How can I be a more thoughtful communicator?

Management Communication Center Director Dr. Fiona Barnes joins host Andy Lord for a conversation about how to craft the perfect email, communicating effectively with different personalities, inspiring communicators in business, and more.

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Andy Lord: I’m creating the new theme song.

Fiona Barnes: You are, what is it?

Lord: ♪ We Are Warrington ♪ ♪ We Are Warrington ♪

Barnes: Yeah, it’s not gonna fly.

Lord: You don’t think it’s gonna work?

Lord: “We Are Warrington” is a new podcast, that helps young business leaders discover what is possible by highlighting stories from the Warrington College of Business Community about the University of Florida experience, business industry insights, innovative research and more. I’m your host, Andy Lord.

Today, we are speaking with Dr. Fiona Barnes, Director of Warrington’s Management Communications Center. Dr. Barnes teaches professional writing to online and on-campus graduate students. Dr. Barnes received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has over 30 years of experience teaching writing, on two continents. She has developed and taught writing courses and workshops for students and professionals in the fields of business, engineering, medicine, psychology and chemistry.

Today, we’re gonna be talking with Dr. Barnes about some of the worst business communication mistakes, how you can avoid them, and other tips on how to be an effective communicator in the business. Dr. Barnes Fiona, welcome to the podcast. I remember one of the first times I ever said, what part of England you from? And you said, “I’m South African.” Something like that. But then I looked, and you actually look like you are, I don’t know, from England at one point, or Worcester.

Barnes: Worcester, Worcester.

Lord: Worcester.

Barnes: It’s Worcestershire sauce and it’s Worcester.

Lord: Okay, now I got it, do like the sauce?

Barnes: Of course.

Lord: Yeah, of course.

Barnes: I’m a real mutt. People just have no clue where I’m from, unless they know South Africans. But when I go back to South Africa, which people find very entertaining. If I speak to somebody that, I haven’t met before they say, “Oh, you’re American.” “Where are you from in the United States?” Yeah, to you I don’t sound American at all.

Lord: No.

Barnes: To them I sound completely American.

Lord: I actually started warning a lot of the students when they were coming in and meeting you at the receptions for the MBA program and say, “Whatever you do, do not say what’s your English accent. The South Africa thing.” And they go wow, thanks for telling me that. So, I tried to get them started on a good foot with you in the best way that I possibly could do it. Yeah…

Barnes: Yeah, that’s good. I always say to them at the start, I always say, look, I sound funny. I mean, I start with that. I sound funny. So, all you’re gonna hear is the accent, ’cause I find that with Americans because they’re not used to many accents, that they’re just deafened by the accent. It’s like, they can’t hear what I’m saying first. they like what she’s saying, she’s an alien. And then after a while I say to them, you’ll get used to it. You’ll, you’ll start to hear what I’m saying, okay? Just bear with me.

Lord: Gotcha, so we just clarified the accent for the listeners just now. So, you have a quote on your LinkedIn page. And it’s thought to be from Albert Einstein. It says, “If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough.” I think that’s a fantastic quote, but how does that apply to business communication?

Barnes: Well, clarity is one of the foundational elements of business communication. We just can’t afford missed time and money in business. And that’s a definite no, no. And that Einstein quote, that you referenced, actually explains just how difficult sometimes it is to be clear and simple. Particularly when you don’t know what you’re talking about. And I’ve heard a lot of people get into trouble with that.

Oftentimes it’s only when you’re trying to work through an idea to write a proposal, or a business plan or a paper for school, or explain something to someone else. And that’s why I always say to students, writing a crappy first draft is the step you need to take, and make it crappy. And don’t judge yourself, because it’ll make a big difference. Once you’ve got it done, you’ll see what it is you don’t wanna say, and what you really need to say.

And not to burry people with quotes but I do love my quotations. Lee Iacocca, who revolutionized and turned around Chrysler back in the day the CEO said, “The discipline of writing it down, is the first step towards making it happen.” And I think that’s a great quote ’cause that really kind of sums up the fact that once you see those words on the screen or on the page, you are committed, and you also can see what you need to do, in order to make it happen.

