When you send an e-mail, do you get the response you need the first time? Or, do you play the e-mail guessing game? You know the game…you give your reader just enough information for them to write back and ask questions to clarify what you mean.

We have all played the e-mail guessing game as a reader, a writer, or both. No one seems to like the game, so why do we keep playing it? Every day in our writing skills workshops, participants declare that they have to keep e-mails SHORT! IWCC wants to remind everyone that good e-mails are not defined by length. A good e-mail is one that gives the reader everything they need to know to do what you want them to do, feel the way you want them to feel, or learn, know or understand what you want them to.

Think about the e-mails you receive every day. Does short necessarily mean helpful? Short e-mails that don’t contain the right information cause unnecessary pain for both you and your readers. Do you recognize any of these three pain points?

• Frustration as a reader  - can’t respond without sending another e-mail to clarify
• Frustration as a writer - your reader doesn’t do what you want
• Wasted time while both of you write so called “short” e-mails back and forth continuously sharing bits and pieces of information

How many times have you said something like: "I don’t understand why they didn’t do it right – I sent them an e-mail". Or how often do you get frustrated, thinking: “Why haven’t they responded – I said it was urgent?” We would ask you to reflect before you blame your readers. Re-read your e-mail and make sure it wasn’t one of those “short” e-mails that didn’t give your reader what they needed – just bits and pieces of information.

Our participants often tell us that short e-mails save time. Do they? Are you saving time when you and your reader send countless e-mails back and forth about the same topic or situation? And then finally one of you picks up the phone and calls because the frustration level has reached a peak and you don’t want to play the e-mail guessing game any longer.

Stop frustrating yourself and others. Put all the necessary information in the first e-mail you send and stop playing a guessing game with your readers. In our writing workshops, we give our participants the Five Cs Writing Template, to ensure they always give their readers everything they need, in the order they need it. To help you craft your next e-mail, download our Five Cs Writing Template.

Use these Five Cs and stop playing games with your readers…stop the frustration now!

As communication skills consultants, we work consistently with people to improve their professional image through their communication. Recently, we have noticed that more and more people are sabotaging their professional image when delivering presentations, by using “informal contractions”.

We are not talking about contractions like “don’t” for do not or “we’ll” for we will. When you use a few of these contractions in your speech or your writing, you sound quite personable. However, some contractions can make you sound sloppy and unprofessional. Here are six common examples:

• Gonna for going to                          
• Shoulda for should have
• Woulda for would have
• Coulda for could have
• Wanna for want to
• Dunno for don’t know

Although these informal contractions may be acceptable in informal settings with your friends and your colleagues, they may damage your professional image in business settings. Say the words out loud: woulda, shoulda, coulda, gonna, wanna, dunno. How do they sound – professional or a bit sloppy? What image do you present if you regularly use these informal contractions during a presentation, meeting or business interview?

Almost everyone let’s these informal contractions slip into their speech sometimes. We never use these informal contractions in our writing, so why do we use them in a presentation? That’s easy to answer! We use them because they slide off our tongue so easily. Enunciating the full phrase takes much more focus, concentration and work – especially if we have allowed these informal contractions to become a speech habit.

Listen to yourself and see how many times you are using these poorly enunciated phrases. Listen to your colleagues too and see how often they use them. You be the judge – sound professional?

If you want to sound professional when you deliver a business presentation, we recommend you minimize these informal contractions and make a conscious choice to enunciate!

What is Presenter View?

Our participants are asking us if you can set up a slide show so that you can see the slide sorter view and your notes while the audience sees only the slide. And who can blame them…what a great idea! Does such a feature exist? You bet…it’s called Presenter View in PowerPoint and it works like magic. Want to know how to run Presenter View for your next presentation? Then this is the BLOG for you.

Here is a picture representing what you will see on your laptop screen when you run a PowerPoint slide show in Presenter View:

Note: In order to test presenter view, you must be connected to a projector or a second monitor

Not only does Presenter View allow you to see your slides, your notes, slide progression and timing on your laptop; it also allows you to blacken the screen for the audience while maintaining your view of the slides and your notes. Presenter view works on an operating system that supports multiple displays, including Windows and Mac environments. Most new laptops have the capability to run Presenter View.

In this BLOG, we will step you through the setup for a Windows environment. You can easily set your laptop to run in Presenter View by following the key steps below. You will notice that the steps vary slightly depending on the version of PowerPoint you have on your system.

