Good Communication Skills are essential
Being an effective communicator takes real skill. Communication skills have to be developed, honed and added to on an on-going basis. They are the heart of interpersonal skills and the greater your awareness of how it all works, the more effective your communication will be.
To be effective in business, you have to communicate well. To be a good manager, you have to communicate exceptionally well.
Here we look at basic communication dynamics, learning skills to improve your communication, using effective communication to improve and promote interpersonal relationships, creating an effective communication strategy.
We could write a book about the importance of communication key skills, but for now you can content yourself with some essentials for becoming a more effective communicator.
Communication Core Skills - The Essentials
Communication is Individual
When you look at communication, presentation skills are not all there is to it. Everyone communicates differently and sees the world differently. The greatest skill you can have in order to instantly and significantly improve you communications skills is to understand the other person's point view and how they see the world. Then you can adjust your own communication to take that into account.
Change Yourself to Change Others
Alongside this has to be the knowledge that the only person you can be sure of changing in any communication is you. Therefore, the most effective way to be in charge of what happens in any communication dynamic is changing what you do. There's never one right way to communicate. Remember your personal style probably says more for you that all the words you use can.
What's Already Working?
Most people tend to look at what's wrong with themselves and other people rather than focusing on what already works.
How Communication Happens
Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication
Interpersonal skills. Everything communicates. Remember! If you aren't clear about what you mean and what your intention is, the other person (or people) could easily (and sometimes deliberately), misinterpret what you mean.
It's now accepted that the words account for only 7-11% of a communication. Your behaviour will 'read' unconsciously to other people and you can certainly be more in charge of the reading matter!
You need to be aware of the padding, justifications and excuses you use and whether they are appropriate. You can make a big impact simply by changing some of your language and developing your verbal skills, This way you can significantly improve your communication skills.
Communication Cycle
There is a neat communication cycle we've come across that can help you understand how to make communication work better. It means that you can take responsibility for every stage on the Communication Cycle:
• Spoken - Heard - Understood - Agreed To - Acted On - Implemented.
• Be aware of where you or others tend to fall off the cycle.
• What can get in the way of Effective Communication
• Here are some Common Barriers to Effective Communication.
• We all make Too Many Assumptions
Notice if you alter your behaviour with certain people because of the assumptions you make about them. Also be aware of the assumptions you think other people make about you.
Assumptions aren't necessarily 'bad'. One effective way to deal with assumptions is to say to the other person, 'I've assumed such and such. 'Is that true?' or 'I'm making an assumption here about... Do you agree?'
Good communication in the workplace is often sabotaged by too many unconfirmed assumptions.
Patterns/Reverting to Type
We are pattern-making beings, which is good. Habits, patterns, routine ways of thinking and behaving are difficult to change. Noticing your patterns at least gets you aware of them! One way to practise this is to see how many communication habits and patterns have crept into your workplace. You can always decide if you want to change them or not.
Needing to Be Right
One skill that does need practise is to let go of needing to be right. Think of it as presenting information or a point of view rather than having to bludgeon someone else with your arguments.
If you want to promote effective relationships, this is one of the greatest communication key skills you can have is to be able to change what you want from a communication. Conflict Resolution
Conflict
One of the purposes of conflict is to arrive at a resolution, so if you avoid conflict, the problem usually (though not always) gets worse. Good communication skills require you to be able to resolve conflict.
Agreement
Find something (anything will do) in the other person's argument which you can genuinely agree with. This is a great way to take the wind out of someone's sails and ensure you don't get drawn into an insoluble argument. People usually won't listen until they feel heard.
Bridge Building
Building bridges by making an offer can help enormously, as can changing what you want.
'I' not 'You'
Use 'I' statements, not 'You' statements to avoid blaming. Improving Communication Skills
Attitude
You can change the direction of a communication if you change your attitude. Effective Listening and Responding
You can have tremendous influence on a communication as the listener and the responder. When we get little or no response from the listener, we often project our assumptions onto them about what they are thinking (and usually we assume they aren't thinking good things about us!).
Be Positive
Use affirmation and encouragement to get the best out of people. Notice when others do things well (even if it's part of their daily routine). This shows you're being attentive; most people respond well when they know that others are aware of what they do. Quite simply, the workplace can be a far better place to be if you consciously sprinkle your communication with positive feedback.
The Importance of Basic Communication Skills
What's most important is that you don't leave the business of communication to chance. Raise your awareness, develop your skills and you'll be a role model for effective communication.
