Every time I teach a “Making Meetings Work” workshop, I ask the group, “How many of you enjoy going to meetings?” Can you guess how many hands go up? You’re right — none! Since so many of us don’t like to go to meetings, I think we’ve developed some bad habits as a subconscious rebellion. […]
There’s one in every office — that person whose coffee is always cold, whose commute is longer and worse than everyone elses, who is the only one to face difficult customers, and who is just plain never happy unless he or she is complaining. I’m not talking here about the occasional or legitimate complaint. I […]
Some people mistakenly believe that if customers aren’t complaining, they must be happy. What they don’t realize is most unhappy customers never communicate their concerns or tell you why they’re unhappy, they simply “vote with their feet” and never come back. Customers often don’t have the time, energy, or heart to tell you that you’re no longer meeting […]
The high cost of poor listening isn’t evident when you visit Tenerife Island, the largest and most populous island in the Canary Island chain. More than five million tourists visit the island each year, enjoying its distinctly beautiful beaches, mountains, and many cultural festivals. However, these tourists probably don’t realize that Tenerife holds a more deadly distinction. […]
One day, when my daughter was in college, she called me in a panic because that afternoon she was going to be giving her first campus tour at her university. As she did a “run through” of her tour stops and the comments she would make at each, something she said struck me. She mentioned that parents […]
As some of you may remember, I wrote a post awhile back about the 8 Reasons Organizations Need Standard Operating Procedures. Although I know they are time consuming to write and can be a challenge to keep current, I hope you agreed after reading the post, that it’s critical that organizations have them and why. […]
Speech anxiety should never go away. However, you do want to keep it under control, so you’ll look and feel like the confident, professional, expert that you are.
I probably lead a difficult people workshop at least once a month. For some reason, a lot of people seem to have difficulty dealing with the different personality types in their lives. Go figure! One of the things I like to do when I kick off a workshop is to have people take a selfie […]
I wrote my first blog post on May 31, 2011. The title of the post was “What Everyone Ought to Know About Communicating Successfully.” In it, I stated that my goal for the blog was for all of us to grow our communication skills and that I needed you, my readers, to help with that. After I’d published […]
Whether we blame it on auto complete, or we cover ourselves with an automatic disclaimer on text messages and emails, such as, “This message was sent from my phone, so ignore my sloppy writing,” we need to stop blaming our communication devices for the poor messages we send. A recent survey found that spell check and […]
