Back in August 2010 I wrote a post, How to Influence your Boss and since then we have had requests to run this as a seminar – well if you are in Singapore on 22nd of March you can attend a half-day program on this topic.
This promises to be a fun and interactive session where I will be sharing how to:
Build your personal brand
Identify your bosses’ ‘currencies’
Communicate on your boss’ wavelength
Get free coaching from your boss
Be proactive and anticipate your boss’ needs
Get your ideas heard
Get a promotion or a raise
Tickets are just $228 if you book before Feb 17th and $288 after that. Contact Azimah at our office to make a booking. Whether you are a junior or a senior executive can you afford to miss this?
I was recently interviewed on the question of “What makes a successful communicator?”
In Summary this is what I shared:
Communication is about creating shared meaning and understanding
Be mindful of how your message will be received understood, and adapt accordingly
Always check if your communication is received and understood
Listen for how the other person feels about the information (emotional response)
Aim to create dialogue. Try saying”do you mind if I ask you a question?
Discover what’s important to them. Ask, “what’s important to you about this?”
Summarise the conversation to confirm understanding
Suspend your own mental maps to avoid missing out on the other person’s perspective
Be ok with silence – the other person is probably processing what you said.
What I didn’t say in the interview which is very important, is that you must get the other parties attention first. An obvious tip but one that is often missed.
Women often complain that, ” Men Don’t Listen”. They may be correct, some men and for that matter, some women don’t listen. What is perhaps closer to the truth is that men ‘listen’ for the things that are important to them that are phrased in a way that they understand.
I live by the maxim, “The meaning of communication is the response you get”, which puts the onus on the communicator to be flexible in their communication style to get their meaning across.
Today I spoke on this topic at the Women’s Leadership Forum 2011, “Gender Diversity for Success” on November 3, 2012 in Singapore. If you attended please give feedback in the comments section and you can view the slide deck here.
The answer as to whether culture can be taught, lies not in the new culture but with the individual who is in the new culture. The cross cultural training programmes certainly help in guiding individuals in understanding generic cultural attributes that may differ; such as high context versus low context, direct versus indirect communication styles. However, learning about these differences does not mean that we can change these behaviours and values of that culture. On the contrary, what it actually achieves is to make us aware of our instinctive reactions to these differences. From this awareness, we can begin to learn and potentially then collaborate towards appropriate actions and outcomes. Continue Reading »
Whether you are running a small business or leading a multi-national company, building and protecting your reputation is essential. Consider some reputation disasters; Toyota denying their ‘sticky’ break pedals, Pizza Hut employees posting a Youtube video of of unsanitary food practices or United Airlines breaking guitars on the tarmac.
With blogs, YouTube and Facebook pages it is now possible for people to let the world know what they think about you.
Corporate reputation is based on the perceptions of any stakeholder group such as consumers, investors, employees, or key influencers. Charles J. Fombrun has listed six drivers of corporate reputation:
In the late 1960′s and early 70′s a communication model emerged that took a different look at the way we communicate. Not wanting this new model to fit into any existing discipline of psychology or therapy the founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder called it Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP for short.
NLP is essentially a model of learning and demonstrates that we can model human thinking, behaviour and communication. Continue Reading »
When communicating any message it is essential that we are congruent, that is to say our words match our tonality which matches our body language. It is also important to get our facts right, because to fail to do so will lose you all credibility.
The 7%, 38%, 55% Myth
You may be familiar with the above statistics which are regularly rolled out by communication trainers to make the point that tonality (38%) and body language/facial expressions (55%) are important in getting your message across. The irony is that people, who I believe should know better, are promoting a myth by quoting statistics without knowing what they mean. Continue Reading »
Back in August 2010 I wrote a post, How to Influence your Boss and since then we have had requests to run this as a seminar – well if you are in Singapore on 22nd of March you can attend a half-day program on this topic.
