succinct and simple.
If you can’t condense what you want to say into one sentence, you don’t have a clear goal of what you want to communicate. Before you write a memo, article, or speech, sit down and write the one thing you want to get across in one sentence.
10. I promise to prepare well in advance.
Great writing and speaking don’t happen at the last minute. It takes time to come up with an idea and put it in just the right words. Even if all you do is brainstorm or write out a few ideas, you’ll be farther ahead than anyone in your business.
The common theme in these promises is that good communication isn’t what you say, it’s what you don’t say. Your best ideas get lost when you clutter your communication with jargon and verbiage. If you zero in on communicating what is essential, your team absorb your best ideas and remember them..
Eddie Rice is an executive speechwriter at http://ift.tt/1V1HMIU. Connect with him on Twitter: @EddieRice84.
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