To convince others you’re brilliant at your job, you must do two things:
- Be brilliant at your job!
- Be brilliant at communicating about it
For example:
- if you did a brilliant piece of work
- and then summarised it in a rubbish report
- and the only thing your boss knew of your work was what she read in your rubbish report …
- … she’d assume your work was rubbish too
So communication is absolutely pivotal to how brilliant others think you are.
Which means – to maximise our chances of people thinking we’re brilliant – we should invest more time ensuring our comms are brilliant.
So, here are three simple techniques, to definitely improve your comms:
Host monthly “improve our communications” sessions
During these meetings, each of your team shares:
- The best communication success they’ve had, and how they achieved it
- The one new thing they’ll do next month, to further improve their comms, and
- Their biggest communication challenge, that they’d like help with
(I call this approach BEST/NEXT/HELP).
You then spend the rest of the meeting learning from (ok, copying) each other’s BESTs, aligning on everyone’s NEXTs, and giving everyone the HELP they need.
Do this every month, and your team’s comms will be transformed. It’s inevitable.
Seek feedback
Ask someone who’s opinion you trust, value and respect for their feedback on your communications. What are you best at? What’s their top tip for how you could improve further?
Review last month’s communications
When I write my books, I always leave a completed chapter for a while, then re-read it. I find that the time gap allows me to review it with fresh eyes. It helps me see improvements I missed at the time.
Similarly, you could choose a communication you did a month ago. Pretend to yourself that you’re the person who received it. Then ask yourself “Would they have thought this was good or bad? What was best? Worst? What’s missing?
So there are three techniques. You’ll be able to think of many more.
But it’s important to do something to ensure your comms are brilliant.
After all, other people’s perception of your brilliance depends on it!
Action Point
Use any/all of these ideas – or one of your own – to transform your communications. Very often, just 1-2 simple changes can make a huge improvement.
Which is always good – maximum impact for minimal effort!