Correlation Between Communication and Time, with Davina Stanley

We speak to Davina Stanley of Clarity First Program on communicating the right message to the right people in the right way.

Davina Stanley is an author on Flevy, the marketplace for business best practices. On Flevy.com, you can download Davina's materials on Structured Communication, as well as find best practices on 100s of other management topics.

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Russ Catanach
Senior Marketing Leader | Product Marketing & Management | Podcaster
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Highlights from this article

How many people are you sending this email to think about email or any sort of communication? Really? How many people are you communicating to? And if you're going more than let's say, just pick an arbitrary number and say 10, then you think, okay, well, what does that mean? https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/27964-balancing-communication-and-time-with-davina-stanley-2

You'll hope is that they arrive at the conclusion you want them to arrive at. Now if they don't, then of course there's the cost of the mistakes, the inaction or the wrong action. So you've got a whole lot of productivity drag that I think people just don't think about. They're so focused on getting that email out quickly. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/27964-balancing-communication-and-time-with-davina-stanley-2

The other dimension is the importance of the communication. I think there are two ways to thinking about that, firstly, the seniority of the audience. So that could be you know, if, if you're sending something to somebody very senior in your organization or externally somebody who matters a lot to your organization, maybe a really big customer or something like that, or it could be just the impact or the message. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/27964-balancing-communication-and-time-with-davina-stanley-2

I think there's something with this speed of business and speed of working where we really need to be thinking a whole lot more before we send anything out and, you know, preparing https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/27964-balancing-communication-and-time-with-davina-stanley-2

When you understand yourself, then it's so much easier to understand other people and adjust accordingly to know where you're coming from. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/27964-balancing-communication-and-time-with-davina-stanley-2

Working with lawyers. And so we taught, I don't know, 1500 lawyers over a couple of years, how to communicate complex ideas, how to think and how to get their advice across in 30 seconds. And so we were doing that a couple of days a week, and then we'd be working with other clients on other days and we realized that the, the lawyers inside the law firm were so accustomed to communicating with each other, that they would communicate as though everyone was of an analytical mindset, very, very focused on precision and seeing all of the, the logic behind the reasoning and so on and building up towards the connection. That'd be like they would at law school, they taught specifically how to do that, whereas their clients were often very different. https://www.solvecast.com/articles/detail/27964-balancing-communication-and-time-with-davina-stanley-2

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