Guerric

Knowing how to deliver a great speech is an essential skill for a leader.

Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Barack Obama… They are great speakers. We all remember them for how they spoke in public.

But we don’t deliver speeches to such large audiences every day. Right?

We’re more likely to talk to the team we lead, to present something to stakeholders, or to speak at an event.

So it’s good to use these public figures to inspire us. But we also need practical tools to improve how we convey a message or tell a story.

For more than 9 years, I’ve been writing to educate, convince, inspire, negotiate, and sell.

Here are 16 practical things you can apply to improve your writing…

16 Useful Things that Will Help to Sell and Convince through Writing

1. Know who you’re writing to.

Who is going to read? What are they interested in? Keep one reader in mind. You shouldn’t address a group but just one reader.

2. Value your readers’ time more than yours.

Each piece should be the one that your reader shouldn’t miss regarding a specific topic. If not, there’s no reason to hit “publish” or “send”.

As a team leader, you must agree:

Constantly making sure that your team remains engaged and motivated is a real challenge, especially since we’re all so busy.

Here’s a simple solution to know how they feel:

Organise a Team Retrospective with your team.

How to Run Your Next Team Retrospective: The Clearing Session

At the end of every week, meet with your team and ask these two questions:

1. What is not working for you?
2. What is working for you?

One person at a time answers the first question. And when everyone is done—you included—the team starts answering the second question.

Creativity is key in established businesses as well as startups.

The former needs to find new areas of growth while leveraging and fighting against its structural inertia, whilst the latter must deal with initial fragility.

Problem: many idea killers prevent innovation from happening.

In many cases, brainstorming is one of these idea killers.

Let’s see why.

Creating and implementing new ideas are essential, core competencies in today’s business world. As Rita Gunther McGrath explains in her book The End of Competitive Advantage: