Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Effective Communication

Written Communication Tips #2: On date formats

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Date formats and representations The interpretation of a date written in the ’02-12-06′ format can differ. For instance, a reader in the United States may interpret the above date as the 12th of February 2006, where as another from India or the United Kingdom may interpret the date as the 2nd of December 2006. A computer programmer may interpret the date as the 6th of December 2002. Avoid using all-digit date formats.

The most popular formats for expressing dates are 12th February 2006 (more formal,) 12 February, 2006 (the comma is optional) or 12-Feb-2006 (shorter, inexplicit form.)

  • The most significant part of a date is the day. Hence, write the day first, followed by the month (spelled in complete or as a three-letter abbreviation) and then include the year. The least significant part of a date is the year; you may omit the year in informal communication.
  • You can easily avoid confusing a reader about your intended date format by spelling out the entire month or by using a three-letter abbreviation for the month. Further, in speech or thought, we rarely express months in terms of numbers. For instance, while reading out a date, we rarely express February as the second month of the year.

Date formats and representations Whatever format you choose to use, be consistent throughout a document: use an identical format all the dates in the document. Consistency in formats is important for both form and function of the dates.

P. S: International Standard ISO 8601 stipulates numeric representations for date and time. The international standard date notation is YYYY-MM-DD. Accordingly, you would denote the 12th of February 2006 as 2006-02-12. Clearly, this format does not impart order-preference to the more significant parts of the date, viz., the day and the month. However, this date format offers advantages in computer usage; I plan to cover these in a future blog article.

Unlock the Power of Communication: Start with the End in Mind!

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How can you ensure your message hits the mark when you’re about to deliver a speech, prepare a presentation, write a report, draft a résumé, or compose an email? The secret lies in a simple yet powerful technique: beginning at the end.

Instead of diving straight into the content, take a moment to step into the shoes of your recipients or audience. Shift your perspective and view your communication from the outside in. To kickstart this process, ask yourself a series of intriguing questions about the outcome you desire. Don’t hold back—jot down every potential outcome that comes to mind without filtering or limiting your creativity.

Let’s say you’re gearing up for a captivating speech. Picture yourself standing before your audience and delve into their minds. Who are they? What burning questions do they have? What nuggets of knowledge or insights will truly resonate with them? Envision the impact you want to make. What do you hope your listeners will take away from your speech? What action do you want them to take after hearing your words?

Once you’ve gathered a rich array of intended outcomes, it’s time to prioritize and distill the essence of your message. Zero in on the core conclusions you wish to convey to your audience. This is where the magic happens. Now, take a step back and embark on a journey backward. Begin assembling your ideas, anecdotes, and compelling statistics that bolster your conclusions. Weave them into a seamless tapestry of thoughts that guide your audience to those pivotal “aha” moments.

By starting with the end in mind, you gain a distinct advantage—a great perspective that empowers you to shape the direction of your thoughts as you prepare your communication. This approach allows you to discard ideas that don’t align with your desired messages, enabling you to deliver a focused and impactful presentation.

Idea for Impact: communication is an art that revolves around your audience. When you begin at the end, you effectively zero in on the messages you want to convey to your listeners or readers. It’s like fine-tuning a symphony, ensuring every note strikes a chord in their hearts and minds.

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Telephone Skills #2: Avoiding Telephone Interruptions

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The ring of a telephone is one of the most annoying of intrusions at work.

Productive work requires extended periods of concentration. Incoming calls impair your efficiency by breaking your concentration, especially during your productive work-hours. Additionally, a ringing telephone can easily interrupt a conversation, even if you do not intend to answer the ring. If you have a visitor, he or she may let you pickup a ringing telephone, out of courtesy: “Do you want to pickup the phone?” “No. Let’s continue.”

Here are two practices to avoid telephone interruptions.

  • Use voicemail to avoid telephone interruptionsTurn-off your telephone during your productive work-hours or when you are meeting somebody at your desk. Instead, use a voicemail system. The voicemail system allows you to pick the moments at which you pay attention to incoming telephone calls. Check voicemail once or twice a day and return telephone calls promptly. For example, at work, I unplug the telephone cable at my desk until 11:00am and check voicemails after lunch.
  • A large fraction of your unscheduled incoming calls are likely to be from specific people: a project manager calling you to inform you of customer specifications, off-site colleagues requesting help, or, family members updating you of some information. These conversations are probably not on pressing matters that require your immediate attention. Inform the people most likely to call you of times when you are not available to take their calls and request them not to call during these periods. People will respect your request if you inform them of your reason, viz., your desire to be productive during those times, and promptly follow-up on voicemails they may leave. For example, I request people not to call me in the mornings and encourage them to send email.

Your efficiency at work depends directly on how productively you use your work-time. Avoiding telephone interruptions thus provides a greater control over how you organize your time.

Telephone Skills #1: Showing Courtesy to your Visitors when Talking on the Telephone

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Suppose you are talking on the telephone and a coworker visits your desk for a conversation. Do not make your visitor feel insignificant by ignoring him or her. Show common courtesy by following these simple steps.

