Nancy Webb, Visual Communication Strategist
Think about it for a moment: as a leader, what motivates you to write? Is it to extend your influence, motivate and guide your team, enroll stakeholders, or perhaps shape your organization’s direction and priorities?
If you’re a skillful leader, you influence and persuade people when you’re with them and when you’re not. Your writing reinforces your leadership in your absence—both before you’ve personally met someone, and after you’ve interacted with them but aren’t physically present.
Verbal + Visual
To be successful, your print and electronic pages must represent you well—visually as well as verbally. Why? Because the first impression of your message is its visual impact, and like all first impressions, it colors the response to your message, for better or worse.
Even if you never generate another document yourself, you must be able to assess both the print and electronic pages others create on your behalf (your assistants, consultants, graphic and web designers). Recognizing a strong page is a learned skill that gives your writing an edge.
The Visual Communication Series
Over the next months I’ll share simple but powerful ways to improve this key aspect of your documents: the visuals. I’ll help you:
- understand what you must build into every page you produce
- avoid making the most common and serious mistakes when creating documents
- reinforce your professional personality and leadership style
- have your reader respond positively to your document, even before reading it
- get them hooked and reading—almost before they realize it
Let’s Make This a Dialog
I’d love to hear your issues, not to mention your horror stories, about the documents and pages you’ve struggled with, and I’ll answer your questions about how to turn those documents into the successes that reflect and enhance your leadership style.
Meet me back here for VisComm Part 1.