It connects quite nicely to a recent book, that a lot of people have been reading called, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol Dweck. I don’t know if you’ve read it, Andy, you haven’t, it’s really kind of interesting. Essentially what she posited is that we have two types of mindset. One is the fixed mindset and one’s the growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset think that their personalities, and their intelligence is fixed. If you have a high IQ, you’re brilliant. So, you’ll be successful. If you have a low IQ, you’re not gonna succeed. And I think it’s done a lot of damage in that way.

So, with a fixed mindset you’ll find that people will say, “Well there’s no point in me taking on this challenge.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students talk to me at the beginning of my class and say, “Well I’m dreading your class, ’cause I’m just a bad writer.” But I can assure you that the end of my course you will be a better writer than you are now, because you can improve. So, what we’re trying to work towards, is a growth mindset with people, students and others who understand that you can in fact improve. You just have to take on the challenges, and you have to practice, and you have to move forward. And our classes, which are based on skills, very much depend on that kind of growth mindset, which I think is important.

Lord: What are the biggest reasons professionals struggle to communicate clearly in their daily work? It seems like it would be simple to communicate simply but what are you seeing and what are you hearing from our professional students, executives and their feedback about where they need to improve?

Barnes: Well, first of all, I think I’d like to talk about the curse of knowledge. That sounds very contradictory ’cause I was just talking about how important it is to build on knowledge and attain it and the growth mindset. But the curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias, where people don’t understand when they’re talking to others that they don’t perhaps have the same expertise or background that they have. And so, as a result, people talk in with specialized terms, jargon, acronyms whatever it may be, but at a higher level than their audience would understand. I think part of it is because we live in an increasingly specialized world.

Lord: I agree.

Barnes: Universities have become that way instead of a general education, we’ve become specialized. For example, in the business college, you graduate, right? And perhaps you go on and you do a specialized master’s program. So, you’re specializing the further you go.

So, then you go out and you’re hired in a job and you’re a specialist in a field. The problem is, you have to learn how to translate that information for other people. In particular, if you have a boss or a supervisor, CEO whatever it may be, who is not in your field. If you start throwing the jargon, and trying to sound smart, when you’re talking with them, they are not gonna appreciate what you have to do. And I think when you come out from your undergraduate education, you are aware that you don’t know much, and you sometimes try to sound smarter. That can be a very big mistake. In the working world what I would say is, clarity and concision is always gonna win, because of time and efficiency. So, to default to that is a good idea.

Lord: I totally agree with you on that. We’re gonna take a quick break and be back with Dr. Barnes in just a minute.

Communication is an essential skill no matter what industry you’re interested in pursuing. At the Warrington College of Business, communication classes are built into the foundation of all of our graduate programs including our multiple MBA program formats and eight specialized master’s degrees. In addition to building your communication skills, a Warrington graduate degree, will increase your business acumen, marketability in your job search, and according to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, your average weekly pay. To learn more about Warrington’s graduate degrees, head over to www.warrington.ufl.edu/podcast/episode-5. Again, it’s www.warrington.ufl.edu/podcast/episode-5. Or you can visit the link in this episode’s description.

Welcome back to, “We Are Warrington.” I’m chatting with Warrington’s Management Communication Center Director, Dr. Fiona Barnes. Fiona, before the break we started talking about why people struggle with communicating clearly in business. Now that we know what the most common errors are what are your tips for avoiding them?

Barnes: Well, I don’t know about you, Andy, but I grew up with the Golden Rule. And the Golden Rule was do unto others, as you would have them do unto you, which sounds very biblical. Well, there’s a new rule and it came from Dave Kerpen. He came up with the Platinum Rule do unto others as they would want done unto them.

Lord: Aha!

Barnes: And I recommend that as a slight difference. We’re not all the same. And that’s particularly important when you’re interacting with different cultures, for example from other countries. But it could also simply mean different departments in a large company. So, HR would have very different communication needs from the manufacturing floor, for example. So, learning how to deal with a different industry, a different department and a different country, all of whom communicate differently, and do business differently is really, really important if you want to be successful. So, when you’re communicating with people who aren’t in your field or aren’t similar experts to analyze and focus on the readers and the audience and understand their needs, is really, really critical to success, I think.

So, we always, there’s one of the foundations of a business communication courses is, analyze your audience. Be aware of what it is they want, what they need, what their prejudices are, et cetera.

And one of the business books I love, “Writing Without BS” written by Josh Bernoff. I do recommend it, it’s a lot of fun. He cites a concept called the iron imperative. And that is, he says, “You should treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own.”

