Life

Executive Communication in an instant

My friend, long time colleague and US Immigration green card referee, not to mention sometime commentor on my blog posts, Nigel Dessau, runs a great blog, podcast, video series called the 3-Minute Mentor. Well worth subscribing.

I get lots of instant messaging interrupts, Lync internally, Chatter for internal social media, Facebook, Twitter, even Yahoo from time to time. Today I had an interrupt from a colleague that wanted to get some information over to our Mergers and Acquisitions team, it sounded like a useful idea but it took quite a few interactions to get to the point of what he was asking, why it was interesting a what it applied to. Then after I agreed a couple of to-do’s, and did mine and told him, I closed the chat only for it to spring back open with some additional info and ended with an apology “Sorry…”

Here are my top 3-tips for communicating with anyone over instant messaging, I didn’t check to see if the 3-Minute mentor covered this…

1. In executive communication be clear and concise about what you want, if you can’t, don’t ask 😉
2. Never apologise unless you are asked to, then think twice unless its obvious you’ve made a mistake
3. Never be afraid to ask… there is no such thing as a dumb question, only a dumb executive 🙂

 

3 thoughts on “Executive Communication in an instant”

    1. Thanks Fran, indeed these were a direct paste from the IM session, it was fun to poke and prod to get to what the guy wanted but pretty time consuming.

      I’ve noticed that more and more email is becoming type and shoot IM style conversation rather than a considered response.

      ++Mark. [yeah I use Windows Phone 7.5, got to admit, I quite like it…]

      Reply

Leave a Reply