The Quantified Communications Blog

According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, 89 percent of employers are planning to increase the number of MBA graduates they hire, and they expect to offer those MBA grads a median starting salary of $110,000 compared to $60,000 for those with only a bachelor’s. So what’s setting those MBA grads ahead of the pack? According to the vast majority of survey respondents, communication and teamwork. 

We often talk about leaders as particularly great communicators, able to share information, persuade doubters, and inspire employees with ease and finesse. (Or if they’re not there yet, they’re at least working on it.)

But what happens if your boss is a not-so-great communicator?

If there’s one thing our professors, mentors, and advisors drilled into us as we prepared to finish school it’s that networking, and building a robust group of professional contacts, is foundational to a successful career. But for many of us, the traditional idea of networking— waltzing into a room full of strangers and yukking it up while trying to balance a drink, a tiny hors d’oeuvres plate, and endless handshakes—sounds like nothing short of torture.

Unfortunately, all those people who preach networking are right.

Fortunately, there’s more than one way to go about it.

The Austin chapter of the Association for Talent Development is hosting the 2018 Applied Learning Summit next month, bringing together talent development professionals across a range of industries to swap stories and share experiences. The theme for this year’s summit— Anticipate, Apply, Adapt—recognizes the rapid rate of change and the variety of innovations in the talent development industry.

Recently, higher education institutions have found themselves under pressure to show evidence of student learning. In a recent article in the Hechinger Report, University of Bloomington professor and head of the National Survey of Student Engagement Alexander McCormick theorized that this has to do with the continually rising costs of these programs. Given the size of their investments, consumers and policymakers are eager to see an ROI on ungrad and graduate studies.

Whether you’re an aspiring TED speaker or a leader climbing toward the C-Suite, you recognize that your communication skills will play a huge role in getting you to the top. But when it comes to developing those skills, there are so many factors to focus on and, usually, so much room for improvement, that the goal of communicating on the level of a best-in-class speaker seems utterly unattainable.

Here at Quantified, we’re always looking for new research and data on what makes leaders great. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of resources out there, and some of our favorite information comes from podcasts (this is, after all, the year of the voice).

When it comes time to give examples of great talks, there are plenty of old standbys we reference regularly: President Reagan’s Challenger speech, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream, or David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water, to name a few. But we’re always on the lookout for new talks that can illustrate the impact a world-class speaker can have on an audience. That’s why “Quantified’s Best Practices” is our favorite part of our biweekly newsletter. So we were thrilled to discover James Clear’s ongoing list, “Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard.” 

Though there are plenty of valid arguments to the contrary, most research indicates that, in school, grades play an important role in helping students learn. They’re an incentive to work hard and a measure of success (or at least, we hope, progress).

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.