Tag: Effective Communication

Leadership

Three Lessons in Effective Communication from a Funny Ad

I stumbled on to an ad on my Instagram feed, that I had found very funny when it originally aired. You can watch the ad here before we go any further. When I rewatched this ad from the lens of what can I learn from it, I found it had a lot of lessons for us as leaders and as communicators: Lesson 1: Setting the context Whenever we are trying to tell a story, it is important to set the context within which the story is going to play out. The idea here is to make the context as familiar […]

Leadership

Residual Communication

I read this post about Residual Communication written by the British advertiser Dave Trott and it left a deep impression on me. You can read his post here. The idea is pretty simple – what do people remember from what we said, long after we said it. As a leader, I believe that we should obsess about residual communication. What do people remember the most after we had done sharing our vision, strategy or any idea. Our effectiveness as a leader depends on this. We will move on to other meetings and to other tasks expecting our people to act […]

Leadership

Becoming Better Communicators

In this very insightful and a short clip, advertising legend Bill Bernbach talks about the difference between writing and communicating. The writer is concerned with what (s)he puts into his/her writing, whereas a communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. (S)He therefore becomes a student of how people read and listen. (S)He learns that most readers come away from their reading, not with a clear, precise, detailed registration of its contents on their minds, but rather with a vague misty idea which was formed as much by the pace, the proportions and the music of the […]

Leadership

3 Skills for all Leaders to Cultivate – Naming, Framing and Priming

Premise: One of the key responsibilities that we have as leaders is to make sense of what is happening in and around the teams that we lead and share this with our teams as and when required. The way we do this could be either through writing (emails, blogs, etc) or by speaking (in all-hands, at events, 1-1 calls, etc). In either case, we need to be careful about the language we use, as the way we use the language has a big impact on what others perceive or understand from our communication. So, today, let’s explore the importance of […]

Leadership

The Rule Of Six

I came across the “Rule of Six” from a blog post by Adam Voigt (you can read his post here). In the post, he says, and I quote Apparently radio stations use this rule when a new song is released.  They have a quest to have you hear that song six times as quickly as possible, which is why it seems to us as though that song is being played every second track. After six exposures to the song, we move from analysing the song and into familiarity with the song.  Even if the song is horrendous, we tolerate the […]