The Quantified Communications Blog

One of the privileges of leadership is that, with an executive title comes an executive platform—a reason and a place to establish yourself as a thought leader in your field. 

Whether you’re writing a corporate blog post or an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, you’re suddenly expected to share your perspective and insights. Why? Because a strong foundation of thought leadership helps build your organization’s reputation—and your own, as its leader—as a credible expert in a competitive field. Prospective customers have countless choices for any service or product they could possibly want to purchase, and they want to know their vendor is knowledgeable, ready to meet their needs, and on the cutting edge of innovation.

So how do you go about it?

While geography once defined a business’s boundaries—who it could hire, who it could serve, and who could invest—today it’s almost more common for customers, investors, and often even employees to be scattered across the globe than to be locally situated. Phone and email initially empowered the dissolution of those geographical boundaries, allowing us to communicate quickly, efficiently, and cheaply with colleagues and clients in any location.

In November, Patagonia announced it was going to donate the entirety of the $10 million it had received in GOP tax cuts to fight global warming. A couple months before that, Nike released an ad featuring Colin Kaepernick (a precursor to its February “Dream Crazier” ad calling out gender-based double standards). And In January, Gilette called out toxic masculinity in its “The Best Men Can Be” commercial.   

Every one of these decisions—and many more corporate statements on social and political issues—has inspired equal amounts of support and criticism, but they’re part of what looks to be a new wave in a long-growing trend of corporate activism.

Last year, we predicted that 2018 would be the year of the voice, and in many respects, we were right. Voice-activated virtual assistant usage grew, voice and video continued to explode in social media, and we continued to see evidence that talking may be on its way to winning ground back from typing.

But one area in which voice really took off? Podcasting.

Here at Quantified, we spend a lot of talking and writing about how to deliver less-than-stellar news. How do you frame it when you have to disappoint investors? How do you keep your message optimistic and future-forward while still being clear and candid about what went wrong? How do you ensure your voice and body language mirror the gravity of the situation without being overly negative? 

Here at Quantified, we take every opportunity we can to remind leaders that what they consider “soft” skills—teamwork, critical thinking, persuasive writing, and (most importantly) communication—aren’t that soft after all. Skills like these may seem, at first, like “nice to haves.” They’re a little wishy washy and hard to measure, but if an employee with great technical skills can also captivate a room, more power to her. 

We’ve all heard the warning (probably more than once) that we only get one chance to make a first impression. Here at Quantified, where we’re obsessed with helping leaders and speakers improve their audience impact, we take that warning very seriously, and we know that not only do you have just one shot at a first impression, but you have very little time to make it.

We know communication is critical for a business’s operations, reputation, and bottom line. We’ve know communication takes up more of our working hours than any other activity, and we know the cost of poor communication can be devastating to an organization’s bottom line. So it was no surprise that the GMAC Corporate Recruiter Survey found communication to be the most important skill recruiters look for in new hires. In fact, four of the five top skills were communication related, including oral and written communication, listening, and presentation skills.

Each year there are technologies that define us--as humans, as students, as professionals, and in culture. We pay especially close attention to the technologies that change the way we live, engage, and interact. And that’s what we focus in on each January when our team of communication experts, technical creators, and data scientists scour the technical landscape to discover what's next. 

Think about the last presentation you gave, whether it was to your employees, your investors, or your customers. What was your goal? What did you want your audience to understand at the end of your talk? More importantly, what did you want them to do as a result of listening to you?