“Sticky” learning, or microlearning, is an educational approach that offers bite-sized learning units to help learners achieve a goal. An example of sticky learning is whisper courses. These are a series of emails with a simple suggestion, or 'whisper,' for learners to apply new theories to everyday interactions like feedback 1:1’s or team meetings.
In the 1880s, a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus, launched a study on human memory. He developed a theory called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, which illustrates the rate at which people forget new information.
The new year signals an opportunity to have those meaningful conversations. As we continue to adapt to a remote-first work setup, how do we make sure our people are equipped to balance productivity with their personal wellbeing?
How do we ensure that 2021 is a year we look back on as one of focused growth and development instead of a chaotic, stress-inducing mess?
How do you create a culture of collaboration in your workplace? The classic improv rule “Yes, and.” has long been used (and overused) in business, it’s still a great starting point, no matter where your company is in its collaboration journey.
Oak and Reeds Founder & CEO Dave Collins
As more and more employees demand flexible or remote work, managers around the globe face the challenge of learning to lead effective virtual teams.
Oak and Reeds founder and CEO Dave Collins shared a variety of tips in a recent HR.com article to make virtual teams work more productively, including verbalizing nonverbal communication, sharing slides in advance, and understanding the right virtual collaboration tool for your needs.
To learn more about virtual collaboration skills and how to apply them to your work, read the full article in HR.com.
Public speaking is one of the most important—and most dreaded—forms of communication. It’s a critical business skill, no matter your role. Leaders and employees alike need to be able to confidently articulate their messages, whether it’s during a weekly team meeting or an all-hands presentation to the entire company.
People are afraid of public speaking for a number of reasons—they don’t feel prepared, they don’t want to make a mistake, or they’re afraid to look silly in front of their colleagues. But like FDR said in his famous inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
To help you overcome your fear of public speaking, try these techniques and get ready to inform, persuade and inspire audiences.
Define your point of view
Before you develop your presentation, ask yourself the following questions:
Why you? Why are you qualified to present this material? What is your expertise? How can you make it clear that the audience should listen to you?
Why them? What does the audience expect to get out of this presentation? Do you want to meet those expectations, or subvert them? What is the best way to reach this specific audience?
Why do you care? How does this topic excite you? Even if you’re presenting at a weekly status meeting, find one interesting data point or insight to make your presentation more memorable.
What action do you want to inspire? What is the one big takeaway you want to convey to the audience? Make it obvious—say it at the beginning, several times in the middle, and again at the end to drill it into your audience’s heads.
Manage anxiety
The anxiety we feel before delivering presentations is unfortunately not something we can control—it’s been hard-wired into our physiology as a response to danger. While that “fight or flight” adrenaline rush may have helped our ancestors fight an unexpected saber-toothed tiger, today you can take advantage of that “bonus energy” to be louder, more energetic and more focused during presentations.
You can also try to calm your anxiety with a pre-presentation ritual, which journalist Daniel McGinn explores in the book Psyched Up. Just like baseball players have an at-bat ritual, you can create a routine that will take your focus away from your nerves and get you into the optimal headspace for presenting.
Before I give keynote speeches, my ritual is to walk around the block while listening to a podcast about basketball. It calms me down and gives me a minute to relax before I put on my “game face.” Other examples include: listening to a favorite song, using a guided meditation app, power posing, or—as one Oak and Reeds workshop participant suggested—go into a bathroom stall, close your eyes, and imagine yourself screaming at the top of your lungs! No matter how quirky it is, experiment with different strategies to channel that adrenaline boost for good.
Nail your opening
Another public speaking technique is to memorize the opening of your presentation. The opening is when you’ll likely be the most nervous, and it’s also when the audience will be the most skeptical. Audiences will decide in that first minute whether to keep listening or not, so it’s important to confidently deliver your opening and set the tone for the rest of your presentation.
That said, while the opening should be scripted, the rest of the presentation can be an outline. Scripting your entire presentation is risky because if you forget something, you’ll go into panic mode without a fallback plan. Great public speakers are able to adapt in the moment based on audience engagement, gracefully deviating from the plan.
Rebound from mistakes
Speaking of throwing away the script, what do you do when you make an embarrassing mistake? Answer: own it, and move on.
If you spill coffee on yourself, drop the slide clicker, or notice toilet paper stuck to your heel (unfortunately all very real things that could happen), acknowledge it with a self-deprecating joke. If you don’t, the audience will be distracted, wondering whether you noticed the issue and cringing on your behalf. By simply owning the mistake, you’ll drive empathy from the audience and they’ll find you more relatable and likeable throughout the rest of the presentation.
Public speaking can be a daunting task. But if you incorporate these tips, you’ll set yourself up for success—whether you’re presenting in an internal presentation, a customer-facing meeting or keynote speech.
Interested in training your team on public speaking techniques? Learn more about our workshops on the Oak and Reeds Presentation Skills page.
The concept of “Yes, and” has been, in my opinion, beaten to death in the business community. That’s in no small part thanks to consultants and trainers (like me!) who use this concept as a panacea for solving collaboration skill-building challenges.
“Yes, and” implies there are only two people in a collaborative transaction; one to share an idea, and the other to build on it. Why is that wrong? Because 99% of real-world challenges, upon closer inspection, involve multiple parties. These challenges can’t be solved with pairs of neatly organized “call and response” surface-level solutions.
Collaboration at work is messy and confusing. How can we fix that this year?
My solution? Include a third person. We need to start approaching challenges with a question: “Who is the third person we’re not discussing here? What do they want? What can we give them as part of the solution?”
Why is including the third person important?
1. It forces non-binary decision-making - Boolean, “ones and zeros” logic is built into every piece of technology we have, but that doesn’t mean we as humans have to problem solve like an AI robot. Moving away from binary, Yes/No decision-making helps us think about the ripple effects of our decisions in a more comprehensive way.
2. It forces inclusion of multiple points of view - It’s simple to focus a team on hitting a single metric or target. It’s much much harder to keep multiple goals in your team’s crosshairs.
Think of it like exercise (metaphor alert!). It’s easy to pick up a weight with your arm and curl it up to your shoulder. It’s much much harder to do the same movement while balancing on one foot on on unstable surface. You get much more out of a workout if you can engage balance, stability and kinetic challenges into the same movement. The same logic applies when building collaborative problem-solving skills with your team.
The more inputs you can bring to the table, the more you’ll build your team’s ability to think dynamically about multiple stakeholders.
3. If you can include three you can include seventeen - How many customers, internal and external, do you have? I’m talking about your team, the cross-functional teams you require input from to approve budgets, your customers, their bosses determining their budgets, etc. How often do you actively think of ways to bring wins to those farther down the list?
If you can think about a third person’s relationship to a deal or solution, then you can start to think about a fourth. Then a fifth. Keep these small stakeholders top of mind and you’ll discover easy wins that come at little to no cost for the larger initiative.
In these newsletters I’ll be introducing you to simple group exercises you can facilitate on your own. This month, we’re looking at how to demonstrate the power of “Yes, and, and” to your teams. The following exercise is something you can do at the beginning of your weekly team check-in meeting or in the first five minutes of a daily standup.
Skill: Practicing “Yes, and, and”
Exercise: “I’m a Tree”
Time: 5-7 minutes
# of People: 10-15
After you try this out, let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear how this approach changes the way you look at the challenges you’re addressing in a particular meeting or collaborative setting.
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