Want to improve communication skills for yourself or your team?
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When people participate in Turpin workshops, individual members and teams enjoy a host of secondary benefits beyond greater comfort with their own communication skills. Managers and leaders are often pleasantly surprised by how team meetings become more efficient, leadership skills start to emerge, relationships blossom, and so on. We often hear that teams “Turpinize” their...
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This article was inspired by a question posed by a client in a recent virtual workshop. She asked: If you are part of a virtual meeting and there is a conflict, argument, etc., how does one handle that as a host or an attendee of that meeting? This question is extremely difficult to answer because...
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As you know, companies are spending lots of money to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) among their workforce and in their company culture. There’s been a lot of talk about the need for fundamental cultural shifts in corporate America and deep soul-searching among executives. This is all absolutely worthwhile—if it’s done right and is...
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In other blog posts, we’ve been talking about hybrid meetings: how to lead them successfully, how to practice good participation behaviors, and even how to dress and set up your space to look professional on Zoom. This led us to think about what an organization’s leaders can do to ensure an efficient, effective, and equitable...
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We’ve previously talked about the crisis in soft skills in corporate America—clear communication, empathic audience analysis, effective meeting skills, and the like. What we’re hearing is that even new hires who have a natural instinct for soft skills, especially those right out of college, still experience a learning curve while they tailor those skills to...
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If the audience for your business presentations is usually the same group of people—your internal team or a well-known client group—your assessment of them can become pretty instinctive and even subconscious. You share a common working language, and you know what challenges they face, what their business goals are, and what approaches to information they...
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In our first post on hybrid meetings, we talked about best practices for managing focus when leading meetings with some people in the room and others participating remotely. But even if you’re not in the leadership role, you contribute to the efficiency and effectiveness of the hybrid meetings you attend. If you don’t make these...
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One of the many interesting observations from the pandemic is the evolution of people’s Zoom backgrounds. Initially, everyone was excited to play with the virtual backgrounds available online. I saw people log in from virtual versions of a dive bar, Versailles, and the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Eventually, talking to colleagues who were literally...
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Learners come into our workshops absolutely certain of one hard-and-fast rule: never ever read from your slides. They look pretty bewildered when we respond with, “Well, it’s complicated,” rather than emphatic agreement. The problem with “never read from your slides” is that it often ends up meaning presenters glance at the slide as it comes...
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Do you have that friend or family member who offers you a ride and then doesn’t look at a map or set their GPS app because they’re so sure they know how to get to where they’re going? They may be confident that they know where they’re headed, but unless you already trust them—a lot—you...
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