This cast describes how to determine your boss's preferred communication style, and how to be more effective knowing it.

We periodically get asked by corporate clients to help not just managers, but also individual contributors. Sometimes it's a highly effective performer who has relationship issues, and sometimes it's helping an entire organization, getting the directs on board with what their managers are doing with One on Ones, or Feedback, or even organizational change.

When we do work with groups other than managers, we get all kinds of questions about working with their boss. The first question we get, is how do I give feedback to my boss? For you long time listeners, you know the answer to that one – you don't. The question we don't often get, one we think is really good, is how can I influence my boss?

And the answer to that question starts with knowing how he or she communicates. Here's how to learn what's best for your boss and how to be more effective with it.

1. Bosses (and Everyone Else) Tend to Be Either Readers or Listeners
2. How To Tell Which Your Boss Is
3. How To Be More Effective Knowing It

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This cast concludes our Career Tools' recommendations for textual communications on portable devices.

1. Put Your Device Away When You Are Addressed
2. Don't Touch Your Device When Conversing
3. Rare – RARE – Urgency Trumps This
4. Ask To Be Excused
5. And Finally, Interrupt Politely

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This cast describes Career Tools' recommendations for textual communications on portable devices.

If you've ever been talking to someone who was distracted and then proceeded to answer a text message, send an email, post on Facebook, "Tweet", or in any other way use their cell phone, smart phone, pager, or any other mobile device to communicate, this cast is for you. Feel free to start playing this cast for the offender, on your own mobile device, and then hit them over the head with it.

Here is Career Tools simple guidance for using mobile phones and messaging devices.

1. Put Your Device Away When You Are Addressed
2. Don't Touch Your Device When Conversing
3. Rare – RARE – Urgency Trumps This
4. Ask To Be Excused
5. And Finally, Interrupt Politely

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This cast explains a simple application of DiSC Behavior on greeting others.

Greeting others seems simple enough.  Most of us probably use the same greeting for everyone.  If we're greeting a lot of people, it sure makes it easier for us.

But if we greet everyone the same, roughly, how does that square with what Drucker teaches us: Communication is what the listener does?  It doesn't.  Most of us tend to communicate in ways that make sense to US, but that only works WELL with 25% of our potential audience.  Here's how to start making a better first impression even earlier in a conversation or professional exchange.

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This cast describes how to begin any effort to change an organization.

At some point, each of us as managers are either going to initiate a change, or have to manage our part of a larger change process. It's usually hard work, and if it's someone else's change process, we get the "squeeze": our directs expect us to know stuff which no one is telling us.

There's a better way. Manager Tools does work with corporate clients, and when we help with a change effort, we run a change playbook. The first step in any change effort is to create an EMOTIONAL appeal to those who will be involved in the change. And that is NEVER achieved with financially solid spreadsheets which show a clear cost-benefit win for the change.

Visual, emotional persuasion is the single biggest idea we have ever come across when it comes to change efforts. If you do this well, other stuff is much easier. If you don't, everything else is MUCH harder.

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This cast describes a simple verbal tool for addressing tension, conflict or other ineffective emotions in the workplace.

This cast describes the second part in our series how to think about being persuasive in a presentation.

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This cast describes how to think about being persuasive in a presentation.

One of the most maligned arts in professional life today is persuasion. The classic case of persuasion falling out of favor is how often professional sales people are viewed as golfers with big expense accounts. Or, perhaps even more perniciously, why is it that all of the sales roles in technology firms are called "Business Development"? Sales is associated with persuasion, and that taint keeps far too many managers from embracing the real value of persuasion.

This cast describes how to leave an effective voicemail.

If you've ever gotten a voicemail which sounded like, "[your name], this is [their name], call me," you know why we're doing this cast.

In this cast, we describe how to be effective in everyday conversations.

We've spent a great deal of time on managerial communications, and for good reason. Managers rely on communication to achieve the very basic requirement of their role: aligning and inspiring others to achieve more than they could do on their own. As a former boss of mine was fond of saying, "you may be smarter than me, but you're not smarter than WE."