Presenter View Setup for PPT 2007 or 2010

Laptop Settings
First you need to take five steps to prepare your laptop to run Presenter View:

1. Connect your laptop to an LCD Projector or second monitor (i.e. LCD Screen or TV)
2. From your start menu, select “Control Panel”.
3. Choose “Appearance and Personalization”.
4. Under “Display”, choose “Connect to a Projector”.
5. Choose “Extend” from the choices. (This extends your display to the second projector.)

PowerPoint Slide Show Settings
You will need to open PowerPoint and then select these settings:

1. Open your PowerPoint slide deck.
2. Click on “Slide Show” menu item (across top of your screen).
3. Go to “Show Presentation On:” click on arrow in box to right & choose Secondary Monitor or Monitor 2.
4. Select “Use Presenter View” (just below “Show Presentation On:”).
5. Press F5 to start Slide Show.

Presenter View Setup for PPT 2003

To run Presenter View in PowerPoint 2003, simply follow these six steps:

1. Connect your laptop to an LCD Projector or second monitor (i.e. LCD Screen or TV)
2. Open your PowerPoint presentation.
3. Select "Slide Show" | "Set Up Show...“ menu item (across top of your screen)
4. Click on the "Show Presenter view" box option to select it.
5. Click OK.
6. Start slide show.

My name is Alan De Back and I am thrilled to once again be a guest writer on IWCC’s BLOG. Since joining IWCC as an Associate Consultant in 2001, I have facilitated IWCC writing skills training, presentation skills training and meeting skills training workshops to hundreds of business professionals across North America.

I’d like to talk with you about why you should strive to develop and maintain good communication skills. I decided to conduct some research and found a very interesting survey that I believe provides outstanding credence to the value of good communication skills. The American Management Association (AMA) conducted this "Critical Skills Survey" in 2010. They focused the survey on skills they felt were of huge importance in today’s business world and in preparing for tomorrow’s challenges. Among others, these skills included: communication, critical thinking and problem solving.

AMA surveyed 2,115 managers and executives in member and client companies. I’d like to share three interesting statistics from the survey::

• Priorities in employee development, talent management and succession planning are communication skills (80.4%), critical thinking (72.4%), collaboration (71.2%), and creativity (57.3%)
• Over 3/4 of the respondents (75.7%) said that they believe these skills will become more important to their organizations in the next three to five years.
• Over 1/2 of the respondents (51.4%) said that their employees were only average in effective communication skills.

That final bullet has the most impact for me. How about you? Do you want to be only average in your ability to communicate effectively? If communication skills are at the top of the list in terms of importance for your organization, and you believe they will become more important, don’t you want to be an exceptional communicator?

Are your communication skills going to take you and your organization to the next level?

We all know that executives/senior leaders don’t listen to presentations passively - they often interrupt with questions, challenge your data and begin separate conversations. In our Executive-Ready Presentation Skills workshops, we call these executive behaviors “pushback”. Do you handle “pushback” confidently? Let us share a simple strategy to help you.

Try using IWCC’s 3-D technique. When executives challenge your presentation:

1. Detach
2. Drill Down
3. Defuse

Detach…
Panic never exudes confidence. You must detach yourself. In other words, keep your ego out of your reaction and stay calm. The executives are not challenging “you” - they are asking questions about your proposed plan and supporting data. Stay focused on the issue at hand rather than your emotional reaction to their pushback.

Drill Down…
Misinterpretation leads to disaster. With your emotional reaction under control, you must then drill down by asking good questions to understand the basis for this pushback. Is it merely an objection? Has he or she simply misunderstood or miscalculated something? If so, alleviate the executive’s concern by clarifying or adding supporting data. You can probably overcome the pushback, squelch the executive’s concern and get on with your presentation confidently ─ executives on board. 

If however the pushback comes from a deeper issue, you are likely facing a roadblock. You cannot squelch a roadblock on-the-spot. A roadblock surfaces when an executive sees a major problem that you did not see – or are not privy to. You must respond to a roadblock through three steps:

1. uncover the source by asking good questions
2. demonstrate that you understand the roadblock and the potential consequences
3. offer to work with the executive to develop a solution

Defuse…
You can only defuse what you understand. Once you understand what is causing the executive to disagree or voice the concern, then you can choose how to defuse the pushback. Without understanding, you risk responding to the pushback inappropriately…a recipe for disaster with an executive audience!

IWCC hopes the 3-D technique gives you some insight and confidence to deal with pushback from your executive/senior leader audiences.