The Seven Essentials of Business Communication
There are seven essential elements to successful business communication:
• Structure
• Clarity
• Consistency
• Medium
• Relevancy
• Primacy/Recency
• Psychological Rule of 7±2
If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.
1. STRUCTURE
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.
Every good communication should have these three structural elements:
• an opening
• a body
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions. In this instance size doesn't matter -- the rules remain the same.
Opening
An opening allows your communication's audience to quickly understand what the communication is about. Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message. It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the point. Don't bog down your audience with irrelevant material, or charts with confusing, illegible numbers and colours.
--SIDE BAR--
There's a key to rapid uptake of your message -- KISS.
Pitch your presentation's graphics at a grade seven child. If THEY can follow and understand them, chances are good that your audience will too.
--END SIDE BAR--
Close
The more powerfully you can end your communication, the more easily remembered it will be by your audience.
2. CLARITY
Be clear about the messaqe you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored.
If you are giving a message about, say, overtime payments don't then add in messages about detailed budget issues or the upcoming staff picnic -- UNLESS they ABSOLUTELY fit in with your original message. It's far better and clearer for your audience if you create a separate communication about these ancilliary issues.
3. CONSISTENCY
Nothing more upsets a regular reader of, say, your newsletter than inconsistency of your message. Taking a position on an issue one week, only to overturn it the next, then overturn THAT position the following week, only breeds distrust in your message.
And distrust in you!
People who distrust you are exceedingly unlikely to take the action you wish them to take. They are also highly unlikely to pay any attention to your future messages. As well as consistency amongst multiple messages, be aware that inconsistency within your message can be just as deadly to audience comprehension.
4. MEDIUM
Similarly, if all you believe you have as a communications tool is PowerPoint then pretty soon all you'll do is reduce very communications opportunity to a PowerPoint presentation. Which is the right one?
The one that communicates your message:
• with the largest likelihood of audience comprehension
• at the lowest fiscal cost
• at the lowest time cost
There's absolutely no value in spending the least amount of money if the medium you choose doesn't deliver on any of the other criteria.
So what media are available?
• paper-based memo
• letter
• one-to-one face-to-face presentation
• seminar
• one-to-one phone presentation
• meeting
• one-to-many personal presentation
• plain text email
• text + graphics email
• voice email
• webpage
• webcast/webvideo
• radio broadcast
• television broadcast
• press release
• tv/film commercial
• cd-rom/dvd
Choosing the right medium or media is obviously critical, as the fiscal costs of some in the above list are higher than others. Get the media mix wrong and you could end up spending a whole lot of time and money on a very visually attractive business communication that delivers next-to-zero ROI (return on investment).
5. RELEVANCY
Screen-after-screen of lengthy text, in a small barely legible font size (because a small font size is the only way to fit all of the words onto the slide), which the manager duly and dully reads verbatim.
Ugh!
The psychological reality is that unless a person is interested in the subject of the message they are highly unlikely to pay any attention.
Which means that if you force them to attend to your message you will actually turn them against you and be even less likely to receive their attention in the future.
Save your in-depth budget and performance analysis Excel-generated charts for those who genuinely care and need to know about such things.
If your business communication needs to touch on several areas that might not be of interest to your entire audience, let them know of alternative resources that more fully address each of these additional areas.
6. PRIMACY/RECENCY
the power and memorability of its opening
Psychologists call the effect of remembering the first few items presented as a 'Primacy Effect'. Similarly, they call the effect of remembering the last few items presented to you as a 'Recency Effect'.
A powerful opening can be anything that captures the audience's attention:
• a quote,
• a joke,
• a loud noise,
• a preposterous statement.
Just make sure that your opening remains consistent with and relates to the subject of the communication.
For example, whilst the opening line, "Free Sex is available in the foyer" would no doubt get your audience's attention, if the theme of your communication thereafter is about some process re-engineering going on in your department, your audience would be annoyed (some would be very annoyed at your duplicity. Equally, a powerful close that bears no resemblance to the main body of the communication would just confuse and disappoint an audience brought up to expect something more.
Business communication is a serious business and very few people have the skill to be able to deliver a humourous message that the audience will retain and act upon.
A fantastic example of how humour engaged an audience but failed to elicit the desired response is from Jeffrey Robinson's superb book 'The Manipulators'.
