How To Communicate Effectively At Work | Book Summary | Read A Book With Me

Think of the last time you watched Olympics. Athletes make it look so easy, and you might be thinking, wow, that looks amazing. And I bet I could do that at the same time. Sometimes when I watch TED Talks and read books, I get similar feelings. The presenters or the authors are just so good, and they look effortless. That is what this book is trying to help with. This book, Simply Said, Communicating Better at Work and Beyond, touches on a lot of useful tips for various types of communications. In this video, we're going to summarize and highlight the key points of the book. We're going to talk about how to structure your thoughts and create good content, how to improve your oral communication skills, and how to communicate effectively through writing. Let's start by talking about how to craft good content, such as a specific message, personal introduction, engaging stories, and content for different purposes. We often communicate in professional content to convey a specific message. So how to craft and convey a clear message? A clear message should be short, use simple language, and should focus on the needs of the audience. Limit your key message to one sentence, preferably fewer than 10 words long, such as, we need to close the deal soon. Avoid using big words and jargons. Keep in mind that your message is never about you, it is about your audience, how your audience needs to use your content. To craft an audience-focused message, ask yourself, what does this audience need to learn? When we introduce ourselves, we should also be more focused on others, instead of seeing ourselves based on titles and status. We view ourselves from the perspective of how we impact other people. So when you introduce yourself, instead of saying you are the principal of a girl's high school, you could say you foster girls' growth into wise young women. And how do we tell engaging stories? Each story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. All good stories start and end in the same way. They usually begin with a time or place that establish context. In a business context, the beginning should be short and pitchy. The middle of the story should explain the struggle and build tension, explain a problem of your company, and then you show how the lesson learned is what led you to your suggestions. In the end, you convey the point you're making. There is another book on this topic that I highly recommend for you to read. It's called Storyworthy by Matthew Dix. I love that book, highly recommend. How do we organize content? Consider three aspects to structure your information. The audience needs, the key message that you want your audiences to hear, your purpose. Do you want to persuade them to take action or convey information? Always consider the audience needs. So when you meet with your manager, instead of saying I want to talk to you about Project X, you could say since we have a staff meeting tomorrow, I thought it would be helpful to you to give you an update on Project X. Then start with the broadest possible assessment of the situation so that your manager has context and knows how to hear your points. The broad assessments could be regarding Project X, everything's on track. Regarding Project X, we hit a snack. Regarding Project X, I've got good news and bad news. This key message sets the tone for the meeting and gives the audience control. Then it's time to convey your content. There are two content formats, the informative format and the persuasive format. When you want someone to know something, follow the informative format. In this message, each box represents one slide of your presentation. Tell them what you are going to tell them in your context and agenda slide. Tell them what you've got and go deeper into the topics and tell them what you've just told them in your summary slide. When you want someone to take action to do something, follow the persuasive format. Mention very briefly what you want and then spend the majority of your talk telling your audience why they should want it. People don't really care what you want as much as they care about how what you want impacts them. To figure out what is in it for your audience, think about the universal motivators like time, feelings, and money. The second section of the book talks about oral communication skills. All speaking is public speaking. We are always talking to someone. Most people are okay speaking to one person at a time. The secret is to apply the same techniques you are using speaking to one person to situations in which you're talking to many people at once. We all know it is important to look at your audience when you speak to a group. You should not scan your audience and make eye contact with as many people as possible. Instead, look at one person at a time for a complete sentence. This way you will relax since you only talk to one person at a time. Also, you will avoid distractions and build rapport with your audience. In terms of body language, you want people to focus on your content, not be distracted because they're trying to interpret your body language. Take a solid stance, use open neutral body language, maintain an open posture, and use open hand gestures and facial expressions. Communicating effectively isn't just about the way you send down information but also about the way you take in information. Listening well is hard work. Are you just waiting to talk or are you listening to understand? Maintaining eye contact and posture is equally important when receiving information as delivering information. Most of us approach a conversation as if it's a competition. I talk, then I pause, you jump in. When you pause, I jump back. It's a fight for control. We should always welcome other people to talk. When the other person's done talking, we can say, that's very interesting, tell me more about that. Think about information like a pyramid. At the top is the smallest amount of information of the content you know that you know. Then it is you think you know, you know you don't know. The greatest information is things you don't even know you don't know. When meeting with others, assume that there is a lot of stuff you didn't even know you didn't know. The goal is to uncover the information you didn't even know you didn't know. In