The Quantified Communications Blog

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?

Everywhere you look in the weeks leading up to and following New Year’s Eve, people are making predictions for the year to come. Economic forecasts, political projections, pop culture forecasts. You name it, we’re predicting it.

More and more in our evolving economy, we hear that employers are struggling to find applicants with the critical job skills they’re looking for (chief among them being communication), and that struggle has led to calls for higher education institutions to shift their focus from a broad liberal arts education to a more concrete, skills-based curriculum.

Think back to your college days, and imagine a lecture hall packed with hundreds of students. The professor, wearing a body mic or standing behind a lectern, looks like a spec to the people in the balcony, who take furious notes (or don’t) as she lectures. Every single day.

In a recent article for Forbes, leadership strategist Victor Lipman writes that new managers making the transition into their first leadership roles are in need of more training than anyone else in the organization, and yet these young rising stars often have little to no support.