The digital age also requires penmanship

Today's business leaders have countless communication channels: e-mail, teleconferencing, text messaging, instant messaging, websites, Web Logs, and satellite communications, not to mention old communications way too.

However, new media and convenient means of communication also have the disadvantage of being more prone to misunderstandings. Employees may ignore, misunderstand, or misuse your message. Information that is ill-expressed and under-observed is likely to be drowned in crowded company inboxes.

Pens Still Matter

In short, despite the digital age, the written word is still a basic human communication tool, whether it’s developing a business plan, writing emails, reports, performance reviews, or doing business Positioning statements and persuasive written presentation skills remain a core skill that leaders must master.

Although many companies have a public relations department or corporate publicity department responsible for drafting external publicity documents, business leaders must rely on their "pen" to handle more and more daily internal documents. In this way, the entire organization may know exactly how the leader's writing is.

A person in charge of executive search firm Korn Ferry said: "More and more people have the misconception that the development of multimedia technology makes writing ability less important, which is completely wrong. The core of communication It is the content, and the expression must be closely related to the topic and concise. When we recruit people, we pay great attention to their writing ability, which can be seen from their resumes, application letters or various written materials related to work performance."

Outstanding business leaders know that while speeches can boost morale, the effects are fleeting; Whether it's to boost morale, declare victory, admit defeat, or motivate employees to be more productive, the impact of written communication lasts.

Writing styles and styles are changing

In fact, business leaders are now spending more time than ever communicating in writing. Email has become the primary form of communication within and outside companies. The Goizueta School of Business surveyed 1,200 managers and found that more than half of them spend at least two hours a day responding to emails, and 30% spend at least an additional hour at home.

As philanthropist Jeff Skoll, former president of eBay Inc. put it, "It's interesting that in this age of email as the primary form of communication, people are writing more than ever. Now, While people spend so much time in front of their computers communicating in writing, the art of written communication is on the decline."

Of course, we're not just limited to email. Business leaders with good computer skills may set up personal review sites or weblogs, which are often referred to as "blogs." In the United States, the number of weblogs is as high as one million and growing. In addition, instant messaging, once only used by teenagers in chat rooms, has quickly found its place in the enterprise as a business tool. A year ago, Forrester Research estimated that instant messaging penetration in businesses was 45 percent, and that number must be higher now. Both IBM and Microsoft are adopting and actively promoting the development of this technology, so instant messaging is set to become widespread.

The style of business writing is also changing. The rise of e-mail and other electronic communication methods coincides with the need for business leaders to seek direct and targeted communication. The flattening of the management structure means that business leaders can no longer rely on hierarchical power to enforce their own will, and can no longer rely on hard orders to arrange the work of employees, but must instead use persuasion and encouragement. This requires more sophisticated communication skills, that is, one-on-one, emotionally moving and understanding. A survey of business leaders found that the messages that caught employees' attention were well-targeted, straightforward, emotionally resonant, and sent from people they trusted or respected.

First-class leaders have first-class writing skills

According to Knight, CEO of an Internet company, "Great business leaders and those who aspire to be great business leaders can successfully communicate important messages. Outstanding written skills. They powerfully articulate between the lines the values, business core, and strategies necessary to make the company thrive, summarizing and reinforcing all messages conveyed in a variety of ways."

General Electric's Welch (Jack Welch) Makes a habit of handwriting notes to employees at all levels, from part-timers to senior management. Some employees even frame the notes as evidence of leadership care.

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett is another figure who loves to communicate by letter. Every year, he writes a letter to the company's shareholders, which attracts the attention of all the media, and is published in Fortune magazine as a summary, and stock analysts around the world will also do a detailed study of it. Buffett's letter could move markets and create wealth.

But it's not just the older generation of business leaders who understand the power of the written word. Skoll is a firm believer that what is written lays the foundation of eBay's culture. In the early days of eBay, many employees—such as those in customer service—were scattered around the world, and communication with them was always via email. "If the primary form of communication in an organization is in writing, how do you structure the organization, create the culture of the organization? I think the answer is: when you write any document, you have to be thoughtful and articulate," Skoll said. . Company founder Pierre Omidyar and I both put a lot of effort into writing written materials to make our intentions clear."

Bad Text Everywhere

While business leaders may also recognize the importance of serious writing, due to time pressure, the quality of their text is often subpar. Misuse of terminology, ambiguity, punctuation errors, syntactic or grammatical errors are common in business correspondence.

Sam Hill, a consultant and author who taught business writing at university, doesn't think the grammatical quality of business letters is getting worse: "I think it's always been bad. With the 'help' of tools such as email and the presentation software PowerPoint, these grammatically awkward business people were able to send out unedited, error-ridden documents, thus making the problem more known."