order to get more information and be a good listener, we need to ask more open-ended questions. For example, instead of asking did you finish the memo, ask where are you with the memo. Open-ended questions help you probe not just for content but also the feeling behind the issues and helps you avoid making assumptions. During a conversation, you may want to confirm and clarify what you have just heard. The author calls it you statements. There are three components, an introductory phrase, raised statement of the point of the other person made, and a confirming question. When we address an audience, we often use powerpoint presentations. You need to create a constant connection between the audience, the visuals, and yourself. The slides are not the presentation, you are. Make sure to smile and look like you want to be there. If you have words on your slides, read every word that is on the slide and add comments after you deliver the words on the slides. Reading every word that is on the slide reinforces what audiences see and helps them process the content. This is kind of surprising to me because I thought we're not supposed to read the slide. The book did make a good point that this only works when your slides are simple. You should follow the six by six rule. No more than six words per bullet, no more than six bullet per slide. To access information from the slide, apply the see it, save it, and say it method. See it. Look at your slide in silence. Save it. Remember what is in the bullet point. Say it. Make eye contact with one individual in the audience as you state the bullet point verbatim. When you have graphs and charts on your slides, if not delivered well, they can overwhelm your audience. Tell audience what they are looking at before sharing why they're looking at it with the following steps. Read the heading. Identify the types of graphs. For example, here's a bite chart showing our sales performance compared to our goal for last year. Define the parameters and main points. You can start with the vertical and then the horizontal. With hand gestures, you can say here we have the sales performance and here we have the month of the year. Once you define the parameters, highlight the key points. For example, you can say you'll notice in the third quarter last year we saw a decrease in sales. And then explain why you're showing the audience this information. This is where you communicate key messages and draw conclusions. The third section of the book talks about written communication skills. There are three steps that will allow you to write better. First, challenge every word you use and get rid of the clutter. You should eliminate zero words. For example, replace during the course of with just during. Cut wordy expressions. For example, instead of using due to the fact that, just use because. Avoid confusing constructions and avoid missentence parenthesis. See these two examples. The one without parenthesis is more clear to me. Second, make sure you're using the best words you can to convey your idea. This means using strong verbs. Looking for words ending in shen, ment, ens, and in. For example, he made a statement is not as good as using he stated. Where stated is the key action of the sentence. Look for the to be verb and similar weak verbs. For example, the process is flawed. It doesn't meet our needs. Can be rewritten as the process fails to meet our needs. Finally, look at whether you have made clear who is accountable for the action in the sentence. Putting the actor up front in the sentence before the verb creates clear accountability for the action and increases the likelihood you will use a stronger verb. Putting the actor after the verb creates what is called a passive voice. As the name implies, it is a passive, less assertive way of communication. It is used to soften the tone. I think in most cases in general though, it is better to use an active voice than a passive voice. There are many formats for structuring a document. Similar to what we have mentioned earlier, the purpose of a document can also be persuading or informing. The persuasive formatting states main message, gives background, expands the message, and provides a quick ending. The informative format introduces subject and context, states topics, explains each topic, summarizes topics, and then tells next steps. Beyond the structure of your document, there are other elements that will make your document more reader-friendly. For example, because your writing should be focusing less on yourself and more on the other person, there should be more U's than I's in your writing. Write short sentences. You should aim for a maximum of 17 words per sentence. With regard to bullet points, all the bullets should have the same structure. I make this mistake of mixing up the structure of the bullets all the time. As you can see in this example, it can get very confusing if you mix up the bullet structures. Also, vary your sentence length to keep people engaged. Don't overwhelm the reader. Keep paragraphs to a quarter of the page at most. Anything longer is visually intimidating. An interesting document uses plenty of white spaces and occasionally headings and subheadings that tell the reader where to find certain information. Here are two examples of layout. The one to the right looks a lot more interesting to me. Okay, so far we have talked about tips for creating good content, tips for oral communication skills, and written communication skills. This book also talks about other types of interactions and leadership tips that I'm not going to cover in this video. Overall, I think this book is very informative and provides lots of useful tips. The author was an attorney and some of the communication tips written in this book seems more applicable to lawyers, sales, and consulting types of work and might not be as relevant in the tech industry where communications are much more casual. That's why I left some of the tips out of this video. If you are interested in learning more, I recommend you to read this book. The only thing I do not like about this book is that it includes the sales pitch of the author's company way too often and kind of diminishing the actual content of the book. Okay, so that's it for this video. I hope you find this video helpful. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye!