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.
Communication Skills - A Vehicle On The Road to Success
From the moment of birth, babies are learning how to communicate, building on their innate ability to communicate to their mother through crying. Thereafter, throughout life, a person's development and progress relies on communication of one form or another, either communicating to or receiving communication from others. Communication skills are a very important asset to help any person on the road to success.
Of course, we regard human communication as far more complex and sophisticated than that of other species. It is no coincidence that most large companies and organisations will include communication skills in their training programme for their staff's career development. For most businesses and non-profit organisations, their long term success and efficiency will receive a valuable contribution from employees with good communication skills. For those who need specific types of communication skills, such as public speaking, special training courses may be arranged internally, contracted out, or the employee sent on an outside course.
Few in business would argue that the better your communication skills, the more success you are likely to experience, and the more your career is likely to flourish in the future. There are, of course, more factors in achieving success than communication skills, but their potential contribution is undoubted.
The Benefits of Good Communication Skills
The potential benefits of good communication skills are too many and various to go into here; they could even save your life at some point in the future, win the heart of your dream partner, or save your marriage.
In business, though, some of the main benefits of developing your communication skills are:
1. Managing Your Staff
Staff management involves constant and effective, two way, communication. If you are not capable of communicating with those under your control, then your management ability will be constrained, and may even be damaging to staff morale. Being able to communicate effectively will come into play when delegating to, encouraging, understanding, and training staff, amongst other things.
Good communications with your staff can help you with their motivation, whether directly or through encouraging their self motivation, or both.
2. Dealing With People Outside of the Organisation
Whether you work for a business, or a government or other type of organisation, you may be in a job that requires meeting people from outside of the organisation or talking to them over the telephone. Good communication skills take on a dual role in those cases, as you represent the organisation as well as yourself, so your effectiveness is doubly important. Firstly to the image of the company or organisation, and secondly to your career success.
3. Building Self Confidence
As your communication skills improve, you will find your self confidence increase also, so improving your communication skills can be an important part of your long term success strategy.
There are numerous other benefits to improving your skills in communicating with other, in many aspects of your life.
Ways to Improve Communication Skills
Training courses on communication skills are commonplace, and with any luck your own employer, if you are not self employed, will have a course or series of courses they can arrange for you. The type of course you should do depends on the reason for needing the course; a course on public speaking would be different to one on communicating with your staff, or employees. You can also find courses on verbal communication skills, telephone skills, written communication skills. Practice is also essential, so speaking to staff or to groups of people at every opportunity can be important.
1. Communication is two way. It is not just a question of you talking to your staff. In some cases, that may not be easy, so interpersonal skills really come to the fore here. Being a good listener is a critical skill; in fact, I consider being a good listener is a very powerful personal asset to have.
2. Whoever it is you are speaking to is an individual; a group is made up of individuals, and it is always important to remember that.
3. Improving your memory can be especially important if you have a lot of staff or employees under you, as you need to understand each as individuals to be an excellent manager. Memory can play a big part in other forms of communication. Public speaking is an example, as speaking to a group of people from memory is a great boost to your confidence and effectiveness. If a public speaker has to refer to notes non stop, it greatly reduces the effect of their talk.
Communication is a vast subject, but your communication skills are worth developing, and you have to start somewhere. If you have no boss, then personal friends whose opinion you trust and respect may be an alternative source of opinion.
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.
Communication Skills - A Vehicle On The Road to Success
From the moment of birth, babies are learning how to communicate, building on their innate ability to communicate to their mother through crying. Thereafter, throughout life, a person's development and progress relies on communication of one form or another, either communicating to or receiving communication from others. Communication skills are a very important asset to help any person on the road to success.
Of course, we regard human communication as far more complex and sophisticated than that of other species. It is no coincidence that most large companies and organisations will include communication skills in their training programme for their staff's career development. For most businesses and non-profit organisations, their long term success and efficiency will receive a valuable contribution from employees with good communication skills. For those who need specific types of communication skills, such as public speaking, special training courses may be arranged internally, contracted out, or the employee sent on an outside course.
Few in business would argue that the better your communication skills, the more success you are likely to experience, and the more your career is likely to flourish in the future. There are, of course, more factors in achieving success than communication skills, but their potential contribution is undoubted.
The Benefits of Good Communication Skills
The potential benefits of good communication skills are too many and various to go into here; they could even save your life at some point in the future, win the heart of your dream partner, or save your marriage.
In business, though, some of the main benefits of developing your communication skills are:
1. Managing Your Staff
Staff management involves constant and effective, two way, communication. If you are not capable of communicating with those under your control, then your management ability will be constrained, and may even be damaging to staff morale. Being able to communicate effectively will come into play when delegating to, encouraging, understanding, and training staff, amongst other things.
Good communications with your staff can help you with their motivation, whether directly or through encouraging their self motivation, or both.
2. Dealing With People Outside of the Organisation
Whether you work for a business, or a government or other type of organisation, you may be in a job that requires meeting people from outside of the organisation or talking to them over the telephone. Good communication skills take on a dual role in those cases, as you represent the organisation as well as yourself, so your effectiveness is doubly important. Firstly to the image of the company or organisation, and secondly to your career success.
3. Building Self Confidence
As your communication skills improve, you will find your self confidence increase also, so improving your communication skills can be an important part of your long term success strategy.
There are numerous other benefits to improving your skills in communicating with other, in many aspects of your life.
Ways to Improve Communication Skills
Training courses on communication skills are commonplace, and with any luck your own employer, if you are not self employed, will have a course or series of courses they can arrange for you. The type of course you should do depends on the reason for needing the course; a course on public speaking would be different to one on communicating with your staff, or employees. You can also find courses on verbal communication skills, telephone skills, written communication skills. Practice is also essential, so speaking to staff or to groups of people at every opportunity can be important.
1. Communication is two way. It is not just a question of you talking to your staff. In some cases, that may not be easy, so interpersonal skills really come to the fore here. Being a good listener is a critical skill; in fact, I consider being a good listener is a very powerful personal asset to have.
2. Whoever it is you are speaking to is an individual; a group is made up of individuals, and it is always important to remember that.
3. Improving your memory can be especially important if you have a lot of staff or employees under you, as you need to understand each as individuals to be an excellent manager. Memory can play a big part in other forms of communication. Public speaking is an example, as speaking to a group of people from memory is a great boost to your confidence and effectiveness. If a public speaker has to refer to notes non stop, it greatly reduces the effect of their talk.
Communication is a vast subject, but your communication skills are worth developing, and you have to start somewhere. If you have no boss, then personal friends whose opinion you trust and respect may be an alternative source of opinion.
1 comments:
Communication Skills is a very wide concept. It is not easy to be 100% perfect in Communication skills . so, the continious learning is requires.I really learns a lot from this article.Regards, Sanya communication skills training
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