One of America's great comedic writers, Stan Freburg, was convinced to dabble in advertising. Deciding that his own agency should be called, 'Parsley, Sage , Rosemary and Osborn, a Division of Thyme, Inc.', Freburg created a series of incredibly funny adverts. On the strength of these, he was hired to create an advert for Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), forever remembered in the annals of advertising as 'White Knuckle Flyer'.
"He was aiming at people who hate to fly and are forever worried that planes crash. To pacify them, he got the airline to hand out security blankets — literally, tiny blankets with the PSA logo — to any passenger worrying that flying might get them killed. PSA had succumbed to humour and, unfunnily, went out of business.
As Granville Toogood says in his excellent book 'The Articulate Executive', humour is a very risky strategy. If you are determined to use humour in your presentation, then please follow Toogood's recommendation:
• Tell the story as if it were true. The punch line is a lot funnier if we aren't expecting it
• Tell the story to make a business point. If you don't make a point, you have no business telling a joke
• The opening and closing of your business communication are the two most easily remembered and therefore essential elements. Make sure you give your audience something to remember.
7. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RULE OF 7±2 (seven plus or minus two)
Psychologists have long known that the human brain has a finite capacity to hold information in short-term or 'working' memory. Equally, the brain is also structured to retain information in 'clusters' or groups of items. Similarly, your audience will group your business communication's message with between four and eight other messages in their long-term memory.
Now do you see the importance of clarity of message and of having a distinctive and memorable opening and close?
If you want your key points to be remembered even five minutes later, it is essential that you limit your business communication to between just five and nine key points.
Equally, if you want your key action points to be remembered five weeks later, ensure that your communication is amongst the five to nine most memorable messages your audience has attended to in the last five weeks.
The human brain 'chunks' information together, so if you have a long document or communication that you want to deliver, especially on paper, then structure your document so that you have:
• 7±2 'chapters' or sections
• 7±2 sub-sections in each section
If you find that you end up with 10 or 11 sub-headings in a chapter, or sub-sections in a section, see if you are able to either consolidate two or three sub-sections in to, or create a new main section out of them.
CONCLUSION...
There are seven essential elements to successful business communication:
• Structure
• Clarity
• Consistency
• Medium
• Relevancy
• Primacy/Recency
• Rule of 7±2
If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.
Being an effective communicator takes real skill. Communication skills have to be developed, honed and added to on an on-going basis. They are the heart of interpersonal skills and the greater your awareness of how it all works, the more effective your communication will be.
To be effective in business, you have to communicate well. To be a good manager, you have to communicate exceptionally well.
Here we look at basic communication dynamics, learning skills to improve your communication, using effective communication to improve and promote interpersonal relationships, creating an effective communication strategy.
We could write a book about the importance of communication key skills, but for now you can content yourself with some essentials for becoming a more effective communicator.
Communication Core Skills - The Essentials
Communication is Individual
When you look at communication, presentation skills are not all there is to it. Everyone communicates differently and sees the world differently. The greatest skill you can have in order to instantly and significantly improve you communications skills is to understand the other person's point view and how they see the world. Then you can adjust your own communication to take that into account.
Change Yourself to Change Others
Alongside this has to be the knowledge that the only person you can be sure of changing in any communication is you. Therefore, the most effective way to be in charge of what happens in any communication dynamic is changing what you do. There's never one right way to communicate. Remember your personal style probably says more for you that all the words you use can.
What's Already Working?
Most people tend to look at what's wrong with themselves and other people rather than focusing on what already works.
How Communication Happens
Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication
Interpersonal skills. Everything communicates. Remember! If you aren't clear about what you mean and what your intention is, the other person (or people) could easily (and sometimes deliberately), misinterpret what you mean.
It's now accepted that the words account for only 7-11% of a communication. Your behaviour will 'read' unconsciously to other people and you can certainly be more in charge of the reading matter!
You need to be aware of the padding, justifications and excuses you use and whether they are appropriate. You can make a big impact simply by changing some of your language and developing your verbal skills, This way you can significantly improve your communication skills.
Communication Cycle
There is a neat communication cycle we've come across that can help you understand how to make communication work better. It means that you can take responsibility for every stage on the Communication Cycle:
• Spoken - Heard - Understood - Agreed To - Acted On - Implemented.
• Be aware of where you or others tend to fall off the cycle.
• What can get in the way of Effective Communication
• Here are some Common Barriers to Effective Communication.