  • Acknowledge the visitor’s presence with a wave and a smile. Then, gesture to him or her to take a seat close to your desk.
  • If you have an appointment with the visitor, your telephone call was probably unscheduled. Or perhaps, your phone conversation has been longer than you expected. In either case, if you sense your telephone call is not likely to end in a minute or so, defer your phone conversation. “Hey, Sharan. I have a visitor here at my desk. I have an appointment with her. Shall I call you back in the afternoon to complete our discussion?”
  • If the visitor is unscheduled or if the telephone call involves an important topic, defer meeting the visitor by writing a small note. Hand over your note to the visitor with a smile. “Sales review till 2:00pm. Will visit you or call you.” Alternately, if you believe your call will end soon, write down “Two minutes, please.” You can then continue to concentrate on your phone conversation.

Practicing these good manners will enable you to prioritize the visitor over the telephone call or vice versa, as appropriate.

Two Essential PowerPoint Slideshow Tips

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‘B’ for Blank Screen, ‘W’ for White Screen

Powerpoint slideshow: Presenter should be the focusDuring a presentation, when you are running a slideshow in PowerPoint, you may want to divert the attention of your audience away from the contents of your PowerPoint slide. When you are answering a question on a topic unrelated to a current slide, you may not want the audience to focus on the illustrations or graphs on your slide. Instead, you may want to be the focus of their attention.

  • If you press the ‘B’ key or the ‘.’ key during your PowerPoint slideshow, the screen will go blank. This will enable you to redirect your audience’s attention to yourself and your talk. When you are ready to continue, press the ‘B’ key or the ‘.’ key to resume the slideshow.
  • Alternately, press the ‘W’ key or the ‘,’ key to display a white screen. Press the ‘W’ key or the ‘,’ key a second time to resume the slideshow.

In general, it is always a good idea to have a blank screen to help get your audience to focus on you when beginning or concluding your presentation, introducing yourself or answering questions. The later versions of Microsoft PowerPoint end with a blank “End of slideshow, click to exit” screen by default.

[Number] + Enter to Transit to a Particular Slide

As with all communication processes, your PowerPoint slides and verbal presentation should consist of a logical flow of ideas and supporting material. Unfortunately, presenters often overlook this necessity.

Presenters habitually transit to a prior slide to show a graph or some data— “As I said in slide four…let me go to slide number four…here it is… .” Alternately, they sometimes transit to a further slide or to a slide in the appendix— “Edward, I am glad you brought that up…in fact, I included a chart in the last slide…let me show it to you now… .”

Moving to a prior slide or a further slide (by using the ‘Page Up’ or ‘Page Down’ keys) can distract the audience. If you must transit to a particular slide, hit the slide number and press ‘Enter.’ Note down the current slide number to use when you want to resume the slideshow. Refer to your handouts or a printout of your slideshow for slide numbers.

Additional

  • In the PowerPoint slideshow mode, hit the ‘F1’ key to access a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use during slideshows.
  • My article from November, ‘You, not Your Slides, are Your Presentation,’ offers tips on engaging your audience during public speaking.

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How to Help People Pursue Conversations after Introducing Them

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Many people have difficulty with starting conversations and engaging in small talk in unfamiliar social situations. They do not have much to say when introduced to new people at parties, meetings or formal gatherings. As a host or fellow-attendee, you can help.

Say you are presenting people to one another. In addition to stating each person’s name, add a snippet of information about a topic of common interest. Do not elaborate. This will help them connect and pursue a conversation.

Here is an example: “Hey Charlie. This is Sarah, my colleague from work. [Pause for pleasantries.] Sarah’s daughter just returned from Spain after a semester of the ‘Study Abroad’ program. Charlie, wasn’t your daughter thinking of enrolling in the program?”

In a future blog article, I will write about the protocol for introducing people to one another in gatherings.

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Black Friday and the Shopping Craze

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Today, the day after Thanksgiving, marks the first day of the holiday shopping season. The retailing industry terms this day ‘Black Friday’.

In theory, stores expect to switch from losses (accounted for in red color in financial statements) to profits (accounted for in black color.) Stores, big and small, offer hefty discounts and attractive promotions to lure shoppers. Consequently, Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

  • Stores open as early as 5:00am and publicize low-ticket items to attract shoppers. Often, stores carry limited quantities of deeply discounted items. Thus, shoppers scramble to enter the stores and fight to lay their hands on these items. See interesting news stories of shoppers fighting for bargains here, here and here.
  • Most stores offer discounts for only a few hours in the morning. For instance, today, Wal-Mart’s discounts were limited to 5a.m. to 11a.m. Shoppers transit from store to store and families split-up to reach various stores before discounts terminate.
  • Stores hope that once shoppers are tempted to start the day at their stores, they will buy less-discounted and regular merchandise. Clearly, they risk margins in an effort to boost sales numbers, one of the key metrics in the retailing industry.
  • In 2004, Wal-Mart decided to scale down on Black Friday offers in an effort to increase margins. Sales were poor; Wal-Mart stock dropped 4% the day it announced poor sales figures.
  • This year, major retailers including Wal-Mart [WMT] and Target [TGT] reported weaker-than-expected sales numbers for October. Wal-Mart announced just 0.5 percent increase in same-store sales for October; these numbers were short of the 2 to 4 percent increase that it had initially expected. Consequently, Wal-Mart announced aggressive discounts on a wide-range of goods including consumer electronics.

