The Quantified Communications Blog

If you’ve ever been to a job interview—or an interview for just about anything, for that matter, you’ve fielded the request, “Tell me about yourself.” It seems innocuous and oh-so simple, doesn’t it? But chances are, that question has made you feel like a deer in headlights at least once. “Tell her about myself? What about myself? Who am I, even?”

Entrepreneurs looking to recruit investors to support their business ventures are constantly finetuning their pitches, honing the data, polishing the business plan, and looking for just the right way to tell their stories.

The YouTube voice. You can hear it in your head, can’t you? In fact, you’re probably using it to read this paragraph. Your inner voice suddenly sounds uncannily like Hank Green.

As YouTube has evolved from an artistic repository of classics like “Charlie Bit My Finger” and “Harry Potter Puppet Pals” into a platform where influencers and explainers can monetize their every opinion, something else has evolved as well. That’s the YouTube voice.

The standard for measuring your communication skills.

If you’ve been following Quantified, you know our obsession is adding science—algorithms, data, and objective measurements—to the art of communication.

There’s no two ways about it: employee retention is a critical driver of a financially healthy organization. Retaining talent isn’t easy, but research has shown that the cost of replacing just one employee can soar to nine months of that single employee’s salary, and Gallup has found that turnover among millennials alone costs the US economy $30.5 billion annually.

It’s clear that today’s businesses can’t afford not to retain employees, but how can companies keep their top talent engaged? There are dozens of great retention strategies out there, but the way we see it here at Quantified, it comes down to leadership.

Here at Quantified, we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how organizations can use big data to drive improvement—not only in leadership communication skills (though certainly in that regard) but in operations, back-office processes, customer relations, and, ultimately, the bottom line.

We talk a lot here at Quantified about how artificial intelligence is enhancing personalized and experiential learning—particularly communication skills. After all AI-driven communication development is our bread and butter, and we’re passionate about using the latest innovations to make communication training more effective and more lasting, and to make world-class communication training accessible to millions of people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inclusive leadership lately.

It’s been a buzzword for years, and years ago we started working with Chief Inclusion Officers to help them improve their narratives and lift their communication platforms, but in recent months, inclusion has evolved from an element of employee and career communications to something that’s front and center for leadership, an imperative for brands, and one of the top training and performance requests from leading organizations.

Think back to your last important communication event. Maybe it was a presentation to five hundred key stakeholders, or maybe it was an innovative product pitch for the CEO and her team. You had your message down pat—you’d prepared your data points, supporting stories, and visual supports using audience-first methodology—and you’d rehearsed until you knew your key points like the back of your hand. Your content was on point. You were talking like a leader.

But did you look like a leader?

“Why would I invest in developing my employees when they’re just going to leave and use those new skills to help some other company?”