• We all make Too Many Assumptions
Notice if you alter your behaviour with certain people because of the assumptions you make about them. Also be aware of the assumptions you think other people make about you.
Assumptions aren't necessarily 'bad'. One effective way to deal with assumptions is to say to the other person, 'I've assumed such and such. 'Is that true?' or 'I'm making an assumption here about... Do you agree?'
Good communication in the workplace is often sabotaged by too many unconfirmed assumptions.
Patterns/Reverting to Type
We are pattern-making beings, which is good. Habits, patterns, routine ways of thinking and behaving are difficult to change. Noticing your patterns at least gets you aware of them! One way to practise this is to see how many communication habits and patterns have crept into your workplace. You can always decide if you want to change them or not.
Needing to Be Right
One skill that does need practise is to let go of needing to be right. Think of it as presenting information or a point of view rather than having to bludgeon someone else with your arguments.
If you want to promote effective relationships, this is one of the greatest communication key skills you can have is to be able to change what you want from a communication. Conflict Resolution
Conflict
One of the purposes of conflict is to arrive at a resolution, so if you avoid conflict, the problem usually (though not always) gets worse. Good communication skills require you to be able to resolve conflict.
Agreement
Find something (anything will do) in the other person's argument which you can genuinely agree with. This is a great way to take the wind out of someone's sails and ensure you don't get drawn into an insoluble argument. People usually won't listen until they feel heard.
Bridge Building
Building bridges by making an offer can help enormously, as can changing what you want.
'I' not 'You'
Use 'I' statements, not 'You' statements to avoid blaming. Improving Communication Skills
Attitude
You can change the direction of a communication if you change your attitude. Effective Listening and Responding
You can have tremendous influence on a communication as the listener and the responder. When we get little or no response from the listener, we often project our assumptions onto them about what they are thinking (and usually we assume they aren't thinking good things about us!).
Be Positive
Use affirmation and encouragement to get the best out of people. Notice when others do things well (even if it's part of their daily routine). This shows you're being attentive; most people respond well when they know that others are aware of what they do. Quite simply, the workplace can be a far better place to be if you consciously sprinkle your communication with positive feedback.
The Importance of Basic Communication Skills
What's most important is that you don't leave the business of communication to chance. Raise your awareness, develop your skills and you'll be a role model for effective communication.
The Seven Essentials of Business Communication
There are seven essential elements to successful business communication:
• Structure
• Clarity
• Consistency
• Medium
• Relevancy
• Primacy/Recency
• Psychological Rule of 7±2
If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.
1. STRUCTURE
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.
Every good communication should have these three structural elements:
• an opening
• a body
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions. In this instance size doesn't matter -- the rules remain the same.
Opening
An opening allows your communication's audience to quickly understand what the communication is about. Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message. It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the point. Don't bog down your audience with irrelevant material, or charts with confusing, illegible numbers and colours.
--SIDE BAR--
There's a key to rapid uptake of your message -- KISS.
Pitch your presentation's graphics at a grade seven child. If THEY can follow and understand them, chances are good that your audience will too.
--END SIDE BAR--
Close
The more powerfully you can end your communication, the more easily remembered it will be by your audience.
2. CLARITY
Be clear about the messaqe you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored.
If you are giving a message about, say, overtime payments don't then add in messages about detailed budget issues or the upcoming staff picnic -- UNLESS they ABSOLUTELY fit in with your original message. It's far better and clearer for your audience if you create a separate communication about these ancilliary issues.
3. CONSISTENCY
Nothing more upsets a regular reader of, say, your newsletter than inconsistency of your message. Taking a position on an issue one week, only to overturn it the next, then overturn THAT position the following week, only breeds distrust in your message.
And distrust in you!
People who distrust you are exceedingly unlikely to take the action you wish them to take. They are also highly unlikely to pay any attention to your future messages. As well as consistency amongst multiple messages, be aware that inconsistency within your message can be just as deadly to audience comprehension.
4. MEDIUM
Similarly, if all you believe you have as a communications tool is PowerPoint then pretty soon all you'll do is reduce very communications opportunity to a PowerPoint presentation. Which is the right one?
The one that communicates your message:
• with the largest likelihood of audience comprehension
• at the lowest fiscal cost
• at the lowest time cost
There's absolutely no value in spending the least amount of money if the medium you choose doesn't deliver on any of the other criteria.
So what media are available?
