This Neurological Trick Makes Your Presentations Twice As Memorable
Given the huge amounts of information most of us have to cram into our presentations, getting people to remember everything is a tall order.
Now, we all have different presentation styles and different ways of making our message memorable.
When I go into organizations and I ask the employees “tell me why your team exists?” the most frequent response I hear is “I don’t really know.” This certainly isn’t great news, but it does help clarify one of my recent research findings that only 23% of employees say their leader always communicates their vision clearly.
Here's a frightening statistic: Only 14% of employees think that performance appraisals are useful! And high performers are especially unhappy with their reviews.
To be a great leader, you can’t fear being seen as the bad guy/gal. And I’m not just talking about obvious ‘bad guy/gal’ situations like telling someone “you’re fired” or “you’re not getting a raise this year and here’s why.” I’m also talking about simple situations like telling someone “I need you to change the way you submit that form.”
Here's a very simple time management tip that can cut 17 minutes from most meetings you sit in: have a Statement of Achievement. What is that? Well, we did a survey recently. We asked people coming out of meetings: "The meeting you were just in, did it accomplish its original objective?"
Have you ever been in one of those team meetings, virtual or face-to-face, where a few big personalities just dominate the space? They usually talk louder than everyone else, and if the boss or team leader isn’t speaking, all you hear are their thoughts, their ideas, their yeas and their nays.
When I ask leaders, “What’s the No. 1 thing that wastes your time and hinders your productivity?” the nearly universal answer is “meetings.” Whether it’s wasteful meetings that don’t resolve anything, meetings where everybody talks just to hear themselves speak or meetings where decisions never get made, meetings are often hated and typically wasteful.
Effective communication with an impatient boss is far less challenging if you know their preferred communication style. One simple way to distinguish communication styles is how linear people are. Here's what that means. Some people are very linear.
Imagine that it’s Friday afternoon and your boss walks over to your desk and tells you the following:
Most impatient seeming bosses aren’t suffering from some chronic character flaw. More often than not, they just have a particular communication style that likes things at a high level, without too much detail, and a focus on cutting-to-the-chase. And for the record, that describes a lot of bosses