E-mail no can improve this situation. Compared with other communication methods, although this medium has increased the importance of the writing ability of business leaders to a greater extent, the information conveyed through it is often grammatically incomprehensible and full of errors. Probably half of the emails in your inbox are like this.

The reasons are manifold. Emails are inherently more colloquial than letters, so the author pays little attention to the structure and wording of their content. And because it takes time to process an inbox full of emails, business leaders tend to keep it simple.

The rise of instant messaging heralds a worsening of the problem. It eliminates the process of drafting and revising the letter, which is an important part of writing a good letter. Along with written communication, instant communication is an extreme example of the rapid development of oral communication.

Deborah Valentine of the Writing Center at the Goizueta School of Business noted, "Most of us don't pay much attention to grammar and spelling when communicating in chat rooms and via instant messaging, because the immediacy of this type of communication makes Communicators don't have time to pay attention to grammatical formatting."

Back to Traditional Grammar

While writing conventions are often violated, does this violation really affect communication? Is this new way of writing really bad?

John Patrick, president of Attitude, believes that good writing skills will continue to be as important to business leaders in the future. But he insists that people shouldn't put the blame for bad writing grammar on the medium: "E-mail is just a form of writing. Like writing with a pen on paper, some people write well, others poorly. Writing Proper e-mail is useful and has many advantages, such as being able to be arbitrarily sorted, archived, retrieved, etc."

Writing grammar seems to be gaining attention again. Goizueta Business School conducted a survey of business leaders and found that 60% of business leaders prefer to use standard business writing formats. Valentine believes this is because traditional systems of grammar and punctuation have developed over the centuries to help readers better understand the meaning of texts. "The purpose of segmenting an article is to give the reader a visual break; punctuation guides the reader to slow down or stop reading where appropriate."

Valentine thinks the expedited nature of email and instant messaging is inappropriate Communication at the corporate leadership level. There are three reasons. For one, not every audience knows what acronyms mean, and the time you save while writing your email is likely to be spent explaining those words. Smart business leaders write emails with the recipients in mind.

Second, it is very important to accurately express the meaning of words. Buffett believes that if he doesn't understand someone, he thinks that person is trying to fool him.

The last reason is that some sloppy emails can cost a company dearly, as Merrill Lynch recently learned. Some of the company's analysts have inadvertently downplayed some of the stocks they have publicly touted in emails. After the emails came to light, Merrill was in bad shape, had to reform to avoid another conflict of interest between analysts and investors, and accepted a $100 million fine.

Writing training to hone writing skills

Business leaders with poor grammar can easily find help to improve their writing skills. The rise of business writing training is evidence that business leaders are increasingly aware of the importance of written communication skills. Business leaders and consultants are increasingly turning to communications experts, including journalists, for advice. "I took a writing class and it really helped me," said Knight, CEO of the Internet company. "I write all of my articles with the belief that first-class expression will have the Helps improve performance, which results in great businesses and leaders."

No matter what article you need to write properly, you can always turn to one of the many writing coaches, writing classes, or professional ghostwriters.

Lynn Kearney has been consulting in communications and organization for over two decades. He said: "Our clients, senior leaders of technology and financial services companies, understand the growing importance of clear, persuasive written communication in communications within and outside their organizations. Explosive growth provides companies with endless business opportunities, but also brings them a lot of information to digest. We now often receive calls directly from senior business leaders, explicitly asking us to provide them with tailor-made services: in addition to In addition to teaching them how to write the content of a business letter, ask for guidance on how to package a business strategy to grab the reader's attention. Given the increasing competition among companies for customers, business leaders must improve the quality of business letter writing to Build and maintain customer relationships."

While most business leaders can tell the difference between good writing and bad writing, they tend to think that bad business letters -- including their own writing -- are the most important part of modern business activities are inevitable. However, improving the quality of writing is actually easy and not time consuming, contrary to what people usually think. Gerry Griffin, who works in a media training institute, said: "Good writing is mainly derived from a state of mind. When I think of the basic characteristics of good and bad writing, the ability to write improves invisibly. I don't think good writing comes naturally, I started to think more seriously about writing techniques, the audience for my work, etc."

Having a sense of writing goes a long way in improving the quality of your writing, it may even affect to your professional development.

Consultant Hill said: "Excellent writing skills can be a shortcut to distinguishing yourself in the company. When I was at Booz Allen, a group of our colleagues were young and aggressive, but I stand out for my excellent presentation skills. I often spend hours behind the scenes at home drafting and revising the report until it's logical and well-grammed. The next afternoon, I casually place the report on the desk of the firm's partners I tried to make him think I had just driven out the report, in hopes of impressing him with great intelligence. This 'trick' seems to have worked: I also later became a partner in the firm." See Come on, excellent writing ability can not be said to be huge!

This original text was reproduced with permission from The Conference Board Inc., May/June 2004 issue of its Across the Board magazine. Translated by Dai Fenghua. Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove are founders of Suntop Media.