• paper-based memo
• letter
• one-to-one face-to-face presentation
• seminar
• one-to-one phone presentation
• meeting
• one-to-many personal presentation
• plain text email
• text + graphics email
• voice email
• webpage
• webcast/webvideo
• radio broadcast
• television broadcast
• press release
• tv/film commercial
• cd-rom/dvd
Choosing the right medium or media is obviously critical, as the fiscal costs of some in the above list are higher than others. Get the media mix wrong and you could end up spending a whole lot of time and money on a very visually attractive business communication that delivers next-to-zero ROI (return on investment).
5. RELEVANCY
Screen-after-screen of lengthy text, in a small barely legible font size (because a small font size is the only way to fit all of the words onto the slide), which the manager duly and dully reads verbatim.
Ugh!
The psychological reality is that unless a person is interested in the subject of the message they are highly unlikely to pay any attention.
Which means that if you force them to attend to your message you will actually turn them against you and be even less likely to receive their attention in the future.
Save your in-depth budget and performance analysis Excel-generated charts for those who genuinely care and need to know about such things.
If your business communication needs to touch on several areas that might not be of interest to your entire audience, let them know of alternative resources that more fully address each of these additional areas.
6. PRIMACY/RECENCY
the power and memorability of its opening
Psychologists call the effect of remembering the first few items presented as a 'Primacy Effect'. Similarly, they call the effect of remembering the last few items presented to you as a 'Recency Effect'.
A powerful opening can be anything that captures the audience's attention:
• a quote,
• a joke,
• a loud noise,
• a preposterous statement.
Just make sure that your opening remains consistent with and relates to the subject of the communication.
For example, whilst the opening line, "Free Sex is available in the foyer" would no doubt get your audience's attention, if the theme of your communication thereafter is about some process re-engineering going on in your department, your audience would be annoyed (some would be very annoyed at your duplicity. Equally, a powerful close that bears no resemblance to the main body of the communication would just confuse and disappoint an audience brought up to expect something more.
Business communication is a serious business and very few people have the skill to be able to deliver a humourous message that the audience will retain and act upon.
A fantastic example of how humour engaged an audience but failed to elicit the desired response is from Jeffrey Robinson's superb book 'The Manipulators'.
One of America's great comedic writers, Stan Freburg, was convinced to dabble in advertising. Deciding that his own agency should be called, 'Parsley, Sage , Rosemary and Osborn, a Division of Thyme, Inc.', Freburg created a series of incredibly funny adverts. On the strength of these, he was hired to create an advert for Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), forever remembered in the annals of advertising as 'White Knuckle Flyer'.
"He was aiming at people who hate to fly and are forever worried that planes crash. To pacify them, he got the airline to hand out security blankets — literally, tiny blankets with the PSA logo — to any passenger worrying that flying might get them killed. PSA had succumbed to humour and, unfunnily, went out of business.
As Granville Toogood says in his excellent book 'The Articulate Executive', humour is a very risky strategy. If you are determined to use humour in your presentation, then please follow Toogood's recommendation:
• Tell the story as if it were true. The punch line is a lot funnier if we aren't expecting it
• Tell the story to make a business point. If you don't make a point, you have no business telling a joke
• The opening and closing of your business communication are the two most easily remembered and therefore essential elements. Make sure you give your audience something to remember.
7. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL RULE OF 7±2 (seven plus or minus two)
Psychologists have long known that the human brain has a finite capacity to hold information in short-term or 'working' memory. Equally, the brain is also structured to retain information in 'clusters' or groups of items. Similarly, your audience will group your business communication's message with between four and eight other messages in their long-term memory.
Now do you see the importance of clarity of message and of having a distinctive and memorable opening and close?
If you want your key points to be remembered even five minutes later, it is essential that you limit your business communication to between just five and nine key points.
Equally, if you want your key action points to be remembered five weeks later, ensure that your communication is amongst the five to nine most memorable messages your audience has attended to in the last five weeks.
The human brain 'chunks' information together, so if you have a long document or communication that you want to deliver, especially on paper, then structure your document so that you have:
• 7±2 'chapters' or sections
• 7±2 sub-sections in each section
If you find that you end up with 10 or 11 sub-headings in a chapter, or sub-sections in a section, see if you are able to either consolidate two or three sub-sections in to, or create a new main section out of them.
CONCLUSION...
There are seven essential elements to successful business communication:
• Structure
• Clarity
• Consistency
• Medium
• Relevancy
• Primacy/Recency
• Rule of 7±2
If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.
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