Write Better At Work

Improving leaders’ communication skills can boost the bottom line

by

Poor communication can cost mid-sized companies thousands of dollars per year. Cost estimates can reach millions of dollars for multinationals, according to SHRM.

Now we know that improving writing does more than save money. A series of studies by Towers Watson over 10 years found that good communication by leaders drives financial performance.

“Companies that are highly effective at both both communication and change management are three and a half times more likely to financially outperform their peers,” according to Change and Communication ROI.

“A significant improvement in communication effectiveness is associated with a 29.5% increase in market value.”

Want to increase your leaders’ communication effectiveness? Find tools to Develop Leaders’ Writing Skills here. This free 22-page whitepaper provides reproducible tools you can use for individual coaching or writing training. You’ll also find resources for determining the ROI on your investment in writing training.

Sources:

Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). (2010). The cost of poor communications: A business rationale for the communications competency. Retrieved from http://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/communication/pages/the-cost-of-poor-communications.aspx

Towers Watson.(2013–2014). Change and communication ROI—The 10th anniversary report. Retrieved from https://www.towerswatson.com/en-US/Insights/IC-Types/Survey-Research-Results/2013/12/2013-2014-change-and-communication-roi-study

It’s all about you: How two simple words can transform leaders and writers

by

We were gathered at 7:30 in the morning for a workshop on leadership. The presenter asked us to do an exercise that seemed so simple I began it only to humor her. Her challenge: take each letter of our first name and match it to a word describing ourselves as a leader.

Normally I would have matched C with Creative, but my brain was struggling to make connections at that hour of the morning. Fortunately a source of insight was sitting right beside me. Alan Feirer showed me his acrostic poem and said, “N stands for needs-meeter.”

With two words and a hyphen, he cheerfully flipped standard assumptions about leadership on their head. Many people think about leading from the leader’s perspective: it’s all about what I do, what I tell you to do, what I want you to think about my vision for where we’re going. In other words, I lead and your job is to get with the program.

In Feirer’s model, a leader asks, “What does our company need? As my direct report, what do you need from me?” That attitude positions the leader in the gap between what’s happening and what should be happening. From this perspective, leaders and followers are allies. A leader is more than a provider and assigner of resources; the leader becomes a resource. Responsibility for identifying needs is shared, so leaders’ thinking is no longer bounded by the four walls of a corner office.

How might this model apply to writing? To paraphrase Feirer, my job as a writer is to figure out what readers need and then meet those needs.

How can a business writer become a needs-meeter? The most effective approach, according to writing expert Kenneth W. Davis, is to switch hats. Wear your writer’s hat as you draft. Then take a break. When you return to your draft, take off your writer’s hat and put on your reader’s hat; in other words, reread your draft from your reader’s point of view.

  • Can you immediately find the reason you need to read this document?
  • Do you have all the information you need?
  • Is the information organized so that you can easily understand and act on it?

Answering those questions  from the reader’s point of view will help you make changes that will better serve your readers.

Switching hats might seem to create more work for writers up front. However, in the long run, reader-centered writing encourages your audience to pay attention to your message and reduces the need for follow-up.

For example, it’s easy to dash off an email headed Company picnic scheduled. That subject line leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Revising it to Reserve your tickets for Thriller Diller family outing by 7/1 takes just a few seconds and turns your message into a call to action.

Whether you’re leading or writing, switching perspectives can make it easier to treat your audience as allies. Just remember to ask: “What do you need?”

Notes: Alan Feirer posts his thoughts on leadership in his Group Dynamic blog.

Kenneth W. Davis is the author of The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Business Writing, available from Amazon.

Find advice about how to write with a you attitude in “Finding the Right Tone”: http://www.designsensory.com/pws/lesson12/index.html

Habits of the Most Productive Writers: Avoid Binge Writing

by

Many people assume that writing is best done in long, unbroken blocks of time. Some writers may have that kind of stamina, but few people have the time or endurance to write for hours at a stretch.

Fortunately, the time you have available to write is less important than whether you

• write often

• set concrete goals

• track your progress

Psychologist Robert Boice found that if you write nearly every day, even 15 minutes can be productive. Some writers prefer to work for half an hour, an hour, or even two hours. Your limit should be how much you can do without tiring. Boice advises, “Don’t let writing become so fatiguing that you don’t feel like coming back.”

In a 1990 study, Boice asked writers who usually scheduled big blocks of writing time to work in shorter, more regular sessions. Compared to “binge writers” who wrote for hours whenever they felt inspired, the slow-but-steady authors produced four times as many pages. Those who wrote more frequently also reported getting new ideas more often.

