Leadership Communication--Chapter 5 Summary

CHAPTER 5 USING GRAPHICS AND POWERPOINT FOR A LEADERSHIP EDGE

Leaders need to know how and when to use graphics. Graphics improve presentations and documents, particularly if the material is primarily quantitative, structural, pictorial, or so complicated that it can be illustrated more efficiently and effectively with a visual aid than with words alone. Graphics will contribute to the success of your oral and written communication.

RECOGNIZING WHEN TO USE GRAPHICS
Specifically, graphics should serve the following purposes:
1. Reinforce the message.
2. Provide a road map to the structure of presentation.
3. Illustrate relationships and concepts visually.
4. Support assertions.
5. Emphasize important ideas.
6. Maintain and enhance interests.

SELECTING AND DESIGNING EFFECTIVE DATA CHARTS
For data charts to add to your presentation or document, you first need to clarify your message and then you can determine the type and content of the graph that will add to, support, or explain that message best. Although you may have someone to help design your graphics, particularly if you have reached a high level in an organization, you will find it useful as you manage others and oversee the creation of your presentations to possess some knowledge of the best types of graphs, as well as the best designs, to ensure the clarity and accuracy of the different kinds of data you will be conveying to your audiences.
Edward Tufte, a Yale University statistician and author of several books on graphic design, provides the following best practice guidelines for creating data charts. Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. Graphical displays should:

• Show the data
• Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than methodology, graphic, design, the technology of graphic production, or something else.
• Avoid distorting what the data have to say.
• Present many numbers in a small space.
• Make large data sets coherent.
• Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data.
• Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure.
• Serve a reasonably clear purpose:description, exploration, taulation, or decoration.
• Be closely integrated with the stastitical and verbal descriptions of data set.

MAKING THE MOST OF POWERPOINT AS A DESIGN AND PRESENTATION TOOL

Top ten Guidelines for Using Graphics and PowerPoint for a Leadership Edge

1. Decide on your message, determine what information or data best supports it, and then decide how best to show that data graphically.

2. Use graphics for the right reasons, such as to reinforce your message, to provide a road map of your presentation, and to support assertions.

3. Select the right kind of graph to illustrate your message.

4. Use integrity in selecting and designing all graphics. making sure any graphs do not distort the data.

5. Keep your graphic simple. The graphic should make your message easier to understand, not more difficult; however, make sure it is meanigful and actually says something.

6. Use a title that captures the "so what?" of your slide so that your audience sees immediately the message the graphs is communicating.

7. Create your own PowerPoint template or modify the standard ones Microsoft provides so that the presentation reflects your personality or that of your company.

8. Make the font size and any graphics images large enough for the audience to see even from the back of the room.

9. Be careful with your color selections; go for contrast but conservative.

10. Avoid overusing or misusing animation.

Leadership Communication Chapter 4 Summary

CHAPTER 4 DEVELOPING AND DELIVERING LEADERSHIP PRESENTATIONS

PLANNNG YOUR PRESENTATION
In the planning phase of developing your presentation, you need to:
(1) determine your strategy;
(2) analyze your audience;
(3) select the medium and delivery method;
(4) organize and establish your logical structure and;
(5) Round-Table Presentations. You should select the round-table approach any time you want to achieve one of the following: -Encourage an informal, interactive discussion.
-Receive input from audience members.

Stand-Up Extemporaneous Presentations
One of the most popular deliver methods for business presentations is still the stand-up extemporaneous presentation. It is the most difficult but also the most effective form of presentation if structured and delivered correctly. Extemporaneous presentations offer three major advantages over any other method. They allow you to:
1. Maintain eye contact and rapport with your audience.
2. Make adjustments based on the audience's response.
3. Appear confident and knowledgeable.

Impromptu Presentations
Many of the presentations you will deliver will be impromptu, which means you are called on to deliver them without much, if any, warning. This is the classic "elevator speech," in which you only have the time the elevator takes to go between floors to answer the questions.