Now I see one of the biggest errors that people make, particularly when they’re self-important and there are some of them is out there in business, is they will fire out a message. It’s like stream of consciousness. They just send out whatever is important to them, without thinking about how to present it most effectively so that other people will be able to respond efficiently. And that is really, really counterproductive.

I call it writer centered writing because what you’re doing is you’re having some ideas, and you just throw them out. So, what you’re doing is you’re sending out the process of your thinking instead of the product of your thinking. That’s not respectful. And in business, we need to be respectful of others. Otherwise, they are going to dread messages from us and they’re not likely to respond very well. I think we all have probably regretted the times that we’ve fired off a message and haven’t thought through it or sent it off feeling emotional. It’s a bad, bad idea.

And then the final thing I guess I want to say about correcting errors and ensuring that you’re a professional business communicator, is to protect your image as a professional. Be correct, be precise. Every message we send out and particularly the written one, although when we speak as well, represents us as a professional. And the written messages of course are stored. It doesn’t matter if it’s Slack or if it’s email or what it is. Those are kept and can be archived. So, edit, proofread, be careful with your expression. You can use the Word document, for spelling and grammar check. That’s the most basic of all.

And then out there now are fabulous software tools, that will help you with your writing if you know that you have a deficit in terms of your grammar or your spelling or whatever it is. Two of them that my students have used very frequently, and say to me are really helpful, are Grammarly and ProWritingAid. And I don’t have shares in either of those companies, just so you know, I think they’re very similar. If you go online, you’ll see that a lot of people do comparisons of the two of them. But if you know you’re somebody who has those basic kinds of communication problems, by all means, use something like that to help you so that you come across as a professional who knows what you’re saying.

Lord: What you just communicated to me Fiona, is you have me thinking about some of the emails that I’ve fired off before in the past that I immediately regret once I do send them, you know? And I know they are being archived. And you wonder if those things are gonna come back to haunt you and the amount of stress that brings upon somebody after you do something so ridiculous or deem stupid, it can get folks in a lot of trouble.

So, maturing as a professional, I think is something that is all on our brains and why maybe folks come back to school so they can really hone it in a little bit better.

And I guess that’s leading into this next question, email on in written communication are such a huge part of today’s business world. And we both get a ton of emails, and you mentioned, short and to the point I wish I got a lot more of those short and to the point emails than some of these long-winded emails that you can really just graze over really quickly and know exactly what the point is, but why the waste of such space? So what’s the most effective way? And I know this is kind of just opened or broad question, but what’s the most effective way to write an email, to get a response.

Barnes: Yeah, and I totally relate to what you’re saying. So many business professionals and us too, get 100s of emails and send 100s of emails a day. And it’s really easy to get inbox fatigue, I think. So, well, there are two elements, there’s two ways that people select whether or not they’re going to read an email out of the slew that appear in the inbox. And one is the sender and the second is the subject line. And if you look at any of the studies, they’ll show you that those are the two most important things.

What can you do about the fact that you are that sender? Well, let’s face it. If you’re at the bottom of the corporate food chain, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do to make yourself seem more important. So, you’d likely ought to be passed, going to be passed over by somebody above you, or more important. But that goes back to what I’ve talked about, about being a professional, so the people who see your name in the inbox with an email, don’t go, “Oh no, not her again.” And either delete or skip over it to read later. And there are people like that, in every business that is for sure. So, try and be as professional as possible.

But the second part that I referred to as the subject line which is, I think, the most neglected and the most important real estate in an email. That is what signals to the person, what they’re looking at. It should be a call to action. If there’s a deadline, put it in that subject line, make it as short as possible, but also as informative as possible. People archive their emails and file them using those subject lines. They search for them. And if you have an informative subject line, it’s going to pop up, you’re making business more efficient. And you can capture attention with it too.

Second, I would say personalizing the email. I always advocate when you open up a conversation with somebody, to use a salutation. Use the person’s name, it gets your attention. It makes it into a personal conversation to and fro, and a sign off as well. It only takes a second, but it makes a tremendous difference. Email, I often call a blunt instrument. If you try to personalize it in some way, with a salutation and closing it softens the blow, if it’s something negative, and creates that personal interaction too.