Even more dramatic gains were achieved by those who wrote frequently and charted their progress. Those who also reported their progress to a writing buddy or supervisor were by far the most productive.

Writing Schedule in Boice’s 1990 Study

Average Yearly Output
  Binge writing (write whenever I feel like it)                 17 pages
  Write daily; keep progress chart                 64 pages
  Write daily; keep progress chart; report progress               157 pages

 

Notes:

A summary of Robert Boice’s research on Habits of Research Productivity can be found in Gail Sullivan’s “So You Want to Write? Practices that Work.“ 

This blog entry is an excerpt from Write More, Stress Less: From Getting Ideas to Getting It Done.

Doing better next time: Revision as a learning opportunity

by

With the right mindset, mistakes fuel learning.

Liggy Webb isn’t the first person to say that, but her article “A Positive Approach to Modern Living” has four powerful questions to help people acknowledge mistakes and move on:

• What was the mistake?
• Why did it happen?
• How could I have prevented it?
• What will I do better next time?

Asking these questions can transform an error from a dead-end disaster into an opportunity for growth.

One reason these questions are so powerful is that forgiveness is built-in. No time is wasted on recriminations like How could I have been so stupid? or Will I ever learn?  The first question accepts that our effort fell short. The last question recognizes our intent to do better. Failure may still sting, but this approach makes it possible to shift our focus from what we messed up to what we can learn.

great-expectations-ms-3
A manuscript page from Great Expectation shows Dickens’ many revisions.

By adopting this mindset, writers can make revision more productive. The first step is to accept that drafts, by their very nature, fall short of our best intentions. Knowing that writing is a process of discovery, we can acknowledge that a draft is only a first attempt. We don’t need to berate ourselves for any gap between the draft and our intent; we have only to narrow the distance. To do this, we ask questions to identify the gap and explore its possibilities: What is working in this draft? Where does it fall short? How can I shape it to better fit my intention and my reader’s needs?

This nonjudgmental approach frees us to accept the imperfections in our draft. By accepting them, we can move past them to make our next draft closer to our best.

When to call the grammar police

by

greengrocers_apostrophe_correctionA colleague was presenting a Jeopardy!-style game to our networking group. Her clever questions had us competing to show our knowledge of mortgage-related terms like ARM, PMI, and USDA.

Despite the dry subject, I was having fun—until a couple of unneeded apostrophes caught my eye. Suddenly I was noticing that almost every word ending in –s had an apostrophe. Some needed the punctuation to show ownership: Our bank’s policy is to require first-time home buyers to make a down payment of 3.5 percent. But most needed only –s or -es to  make them plural: Like most banks, we require a down payment.

The rule for forming plural nouns in English is simple: generally adding –s or -es is enough to show you need more than one. For some reason, many people think they need to complicate the rule by adding punctuation. Check out the produce aisle in your local grocery store. Odds are you’ll find Apple’s or Banana’s on sale. (That’s why the British call this particular error the grocer’s apostrophe.)

Did this mistake matter enough to tell my colleague about it? I didn’t want to embarrass her by calling in the grammar police for no reason. On the other hand, if she used the presentation again, she could find herself embarrassed for three reasons:

  1. Errors distort meaning. An apostrophe means one of two things: possession or a missing letter. My cat’s favorite toy means my one cat claims ownership of a plaything; my cats means I have more than one cat. It’s is a contracted form of It is; its is a pronoun like his or hers and needs no apostrophe.
  2. Noticeable errors are distracting. Once I noticed the apostrophe overkill, I was paying as much attention to the unneccessary apostrophes as I was to the content.
  3. Noticeable errors can make you look careless or stupid. Some errors matter more than others, as Maxine Hairston found.

My colleague was under the gun when she prepared her presentation, and she is generally neither careless nor stupid. I decided to email her a thank-you for her engaging presentation and mention that spell check had missed something. Fortunately she was grateful for the feedback.

If you’re now feeling insecure about apostrophes, Find and Replace can help you avoid overkill. First search for -‘s; then search again for -‘es. Each time you find an apostrophe, ask: Do I need this to show ownership or a missing letter? If the answer is no, delete the offending apostrophe and check the next one. If you’re not sure, use a good style guide to review the rules.

  • Mignon Fogarty’s explanations are quick and clear: See “9 Ways to Use an Apostrophe.“
  • Robin L. Simmons’ Grammar Bytes has an excellent summary of the rules for apostrophe usage plus some entertaining interactive exercises.

(Image by Sceptre)