As I hopped from store to store hunting for bargains and gifts this morning, I ignored a few questions the investor in me had: Do Black Friday promotions pull sales from later in the shopping season? How many customers return goods they purchased on Black Friday? If a retailer fails to capitalize on the Black Friday craze, can it make up during the rest of the shopping season? Are sales numbers more important than margins?

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You are Your Presentation, Your Slides Aren’t

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You, not Your Slides, are Your PresentationLast week, I attended a training seminar where the speaker stood by the side of a projection screen and behind a table where he had his laptop. He hardly moved from his position during the hour-long seminar. He was short and was barely visible from the back of the thirty-people room, as shown in the illustration. Despite his interesting content and compelling arguments, he was physically disconnected from his audience.

One of the common mistakes speakers make is that they regard their slides as the core of their presentation—they give their slides the center stage during their presentations. Sometimes they stand behind a podium or by the side of a projection screen and command very little attention from the audience.

Here are a few tips to help you engage your audience.

  • Get a handheld or a clip-on microphone and a remote control to advance your PowerPoint or Keynote slides. Walk around the room and establish a positive rapport with your audience.
  • Maintain a relaxed body language and tone, smile and engage the audience in discussions. A relaxed stance and engaging conversations quickly establish your authority over the subject matter and your credibility with the audience.
  • Maintain eye contact with all the members of your audience. Observe their body language for non-verbal feedback to your presentation content.
  • Have a friend or family member attend your presentation and request that he or she observe your non-verbal communication, viz., your appearance, enthusiasm, tone and volume, gestures, eye contact, audience engagement, pauses, and pace of delivery.

As you prepare for your next public speaking assignment or presentation, remember that your slides or handouts just augment your presentation and support your line of reasoning. You are the presentation; you should be the focus.

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The Twelve Most Persuasive Words in English

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“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”
– A Rephrasing of Aristotle’s Rhetoric

The choice of words is one of the key components of persuasive communication. In marketing, advertising, grant- or project proposal writing, or in most other interactions, we attempt to influence someone’s mind about an idea or a product.

The Twelve Most Persuasive Words in EnglishBelow is a list (in order) of the twelve most persuasive words that have proven to be most influential on listeners’ or readers’ minds. Often, advertisements consist of crafty constructions of these words. Surprisingly, the word ‘free’ is absent. The Language Log website at the University of Pennsylvania has an interesting thread on the source of this list.

  1. You
  2. Money
  3. Save
  4. New
  5. Results
  6. Health
  7. Easy
  8. Safety
  9. Love
  10. Discovery
  11. Proven
  12. Guarantee

How will we use these words in our verbal and written communications? How will we incorporate these words into our everyday vocabulary?

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The Abuse of Exclamation Marks

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“My gosh!!! I was thinking about calling you the other night! It is exciting(!) to hear from you!!!!! How have you been!?!?!?! Congratulations on successfully defending your thesis!!!!!!”

The Abuse of Exclamation Marks in Written CommunicationExclamation marks are used at the end of sentences to express strong feelings of astonishment or emotion. Our generation has learned to use handfuls of emoticons, exclamation marks and question marks as substitutes for tone and body language in instant messaging and such. This communication style habitually creeps into our professional communications. Overuse of exclamation marks is a pet peeve of many professionals; some even consider exclamation marks minor annoyances.

In reality, exclamation marks are not necessary; they are usually inappropriate in professional written communication or in academic writing. Many professionals consider the excessive use of exclamation marks as signs of inexpressiveness and professional adolescence.

  • Use exclamation marks sparingly. Use only one exclamation mark, if necessary, for expressing very strong positive feelings. E.g., “Congratulations on finishing your first marathon!”
  • Do not use multiple exclamation marks to exaggerate your feelings. A single exclamation mark is sufficient.
  • Repeated use of exclamation marks is distracting to a reader. The reader cannot clearly differentiate the more exciting expressions.
  • Do not combine an exclamation mark with any other punctuation. Every sentence must end with a single punctuation—a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark.
  • If you are tempted to use an exclamation mark to attract a reader’s attention, try to reword the sentence. E.g., restructure “The C++ shell sort implementation had an error!” to “We found an error in the C++ shell sort implementation.” Alternately, reorganize your thoughts in an independent paragraph or bullet point.
  • Avoid inserting exclamation marks within parentheses to emphasize a specific word within a sentence. E.g., “Coastal South India is excessively(!) hot and humid during summer.”

In the absence of facial or verbal cues, written communication can easily be misinterpreted. Resist the urge to convey emotion and feelings in email or in written communications. Avoid exclamation marks.