Bastogne Soldiers learn art of being brief during seminar

Photo By Sgt. James Griffin | Joseph McCormack, managing director and founder of The Brief Lab, a communication consulting company, recently presents his techniques for delivering an effective brief to Soldiers of 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, during a leadership development class at Austin Peay State University. The techniques taught are designed to help professionals become clear and concise communicators.– U.S. Army photos by Sgt. James M. Griffin.  

CLARKSVILLE, TN, UNITED STATES

12.07.2018

Story by Sgt. James Griffin 

1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (AA) Public Affairs

CLARKSVILLE – About 125 Soldiers of 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, recently learned how to keep briefs brief during a leadership development class presented by The Brief Lab at Austin Peay State University.
The Brief Lab, a communication consulting company, was founded to teach professionals how to become clear and concise communicators.
“We focus on the professional development of military and business leaders that need to deliver messages that have a high impact,” said Joseph McCormack, founder and managing director of The Brief Lab. “And we teach them how to do that in signifying less time with more clarity.”
McCormack and his team have been working with American service members for seven years, beginning with an invitation to share his technique of messaging with U.S. military representatives who presented media briefings in Iraq.
From there McCormack worked with special operations units improving the way they conduct mission briefings. News of his work slowly spread through the special operations community by word-of-mouth. It was while working with special operations units that McCormack met Col. Derek K. Thomson, 1st BCT commander.
“When Col. Thomson took the helm of 1st Brigade he called me,” McCormack said. “He said ‘we [1st BCT ] are going to deploy, I want to develop our people so they are really concise communicators when they are downrange. It is a really complex environment. It is critical they are clear and concise when they are communicating. They are going to be talking to people all over the country having many, many conversations, meetings and briefings. There is an enormous opportunity to get the message across and be clear. If they learn these skills they will be so much better at it. If they don’t we might not be able to effectively do the things we need to do, if we do it the same old way,’ which is long meetings, complicated briefings, conversations that have no point, [video teleconferences] that are rambling and ranting,” McCormack said.
During the seminar, McCormack explained the importance of being brief.
The millennial generation, he told the Soldiers, consumes 34 gigabytes worth of content in one day, this includes 100,000 words of information. The average person checks their phone around 150 times a day and will make somewhere between 2,000 to 3,000 swipes on that phone on the same day. The average professional receives roughly 300 e-mails per week. In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds, now it is only 8 seconds.
“We as leaders need to understand that the world that we’re communicating in is not connected and cannot be connected to what we’re saying for very long,” McCormack said. “We are just about to lose our audience and we need to be aware of that. It’s a completely new reality as leaders in our teams we have to become masters of brevity if we’re going to be successful.”
He outlined the three most common tendencies that bog down the communication process – over-explaining, the speaker being underprepared, and simply missing the point or not get to one. Spc. Carolina Massanet, military intelligence, 326th Brigade Engineer Battalion, was among the Soldiers who attended the one-day seminar.
“I think it will help a lot in the Army because we are in a cycle and we can’t seem to break it,” Massanet said. “Any brief we get at the company or brigade level is always super long and at the end of it we can’t really tell what it was about.”
At the end of the day each student was given a signed copy of McCormack’s book “Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less.” The book is a companion to the one-day seminar and is designed to help leaders maintain their newly acquired briefing skills.
Massanet plans to apply those skills right away.
“I think this class is great. The class is amazing and everyone in the Army should go to it even if they are not someone who gives briefs,” she said. “I don’t read a lot and I am going to read this book.”
McCormack said he hopes the information he shared with 1st BCT Soldiers will lead to their success.
“When I got the call, my first reaction was that it was an honor to come and support 1st Brigade Combat Team,” he said. “I looked back historically at the organization, at the 101st Airborne and what it had done historical and for me to have any material impact on how they perform overseas is a huge honor. I can’t wait to find out how we’ve done this week and if we’ve had a positive impact on the way they do their job overseas.”

• Date Taken: 12.07.2018
• Date Posted: 03.05.2019 13:44
• Story ID: 304170
• Location: CLARKSVILLE, TN, US