You’ll be seeing the phrases “distance communication” and “distance leadership” more frequently in my blog posts and the primary subject of my upcoming book (4Q 2008).
Distance Communication: any type of presentation or training you deliver to an audience that is at a distance. This includes conference calls, videoconferencing, webinars, teleclasses, and teleseminars.
Distance Leadership: the ability to lead groups of people at a distance using any of the Distance Communication modes. Leadership ability is determined primarily by developing soft skills that include auditory communication, collaboration, management, team building, listening, asking questions, EQ, confrontation, and acknowledgement.
With over 17 years of presentation and distance communication training, I was surprised to discover the following relationship: the people I trained in distance leadership using my model report greater confidence and skill when leading face-to-face presentations yet face-to-face presenters universally dislike distance communication because they can’t see the audience. Confidence in face-to-face presentations does not translate into confidence with distance leadership yet the reverse is true.
I’ll continue to use “conference calls”, “teleclasses”, “webinars”, “videoconferencing”, and “teleseminars” as is appropriate yet most of the time I’ll just refer to them as distance communication modes.
Question:
How can we make these definitions more robust?
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Author – 6 Principles of Learner Driven Teleclasses
ConferenceCallTraining.com
