Chris Fenning breaks down the first minute of a work conversation into three steps: give context so everyone's on the same page, state what you need in one line, and deliver your core point in a single sentence. Skip any step and you lose people.
Do you want to learn how to start any work conversation with clarity and confidence? The key to starting conversations at work is to get the first minute right. The first minute of any work discussion is the one opportunity to get the attention of your audience and to prepare them to understand the message you are about to deliver. Whether you are talking to your boss, your team, or the CEO, the first minute can make the difference between getting your point across successfully, or leaving your audience confused and frustrated. Follow these 3 simple steps, and you will immediately improve the clarity and efficiency of any meeting or work-based discussion. Step 1: Provide context. Step 2: Make your intentions clear. Step 3: Give the key message. The result will be less confusion, fewer misunderstandings, and you will have more confidence when communicating because you know you were delivering a clear and concise message. Step 1 is providing context. When you start a work conversation, You already know the context. It is in your head. You've probably been thinking about it for a while. Your audience doesn't have the benefit of that knowledge. They have no idea what project you're talking about or what problem you want to discuss. They have other things on their minds: other projects, budget issues, a challenging problem at home, what they want to eat, recent sports event, and so on. Whatever they're thinking about, it is almost certainly not the thing you want to talk about. Before you start talking about the detail of your message, you need to provide some context so that you're both starting at the same point. Luckily, this is an easy thing to do. Start your message with a simple statement about the topic. For example, name the project, or name the issue, name the system that you're working on, or give the customer name or client name that you're working with. Name the task or objective you want to talk about. The options are endless. The key is to quickly give the context so your audience knows the topic or area you're going to talk about. Step 2 is make your intentions clear. Having clear intentions is an important step to prepare the audience for the headline You will deliver. Whenever we receive information, it takes our brains a few moments to work out what to do with it. On a subconscious level, we try to work out if we've been asked a question, if we need to take an action, and so on. Our brains do this all day, every day, as we constantly process the information we receive and we adjust our understanding to work out the appropriate response. When you start to communicate, your audience's brains are trying to work out what your message means even before you've delivered it. By showing the intent in the first few lines of your message, you're taking the guesswork out of the process for your audience. Unfortunately, It only takes a few words to show your intent. Most work-related intentions fall into a small set of categories. For each category, it's possible to describe the intent in one line. For example, need help, advice, or input. You're requesting an action. You want a decision. You're letting somebody know that something's going to happen so they're not surprised. You're giving them a heads up. Providing information or input that the other person has previously asked for. As with providing context in the previous chapter, it only takes a few words to make the intent clear. Using a line like the examples below will let your audience know what you need— what they need to do with the information. Can you help me? We need your input. I need some advice. Can you explain something? Hey, heads up, something's about to happen. You need to know this. Here's the report you asked for. Can you take some action? If you started every interaction at work with one of the sentences or something similar, it would be clear every time what your audience can expect from the rest of the conversation. Step 3 is giving the key message a Having provided context and shown the intent, it is time to give the key message. The key message is a one-line summary of your entire topic. It's the one line that, if you don't get to say anything else, your audience will have received the most important message. Another way to think of this is consider the key message as the headline for your topic. News articles put the most important message in the headline and then they go on to explain the detail. You then read the headline and absorb and interpret all the detail in the article in a way that relates to that first headline. If you don't provide a headline for your message, the audience will create one for themselves by guessing what you're talking about. They will evaluate everything you say against that guess. The problem is we often guess wrong. This is one of the most common reasons for misunderstandings in conversations. In any conversation where you or the person you're talking to have said, oh, I thought you were talking about something else, it is because the key message wasn't clear and you've been evaluating the whole message against that wrong key message. Here are some examples of concise key message statements. We just closed a new client. The team beat the service levels. Our most experienced developer is leaving. The system is down, it's going to take a week to fix. We're over budget. We will finish early. You've been nominated for an award. And so on. Each of these is a summary of a much larger topic, but the key message is delivered in a single line. Providing the key message at the start of the conversation will mean your audience is in the right mindset to hear the rest of the detail. Let's wrap up. The first minute of any discussion is critical to the success of the conversation. You should start by providing context. You should always make your intentions clear and deliver a key message early so your audience knows what you're going to talk about. Then you can go on to the detail of the topic you want to discuss. If you do these 3 things at the start, of each work conversation, your audience will appreciate it and you will quickly be known as a great communicator. Thank you for watching. If you found this helpful, please click subscribe below so you can get more helpful content on my channel in the future, and you can find out more at chrisfenning.com.
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