And then something you mentioned earlier, is don’t just send out one blob of information, a dense paragraph or multiple dense paragraphs that you’re expecting people to read through. We don’t read biblically. In other words, we don’t read from A to Z. We in fact, skim and scan business. And if you don’t understand that, you’re not gonna get your messages read. So, try to use formatting, use bullets, use bold, use whatever you can to focus people on the main ideas.

And if you’re sending a message out to multiple readers, try to target it to them, make sure that people can access the information readily or send separate messages. If you just dump a whole bunch of stuff to 100s of people that doesn’t pertain to them, you’re training them not to read your message.

Lord: There you go, and I get that leads into the beautifully crafted email and getting that message across, when you do that and you feel like you’ve really tried to get that message across, and you feel comfortable in what you wrote to somebody, what’s the most effective way to follow up, after you’ve done, you’ve sent something out like that?

Barnes: You mean if perhaps, they are not responding to you, and you sent this great note.

Lord: Right.

Barnes: It happens, it happens. That’s incredibly frustrating. Well, if you followed all the best practices, that I have just mentioned, and you still haven’t received a response, then we understand that perhaps email wasn’t the best mode to use. You need to change that communication channel. And again, you know, we depend way too much on email. And look at all the different communication technologies, there are on today. Communication is multimodal. In other words, we can use all kinds of channels.

Lord: Right.

Barnes: Think about what is the most appropriate, given the context, given the reader or the listener. So, if you don’t get a response to your email, try text, try the Slack channel. Pick up the phone, something people so rarely do these days.

Lord: Imagine that.

Barnes: Yeah, exactly. And everybody’s always shocked when it goes to voicemail, which is generally what’s gonna happen. So, make sure that you’ve got a nice, clear, focus voice mail message ready to leave if they are not there. Instead of going, “oh, oh, hi Fiona. I guess you’re not in. I was calling to, I was thinking that maybe, perhaps when we next…” that’s not a good voicemail.

Try something different, don’t overuse email, don’t expect it to be the beast of burden of the business world. Think about the fact that over 40% of email, is estimated to be open on mobile devices now. And what does that tell us? It’s that tiny little screen. You can’t dump a whole lot into it. You’ve got to realize what its limitations are, and that people who are reading something on a phone screen, and I watched them as I was driving into campus this morning, are walking while reading your email, that’s probably not gonna be a very reasonable thoughtful response. You really cannot put too much in an email. Follow up, give them a call.

Lord: Reading on a small phone. I think the big investment is glasses and contact lenses. ‘Cause that’s what’s turning into, myself included. We’re mentioning all these different ways to communicate and here we are in this environment with the… We’re all working from home for the most part, or people are more remote than ever before. It’s all in response to this coronavirus pandemic we’ve all been going through. We’ve all had to adjust, and we’ve become much more familiar with these online video meeting tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, Webex. So, what challenges do these communication channels present for business?

Barnes: Well, yeah, first of all, I have to say I think they’ve been literal lifesavers during the pandemic. No matter how much we’re getting tired of it at this point. I mean socially and professionally I think they’ve almost literally saved lives, because without that ability to connect online, many people would have remained completely isolated and separated from their families, their friends and lonely and depressed.

But in terms of the business world, global and domestic travel has pretty much ground to a halt or a slow trickle. Zoom and all its relatives have kept business going, despite the obstacles and for me as a teacher, and the education world, we’d never have survived without video conferencing, that is for sure. But it’s just like email. We need to learn how to use the tools effectively. And I think part of the problems with meetings, which I mean what is the biggest complaint about meetings? Well, there are a number. First of all, they go on too long.

Lord: There’s too many.

Barnes: Yeah, too many, exactly. Second, there are too many of them and thirdly, there’s no agenda or focus involved in meetings. The same thing transfers to Zoom, unfortunately. It’s being over relied on just like email. Zoom fatigue is a thing, it is. It’s, I mean, psychologists and an eye specialists are studying it and demonstrating how exhausting it is, to be constantly looking at a screen, looking at a camera. It’s performative. You’re seeing yourself on camera, that’s disconcerting we all know. And it’s exhausting.

Finally, we never get a break. ‘Cause we Zoom at work with, I am, excuse me using Zoom as the verb, but it’s kind of like Google. It just has become a way if you’re using Microsoft Teams or something else, you are Zooming. We are using it at work, in order to have meetings with our colleagues. And then we go home, and we Zoom with our friends or our family. So social and business have merged constantly. And we say we don’t get a break.

