Business English Skills 360 – The podcast that looks at the other side of business English. Skills 360 lessons explore the full spectrum of business english in the workplace; looking at skills for management, careers and communication.
Learn business English and management skills with the Skills 360 podcast.
Skills 360 lessons are focused on the other side of business English. In other words: essential soft skills that are often overlooked in traditional language learning. Through practical tips and strategies, you’ll gain valuable insights into effective communication and management skills.
Our lessons cover a range of topics, including leadership, negotiation, presentation, meeting management, networking, and time management. By exploring these lessons, you can learn about different leadership approaches, negotiation strategies, presentation techniques, and more. You can learn how to adapt your approach and build trust with team members and develop the management skills you need to progress.
Use the links below to access the 90+ Skills 360 business English lessons we have released to date:
Welcome back to the Business English Skills 360 podcast as we continue our look at problem-solving. In this lesson, we’ll focus on the process of solving problems.
As we talked about in our last lesson, the first step in problem-solving is analysis. This means gathering all the relevant information and understanding the problem’s causes. It’s important to look at the situation from different perspectives and ensure that everyone involved has a shared understanding of the issue. Without this, you risk coming up with solutions that aren’t feasible or acceptable.
Once the problem is understood, the next step is to define your goals. Many people skip this, but it’s essential to clarify what a good solution would look like. Set clear guidelines, including your timeline, budget, and who is responsible for what. This ensures everyone is aligned and focused on the same objectives.
Now, you can move on to brainstorming possible solutions. Encourage creativity and seek input from a variety of people. It’s important to separate the generation of ideas from the evaluation. Don’t judge ideas too quickly, just focus on coming up with as many as possible. This will give you a broad range of options to choose from later.
After generating ideas, it’s time to evaluate and select the best solution. The “best” solution is the one that fits the goals and criteria you set earlier. Remember, there’s no perfect solution, only the most practical and effective given the circumstances. Make sure the chosen solution is something everyone can support.
Finally, the last step is evaluation. After implementing the solution, take time to reflect. Did it work as expected? Could anything have been done differently? This reflection helps improve your problem-solving process and prepares you for future challenges.
Problem-solving requires a clear, structured approach. By following these five steps – analysis, goal-setting, brainstorming, decision-making, and evaluation – you can tackle problems more effectively and find the optimal solution.
Welcome back to the Business English Skills 360 podcast as we look at solving problems. In this lesson, we’ll focus on the skills you need to solve problems.
Problems are an unavoidable part of life and work, and in business, your ability to solve them is critical. Fortunately, problem-solving skills can be developed.
The first key skill is analytical thinking. Instead of trying to come up with any old solution, take time to thoroughly understand the problem. What caused it? Can it be broken down into parts? Analyzing a problem requires critical thinking, which helps you understand connections, prioritize, and identify patterns.
Next is creativity, which involves looking at the problem from different perspectives and asking open-ended questions. Creativity, paired with analytical skills, leads to innovative solutions, as it helps you break free from conventional thinking. However, trial and error is often part of the process, and that’s where resilience comes in. Resilience is the ability to stay focused and calm when problems get tough. It’s about persevering, even when your first idea doesn’t work.
Collaboration is another crucial skill, as problem-solving often involves working with others. Effective communication and emotional intelligence are vital in navigating complex group dynamics, especially when tensions are high. Finally, decisiveness is essential to avoid getting stuck in “analysis paralysis.” Making decisions, even with limited information, is crucial for moving forward.
Developing these skills – analysis, creativity, resilience, collaboration, and decisiveness – will significantly enhance your problem-solving abilities.
Welcome back to the Business English Skills 360 podcast as we continue learning about cognitive bias. In this lesson, we’ll look at how to deal with the biases that impact our decision-making.
Trusting your gut and making quick decisions might work in some cases. But if you think your decision-making ability is based on perfect reasoning and complete information, well you’re wrong. You’re only human after all. And your decision-making machinery is flawed. In our last lesson, we had a closer look at exactly the kinds of biases that lead to suboptimal decisions. So how can you overcome these biases?
It’s a question that every good manager should be asking themselves. And making better decisions while avoiding biases comes down to a few key things: awareness, curiosity, and evidence. Let’s start with awareness. Now, if you tuned in to our last lesson when we talked about different types of bias, then you’re already on the right track.
Welcome back to the Business English Skills 360 podcast for today’s lesson on cognitive bias. These are factors that affect our ability to make good decisions and reasonable judgments.
Cognitive biases are factors that can negatively impact our decision-making and judgments. We make numerous decisions daily, ranging from significant ones like hiring employees to minor ones deciding where to go to lunch. These decisions often rely on intuition, information, and others’ perspectives. However, biases, which are unconscious tendencies, can lead to suboptimal decisions.
One common bias is the confirmation bias, where we focus on information that supports our existing beliefs and ignore contradictory evidence. This can cause us to become entrenched in incorrect views. Another is the sunk-cost fallacy, where we stick to a decision due to prior investments, even when it’s not the best choice.
The halo effect and horns effect are biases where one trait of a person influences our overall perception of them, often leading to misjudgments. For example, attractiveness can be wrongly equated with competence, while negative traits can overshadow a person’s capabilities.
Intuition can sometimes mislead us, making data crucial for decisions. However, biases like sample size neglect, where we draw conclusions from insufficient data, can still occur. Availability bias makes us overestimate the likelihood of recent events, such as fearing flying after hearing about a crash despite its relative safety.
The planning fallacy leads us to underestimate the time needed for tasks, often because we consider only the best-case scenarios. Recognizing these biases is the first step to mitigating their effects.
Welcome back to the Business English Skills 360 podcast for today’s lesson on the impact and implications of DEI – or diversity, equity, and inclusion – on the workplace.
As part of the “social” aspect of ESG, DEI has exploded in importance in recent years. Over 50% of employees in the US believe this increasing attention is warranted. And, as we discussed in our last lesson, customers are increasingly discerning when it comes to ethical performance.
So, it’s not just your HR manager who’s thinking about this anymore. The companies that are excelling in this area have it baked in at every level. And that includes commitments at the C-suite level. Given this explosion of attention, it’s worth unpacking exactly what we mean by these terms, and what it means for the workplace.
“Diversity” refers to the presence of different people in an organization. And while we might immediately think about gender and race, we’re also talking about age, disabilities, religion, and sexual orientation, just to name a few. Diverse organizations have many different people. “Inclusion” is an atmosphere where all these people feel a sense of belonging. And where there are systems in place to make them feel welcome and valued.
“Equity” can often get confused with “equality,” but it’s really not the same. Equity acknowledges that not everyone has the same starting point, and that some people might need additional support to take advantage of opportunities. So companies committed to equity focus on systems and processes that create fairness and recognize those different starting points.
