The Quantified Communications Blog

In a recent article for Training Magazine, Joe Lipham, training account manager at Signature Worldwide, wrote about an exit interview he gave an employee he’d thought would be a perfect fit, but who put in her notice just two weeks after she started.

Engineers are known as highly intelligent people who can understand complex concepts and transform them into amazing products—from software to mechanical devices to infrastructure. (Around the QC office, we sometimes refer to our engineers as magicians. They’re that impressive.)

But engineers are not always known for stellar communication skills.

Here in the QC office, we’re hyper focused on studying communication through the lens of leadership. How can our leaders and aspiring leaders develop the communication skills they need to achieve their professional goals and improve their organizations’ reputations, positioning, and bottom line? 

But one of the biggest strengths of the QC team is the learning we do outside of the office. We all have passions and pursuits outside of work, and those varying interests allow each team member to bring incredible new perspectives that contribute to the depth and breadth of Quantified Communications’ work.

The drive to make a difference—in the office, at home, in society—is a common sentiment, but as we all know, it’s easier to dream about change than to enact it. In a recent Forbes article, lawyer and career strategist Avery Blank outlines five ways to develop the confidence you need to become a leader and empower yourself to make a difference:

According to a recent survey of nearly one thousand US workers, 91 percent of employees say communication issues can prevent effective leadership in countless ways—from not giving clear directions to failing to earn employee trust to presenting more as automaton than human. What’s more, we know that businesses as small as one hundred employees spend, on average, more than $500,000 per year clarifying ineffective communication.

While the career ladder used to be pretty straightforward—employees stayed at one company, climbing through the ranks, for most of their working lives—today’s employees aren’t so eager to stay in one place for twenty (or even five) years. But for employers, the cost to find, recruit, and train new employees year after year just isn’t sustainable (Gallup estimates that turnover among millennials alone costs the US economy $30.5 billion annually), so companies are scrambling for effective ways to engage and retain top talent.

TED’s annual mainstage conference always kicks off with a bang, but this year the vibe at the first session felt a little different. From the #MeToo movement to the Parkland shooting to the dark side of tech, the opening talks in Vancouver set a new kind of tone for TED. It was heavier. More emotional. More frustrating.

Earlier this month, we took a deep dive into the science behind storytelling, exploring the way a good story affects listeners’ brains. We know that, thanks to the neurological and chemical changes they cause in our brains, stories are powerful motivators that make us more likely to remember and believe in a message.

One of our biggest pet peeves around the QC office is the use of the term “soft skills” to talk about critical leadership qualities like communication, self-awareness, and teamwork. The term undermines the value of these traits, making them sound hollow and frivolous when we all know that the “soft skills”—particularly communication—are among the most important that recruiters look for in new hires.

When HR departments look for training and development programs for their organizations’ leaders and high potentials, they often focus on industry-specific and job-related tasks. This is because, much more than “soft skills” like communication, teamwork, or critical analysis, these more concrete skills are easier to standardize across departments and titles and simpler to evaluate and teach.