Life is a team effort. Any meaningful creation will inevitably involve close collaboration with other people. 

Hence, we’ll dedicate today’s post to the practical aspects of professional communication via meetings and email. 

So, without further ado, I proudly present the five P’s: 

Purpose

I’ve sat through far too many meetings where most people in the room had no purpose being there. This is a huge waste of resources and motivation. Irrelevant emails are almost just as bad. 

Please … pretty please even … always make sure that your communication serves a clear purpose to every one of the recipients.

This sounds blatantly obvious, but the amount of useless communication in the professional arena is just astounding. No need to add to this communal time-wasting effort. 

Preparation

When you call for a meeting or write an email, you’re taking other people’s time. Make sure they will see this is time well spent. 

Repeated useless or irritating communications will quickly give people a negative connotation to working with you. And this is very dangerous in today’s interconnected world. 

Thus…

1. Be sure to put in the necessary preparations to run meetings smoothly and effectively. 
2. Put some time into your emails to ensure they’re highly relevant, informative and easy to read (without a bunch of typos). 

Presentation

You can have the best idea or the most valid point, but if you don’t present it well, it simply won’t be heard. 

Communication of an idea can almost always be improved by using fewer words and more pictures.

In meetings, be sure to use visual aids and whiteboards to better communicate your points. Sending a visual aid to enhance an email message is also a good idea. It takes a bit longer, but is well worth it. 

Also be sure to formulate properly before speaking or writing. You don’t want to drown your message in an ocean of vague and whishy-whashy superfluousness.

Positivity

Positivity is contagious. So is negativity.

So, if you want get your point across effectively in a meeting and help others do the same, be sure to send out those good vibrations.

Standing meetings are very helpful in this respect. If there is some reason to move around (like writing on a whiteboard), all the better. 

The occasional well-timed joke can also work wonders 🙂

Participation

Lastly, we want to make sure that everyone in the meeting contributes to the information exchange.

Our first P (purpose) is a prerequisite here. If you have that covered, there’s no better way to engage others than asking them to share specific expertise they possess. 

People love sharing information in subject areas they’re passionate about. Ask and you shall receive…

Practice

As a bonus sixth P, I encourage you to slowly build habits out of these effective communication tips (I must admit, I’m still working on some of them myself). 

We don’t want to think too much about the way we communicate. This quickly makes our communication seem forced and awkward. 

Thus, it pays to make small changes and cement those as habits before moving on to the next.

This requires plenty of … wow, these P’s are everywhere! … patience 🙂