Establishing a Logical and Effective Presentation Structure
The organization or structure of a presentation proceeds from the needs and interests of the audience, your purpose, and the demands of the subject matter. When you start to outline or map out your presentation, you will refer first to the analysis of your audience to determine the most effective structure. In most cases, it works best to stated the conclusions or recommendations and then provide the supporting data; however, if your audience will be resistant to your conclusions or recommendations, then you may want to build our argument and present the evidence first.
As you amp out your preliminary plans for the organization of the presentation, remember that in a speech the audience cannot go back and look at the preceding message as they might in a document. You thus need to make sure that each point is logically related to the ideas that precede it and the information that follows, and that you use adequate, even obvious, transitions from point to point.
When creating and organizing a presentation as a team, you should establish the format first, and since most presentations routinely use PowerPoint templates, you should select one that meets your needs.

PREPARING A PRESENTATION TO ACHIEVE THE GREATEST IMPACT
After you have analyzed your audience, developed your communication strategy, and determined the overall structure, you are ready to start preparing the actual presentation. The preparation consists of developing the introduction, body, and conclusion; creating the graphics; testing the flow and logix; editing and proofreading; and practicing.

Presenting Effectively and with Greater Confidence
When it comes time to present, you should concentrates on your delivery style, focusing particularly on eye contact, stance, speech, and overall effect. You want to appear comfortable, confident, enthusiastic, and professional. Since much of the success of your presentation will be determined by how your audience perceives you right at the beginning, you should be prepared to establish your expertise and your value to the audience immediately and maintain that posistive ethos throughout.
The best way to project a positive ethos is to believe in what you are saying and to be fully prepared. As obvious as it may sound, nothing will take the place of preparation. To deliver presentation, you must be prepared.
To appear confident and project a positive ethos when presenting, you need to do the following:
1. Focus your energy on your audience.
2. Create and maintain rapport.
3. Adopt a secure stance.
4. Establish and maintain eye contact.
5. Project and vary your oice.
6. Demonstrate your message with gestures.
7. Adjust pace of delivery based on the audience response.

Leadership Development Within Groups

Communicating Effectively

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/leaddev/he499w.htm

Communication might be thought of as an "idea transplant." We send 300 to 1,000 messages a day. We probably receive that many messages too.
Communication consists of two basic skills: listening and feedback. There are messages we intend to send, messages we actually send, messages the listener thinks he/she heard, responses from the listener due to what he/she heard, and our reaction to the exchange of messages. Is it any wonder things may get garbled along the way?
Good listening takes a lot of practice. It requires concentration. Our minds think four times faster than a person can speak so our minds tend to wander. As we listen we need to focus on a speaker's words, body language, intended message and even unintended message. We need to listen without judging what we hear. A leader learns to listen at least as much as he/she speaks.
When we speak, we give feedback that includes expressing feelings, sharing information and ideas, understanding others and making observations. There are many ways to give feedback. "I" messages are one type.

Chapters 5 Summary --Essentials of Negotiation

CHAPTER 5 PERCEPTION, COGNITION, AND COMMUNICATION

Perception, cognition, and communication are fundamental processes that governs how individuals construct and interpret the interaction that takes place in a negotiation. Reduced to its essence, negotiation is a form of interpersonal communication, which itself is a subject of the broader category of human perception and communication.

PERCEPTION AND NEGOTIATION

The Role of Perception
Negotiators approach each negotiation guided by their perceptions of past situations and current attitudes and bahaviors. Perception is the process by which individuals connect to their environment. The process of ascribing meaning to messages received is strongly influenced by the receiver's current state of mind, role, and understanding or comprehension of earlier communications.

Perceptual Distortion in Negotiation
In any given negotiation, the perceiver's own needs, desires, motivations, and personal experiences may create a predisposition about the other party. Such predispositions are most problematic when they lead to biases and errors in perception and subsequent communication. There are four major perceptual errors: stereotyping, halo effects, selective perception, and projections. Stereotyping and halo effects are examples of perceptual distortion by generalization: small amounts of perceptual information are used to draw large conclusions about individuals. Selective perception and projection are, in contrast, examples of perceptual distortion by the anticipation of encountering certain attributes and qualities in another person. In each case, the perceiver filters and distorts information to arrive at a consistent view.

