Category: Communication

Co-Author Documents in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint Did you know that multiple people can work together at the same time as a co-author on a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PowerPoint presentation? If you have access to OneDrive or SharePoint you and colleagues are ready to get started as document co-authors. Office has functions that allow […]

Here’s a game you can play: The next time you’re in a truly dreadful meeting, decide which of these four reasons is the main cause. To put it another way: If your meeting avoids these four problems, it will probably be a pretty good one. At the start of Learning Tree’s one day course on facilitating […]

A critical skill for leaders and aspiring leaders is storytelling. Throughout history, stories have been an essential form of communication. Brain science even gives us reasons why. I love to listen to and tell stories. Most people do. We tell stories to friends at social gatherings, share stories about work successes and failures, tell stories […]

Asking questions is the only way to find out what the “real” user requirements are — what the other person really wants. But there’s a great deal more to asking the right questions than knowing the difference between open-ended and close-ended questions (in fact, there’s really no such thing as a truly open-ended question). Here’s what to ask that will let the […]

Everybody wants their writing to be concise and clear. Here’s some simple rules that you can follow to achieve both clarity and concision in the next thing you write — and a warning about when being concise is a bad idea. When I ask participants in Learning Tree’s business writing course what matters to them in business […]