One of the most common pieces of advice given to speakers is to lower your voice at the end of a sentence to emphasize it. But, as it turns out, that might not be the best advice after all. In practice, it has been shown that speakers who deliberately lower their voices at the end of sentences again and again are [...]
By Gesine Engelage-Meyer and Sonja Hanau Very few meetings are productive. And yet we spend a large part of our working time with them. Online meetings that have just been discontinued have exacerbated the phenomenon of "meeting marathons". Sonja Hanau, an expert in good meeting culture, explains the self-sustaining meeting cycle and suggests simple ways to finally break it. "I come [...]
by Arno Fischbacher It's five minutes to ten in the morning in the home office, the laptop has already warmed up and the first tricky phone calls with a supplier have been made. MS Teams is routinely booted up and the webcam adjusted. Now it's just a matter of quickly removing the sports anorak from the background of the picture and moving the coffee cup out of sight. After all, [...]
How to become a better listener How well and frequently you listen to others says more about your leadership potential than your intelligence or personality. Guest article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, first published on fastcompany.com Good listening is an underestimated skill. How well and often you listen to others says much more about leadership potential than your intelligence or other [...]
I find it a nuisance of the first degree when large piles of unattractive terms repeatedly obstruct my view of meaning and message during presentations. Do sentences like this sound so familiar to you: "On the subject of controlling, it should be said that the up-to-dateness of the data is of the utmost importance for your success..."? Active language means using alterbative formulations for [...]
Do you know that moment on the phone when you take a call and after just three words you know exactly: "This is now acquisition!"? When you hear clearly from your tone and voice that the callers are not concerned with your well-being, but solely with your own sales? This impersonal tone not only leads to failure all too often [...]
They called me "Machiavelli" behind closed doors. How did this come about? In the eighties, I was the director of a theatre company. Cellar theatre, 200 seats, the audience flocked in droves. The artistic successes were great, the working conditions and salaries a disaster. And I had to make unpleasant decisions all the time. On stage I was [...]
"Isn't that manipulation?!" I hear attentive participants ask again and again in seminars – usually when we are working on particularly subtle mechanisms of voice and speech. Often, the seductive appearance of a populist flickered across the screens the day before, reminding us of the power of rhetoric. "If this whole confrontation with the voice serves [...]
A few days ago, I was invited to a preliminary talk for a routine operation that has been pending for some time. Not really exciting thing, minimally invasive, after a night in the clinic I should go home again. As an enlightened patient, I prepare myself well, study the current treatment methods. I am fascinated by the idea that the doctors [...]
It's five minutes to ten in the morning in the home office, the laptop has already warmed up and the first tricky phone calls with a supplier have been made. MS Teams is routinely booted up and the webcam adjusted. Now it's just a matter of quickly removing the sports anorak from the background of the picture and moving the coffee cup out of sight. After all, the [...]