So, learning how to use it properly, how to set an agenda, set a timeframe, perhaps you don’t always have to have the cameras on, because that’s tiring. And maybe where you don’t need to have a Zoom meeting, perhaps you can use Google Docs, and make notes or send out a document that everybody can comment on and it’ll be more productive. So again, it’s that good old go back to what your readers need. What’s the context, what’s the purpose? And use the tools effectively and carefully.

Lord: You meet a lot of cats and dogs, whenever you’re talking to somebody, when they’re at their home.

Barnes: I love that I love that. Andy, I’m not a cat person, I’m a dog person. But I’ve so loved the cat people, the cats have to come stomping onto the computer, and then they turn their tails to the camera.

They are turning to the owners. So, you get the rear view of a cat in the camera, and that just makes me laugh.

Lord: And we’ve seen a few of those. Transitioning a little bit here. Folks are communicating with their leadership, and their managers quite frequently. We all have to do it, I know these young professionals, it’s intimidating whenever they’re talking to leadership and managers. So, do you have any tips that you can share with this audience about communicating with leadership?

Barnes: Absolutely, and I will say that it’s not just tricky for incoming brand-new employees, ’cause I hear some people further up the chain, corporate chain saying the same thing that they sometimes struggle. And sometimes that’s a function of the company culture.

But my advice for graduating students is, to understand the culture of your company. And then they sort of look at me blankly and I have to explain that every company has a culture. It could be quite formal, informal. It could be technical, non-technical. It could be hierarchical or non-hierarchical.

You have to first, when you’re there, observe. You have to be like an anthropologist or a sociologist, and you have to look around and say, “How do people communicate here?” Do they gather together? Do they like in-person meetings? Are they quite social? Or does everybody stay in that cubicle or their office, and they just send email or I am, does everybody use email or do they prefer the Slack channel? Do they use Zoom? Is every meeting done in video? Follow the leader, in other words. Watch how your boss likes to communicate, and adopt those approaches, but do it very, very cautiously.

And I always explain you wanna just jump in. You wanna put your stamp on your, we say, your start at a company, don’t. Be cautious, wait, watch how people work, and what kind of relationships there are. What is the network there?

And build your trust and professional image. So, start at formerly, don’t start using people’s first names, unless they tell you, you can use their first names. Don’t send a message that says, “Hey Fiona,” at the beginning, when you haven’t met this person. Make it formal. You can loosen up once they respond and you see that they are listening up.

I always say, for example, when somebody is sending me a message, and they call me Dr. Barnes, If I respond, be safe or be well or best wishes, Fiona, I’m just giving you permission to use my first name. But if I haven’t put that there, then you need to stick with the more formal. This kind of applies to something that’s called linguistic mirroring. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one, but most people are probably familiar with the advice that when you go in for an interview, you should mirror the interviewer, right? With your body language?

Lord: Right.

Barnes: And your non-verbals right? If they’re casual, you can be casual. If they lean forward, you should lean forward, to show you’re also interested. It’s partly because as human beings, we like people who are like us. It just seems to be one of those realities that can be problematic sometimes.

Well, a relatively new organizational behavior study, shows that imitating the way people speak, their communication strategies can also make people like us and be more well disposed towards us. These researchers did a study, of lawyers presenting to judges, and they demonstrated that lawyers do very consciously adapt. So, if you’ve got a judge who’s very content oriented, and is persuaded by facts and statistics, the lawyers learn to present their case using a lot of data and statistics.

And if on the other hand this is a very empathetic judge, who likes to hear about the personal story, they’ll adopt the story and change the preferences of the way they present, which I think is quite interesting. And I think that’s a really useful lesson, for people who are wanting to persuade and have people be on their side in the business world. Don’t overwhelm an action-oriented communicator with details, but if you report to a content-oriented expert and pay attention you’ll know, don’t neglect the details ’cause you’ll be in trouble.

Lord: Fiona, your expertise is fantastic. You’re such a resource on their educational journeys. And it’s obvious talking with you, how critical it is for business professionals to invest time in building their communication skills. Something that I ask all of my guests is, what are you doing to invest in yourself right now?