Framing
A frame is the subjective mechanism through which people evaluate and make sense out of situations, leading them to pursue or avoid subsuquent actions. Framing is about focusing, shaping, and organizing the world around us--making sense of complex realities and defining it in ways that are meaningful to us.
An important aspect of framing is the cognitive heuristics approach, which examines the ways in which negotiators make systematic errors in judgment when they process information.
The cognitive heuristic approach to framing focuses on how a party perceives and shapes the outcome (particularly with regard to risk), and how the party's frame tends to persist regardless of the events and information that follow it.

Cognitive Biases in Negotiation
Negotiators have a tendency to make systematic errors when they process information. These errors, collectively labeled cognitive biases, tend to impede negotiator performace: they include (1) the irrational escalation of commitment, (2) the mythical belief that the issues under negotiation are all fixd-pie, (3) the process of anchoring and adjustment in decision making, (4) issue and problem framing, (5) the availibility of information, (6) the winner's curse, (7)negotiator overconfidence, (8) the law of small numbers, (9) self-serving biases, (10) the endowment effect, (11) the tendency to ignore others' cognitions, and (12) the process of reactive devaluation.

MANAGING MISPERCEPTIONS AND COGNITIVE BIASES IN NEGOTIATION
Misperceptions and cognitive biases arise automatically and out of conscious awareness as negotiators gather and process information. The best advice that negotiators can follow is simply to be aware of the negative aspects of these effects, and to discuss them in a structured manner within their team and with their counterparts.

Reframing
Negotiators may apply several different frames to the same negotiation. When different negotiators apply different, or mismatched, frames, they will find the bargaining process ambigous and frustrating. In such situations, it may become necessary to reframe the negotiation systematically, to assist the other party in reframing the negotiation, or to establish a common frame or set of frames within which the negotiation may be conducted more productively.

WHAT IS COMMUNICATED DURING NEGOTIATION?
Most of the communication during negotiation is not about negotiator preferences. The blend of integrative versus distributive content varies as a function of the issues being discussed, but it also clear that the content of communication is only partly responsible for negotiation outcomes. For example, one party may choose not communicate certain things (e.g, the reason she chose a different supplier), so her counterpart (e.g., the supplier not chosen) may be unaware why some outcomes occur. There are five categories of communication that take place during negotiations:
1. Offers and Counteroffers
2. Information about Alternatives (BATNA)
3. Information about Outcomes
4. Social Accounts
5. Communications about Process

HOW PEOPLE COMMUNICATE IN NEGOTIATION
While it may seem obvious that how negotiators communicate is as important as what they have to say, research has examined different aspects of how people communicate in negotiation. There are two aspects related to the "how" of communication: the characteristics of language that communicators use, and the selection of a communication channel for sending and receiving messages.

HOW TO IMPROVE COMMUNICATION IN NEGOTIATION
Failure and distortions in perception, cognition, and communication are the most dominant contributors to breakdowns and failures in negotiation. Research consistenly demonstrates that even those parties whose actual goals are compatible or integrative may either fail to reach agreement or reach suboptimal agreements because of the isperceptions of the other party or becuase of breakdowns in the communication in negotiation: the use of questions, listening, and role reversal.

MOOD, EMOTION, AND NEGOTIATION
The role of mood and emotion in negotiation has been the subject of an increasing body of recent theory and research during the last decade. The distinction between mood and emotion is based on three characteristics: specificity, intensity, and duration. Mood states are more diffuse, less intense and directed at more specific targets. There are amny new and exciting developments in the study of mood, emotion, and negotiation, and we can present only a limited overview here. The following are some selected findings.
1. Negotiations create both positive and negative emotions
2. Positive emotions generally have positive consequences for negotiations
-Positive feelings are more likely to lead the parties towards integrative
-Positive feelings promote persistence
-Positive feelings result from fair procedures during negotiation
3. Negative Emotions Generally Have Negative Consequences for Negotiations.
4. Emotions can be used strategically as negotiation tactics.

SPECIAL COMMUNICATION CONSIDERATIONS AT THE CLOSE OF NEGOTIATIONS
As negotiation come to a close, negotiators must attend to two key aspects of communication and negotiation simultaneously: the avoidance of fatal mistakes, and the achievment of satisfactory closure in constructive manner.