That report you're writing ... yes, that report ... you know that people are depending on it to make a decision, don't you? And that your employer is paying you to write it? 

In my last post I introduced the DISC Personality System and how this impacts on communication. Understanding the role personality plays, enables better understanding of how we need to communicate with our audiences.

This week, I want to share four skills for being a good communicator and portraying a message effectively. Yes.  Good communication is a skill. So, what skills do good communicators use?

We all know how to speak with, email and text each other. But sending a message is only one part of the communication process. We don’t all have a good understanding of how our communication may be interpreted. The different personalities of the recipients of our communication have a direct influence on how they’ll perceive our message.

We have vast opportunity to invest in our children’s future through ICT in education.  Our responsibility, as the ICT community, is to listen to the challenges and ideas of our educators and children and be prepared to think laterally about affordable and reliable solutions.

The practice of outsourcing call centres and other services to overseas locations has been around for many years and, from recent announcements, is still growing.  However, I’ve had two recent experiences with telcos which bring to the fore the lack of ‘localness’ with off-shoring.

Telstra is presently advertising on TV, radio and internet that ‘It’s never too late to call your mum’. The power of this message about verbal communication isn’t that obvious until you consider the alternatives. Can you imagine the copy saying ‘It’s never too late to email your mum’?  Somehow, it doesn’t have the same impact.

In business, many in-house communications are time sensitive. Sometimes, a message needs to be shared immediately but in a relatively short period of time it will expire. Examples of this include announcements, status updates, questions and polls.

Micro-blogging technology provides a better solution than overloading email systems and clogging users’ inboxes.