Barnes: Well, let me start with on the professional side of things because I am very invested in my teaching, and my subject. I’m a voracious reader. I read many, many things, both for relaxation and for work. And there’s so much information out there and new approaches that galvanize me. I follow great communicators online, social media and then use to see how they communicate both themselves, and their brands and present themselves. And I think for people starting out, well people who are higher up in the chain, following great business leaders, it can be very instructive. So, for example, I follow people who are not quite as successful with their communication at times, like Elon Musk.

Lord: Right.

Barnes: He’s brilliant, but he shoots from the hip, and at the same time shoots himself in the foot. I had a talent to do that, frankly, but anyway–

Lord: That’s me. Without the brain power, yeah.

Barnes: Thinking before we talk, and certainly send out a tweet is kind of important. I follow Richard Branson, he’s got a folksy style, that matches his Virgin company brand. Even the big focus on your customers. And he recommends tell stories to sell your product. In fact, he says, if you wanna succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to be a storyteller. So, learning how to tell good stories about yourself, and about your business is how you’ll be able to sell yourself.

And that of course makes me think of Oprah Winfrey, great media empire that she’s built. She’s her own brand. She’s the storyteller. She interviews people incredibly well. She’s an empathetic listener. These kinds of skills that will make you a leader, that other people want to follow. But anyway, so that’s what I do.

But personally, what do I do? I just said, I read, I’m very social, I hang out with a lot of friends, still socially distanced. I meditate, I exercise a lot. I was a gym rat and I’m missing the gym a great deal. So, I hope it comes back.

Lord: That might lead into my next question. You do a ton of teaching across the college. You’ve taught in many of our MBA sections. You’ve taught in our spec programs. You’ve taught all across the board. You come across as a very motivated and charismatic person. So, how do you stay motivated?

Barnes: Well, thank you for those kind words.

Lord: I actually meant those kind words this time around. So anyway, that wasn’t a joke.

Barnes: Well, thank you. I know I’m known as very tough and demanding, and actually that would give you one of my favorite quotes from a student from last semester said, this was the best course I never wanted to take. I think that’s perfect. It really is because it just kind of sums up the student was terrified to take my course, and then realized the value of it.

Well, what keeps me going is, one of the things I think you’re referred to right at the beginning of this podcast is, I hear constantly back from students that I’ve had in the past and they thanked me and there’s no reason for them to thank me. Well, she moves with me given I’m not along to giving them a grade. And they say what they learned from my class and how it is stuck with them.

So, from the finance expert in Chicago who emailed me six years after being in the MBA program, to say that his top client, and a multi-multimillionaire said to him I always open your emails because I know they’re gonna be clear and focused and they’re not gonna waste my time. And then the students who rewrite their LinkedIn profile, do an elevator pitch and contact me and say, I got the job. And I know it was because of what we did in your course. It made all the difference. And that to me, I mean–

Lord: That’s worthwhile.

Barnes: Yeah, it makes it all worthwhile. Way back when I first started teaching business communication, John Kraft asked me to present and he was the current Dean, to present to the Warrington College Advisory Board. And I presented, and I used the term soft skills, which is a very common, and I think denigratory term for communication skills, leadership skills, team building skills, which I think are really, really important and the hard skills, which of course implies that they are more important and tougher, the technical skills.

Well, this top business leader came up to me after I had spoken and said to me, “You know what? I never used the term soft skills.” I said, really? He said, “No, I have a different term. I talk about survive and succeed skills in my company.” And he explained it. He said that what I do is I hire people because they have the experience or the technical skills to do the job at the time. But I warn them that if they wanna move up the ladder, they’d better develop the succeed skills. And those are the skills like communication skills, in particular, he emphasized teamwork, leadership, etcetera. ‘Cause he says, that’s what’s gonna make you a good manager or a good leader. And if you only have the survive technical skills, you’re not gonna move up the ladder.

That story really made an impact on me. And it’s something that I’ve seen born out with my teaching. I see the people who can communicate their ideas well and effectively move up that ladder and move up that ladder faster. So, for me, that’s a great motivation. I know I’m making a difference.

Lord: This is a perfect way to end. Fiona, your expertise is fantastic. Our students and everyone else here at Warrington, are so lucky to have you as a resource. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Barnes: Thank you, it was fun I enjoyed it.

Lord: I had a lot of fun, too, Fiona. And so there you go. All right, for our listeners who would like to follow along with more research from Dr. Barnes and our other amazing faculty members, visit the Warrington newsroom. Until next time stay motivated and keep investing in yourself.