The Quantified Communications Blog

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: a leader’s effectiveness hinges on the way he or she communicates with employees, customers, investors, and community stakeholders. A business’s leaders are its figureheads, shaping its reputation and setting its cultural tone. And they do that in the way they communicate. When they do it well, the entire organization reaps the rewards. When they do it poorly, company morale, community perception, and the bottom line all suffer. 

Fifty, thirty, and even fifteen years ago, it was a relatively straight shot up the corporate ladder. That’s not to say there weren’t challenges in rising through the ranks or running a business—of course there were. But the quantitative decision-making and other skills required were a little more uniform and predictable. So MBA programs taught those hard skills and sent graduates out into the world, prepared for successful careers in the corporate world. 

When we talk about learning and development, our minds often go straight to the “hard” skills: industry-specific, job-related tasks. And that makes sense—these skills are much easier to standardize, train, and evaluate than the softer skills like communication or teamwork. However, the reality is that these soft skills are critical to professional success, as a recent ManpowerGroup study revealed that 61 percent of American companies rate soft skills as the most desired in new hires. According to ManpowerGroup, these skills are the “Human Strengths” that will future-proof our workforce against automation.

Here at Quantified, we talk and write a lot about how organizations that embrace the latest online, adaptive, and AI-driven learning technologies give themselves an important competitive advantage in today’s job market. And the same is true in the higher education world, as the institutions that embrace technology as a way to enhance recruitment, retention, and student success have begun to set themselves apart. Soon, those that hold out will fall behind.

A chief communications officer at a Fortune 100 company recently told me, “Our CEO considers himself to be the chief communicator.” 

Where has the year gone? It seems like just yesterday we were posting our predictions for communication in 2018. Now we’re near the end of summer, and the fall semester is just around the corner.

Have you ever had the sense that moods are contagious? Have you noticed that one person’s bad mood can bring down a whole group or, the opposite, one member’s excitement can ripple throughout the entire team?

As tech innovations become commonplace in classrooms from the grade school level all the way through universities, it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence finds its role in education.

Sometimes when certain speakers give presentations, it might be the case that the speakers use a lot of sort of hedging language, and that might possibly diminish them credibility just a little bit by making them sound kind of tentative.

Have you ever sat through a lecture or had a conversation with someone who was a renowned expert in their field and come away feeling like you hadn’t understood a word? This person may be able to understand complex concepts and produce amazing results, from powerful software applications to beautiful advertisements to sleek investor presentations, but if they don’t know how to communicate their expertise in a way that helps their audience get on board, they’ll soon find all that knowledge can only take them so far.