Effective Messaging

When you have an important meeting or presentation coming up, it’s common to prepare by practicing your key points and anticipating the objections others might have. Bringing this type of thinking to your everyday work is a powerful, yet often overlooked technique.

Think about the key messages you want to reinforce about your team, your work output, and/or your value to the company. Take time to craft statements that are true, supportable, and are stated in a way that allows people to draw the correct inferences. Then practice. Say them out loud to make sure they’re conversational. Make sure you have several different ways to say the same thing. Anticipate objections and craft your responses in neutral language. Then start using them.

The most important thing is to just do it. Start working your key messages into conversations. If you pay attention, you will see plenty of opportunities to do so. This is about informing others, not necessarily selling them. Others need to understand the value of your team, your projects, and your own work, in order to make the best decisions for the business.

Creating and delivering key messages is both a skill and an art. The more practice you have, the more easily you can deliver on both.