Communication Skills

                Communication is a critical skill for almost everything we do. Whether you’re speaking to another person or to a group, giving a formal presentation, chairing a meeting, or writing emails or reports, you’re putting your communication skills to work. And rightly or wrongly, your arguments and ideas have a much greater impact if they’re presented well than if they’re presented poorly.

•      Poor communication makes an impact – but not the impact that was hoped for! So, what impact are YOU making when you communicate? How good are YOUR communication skills?

•      No matter how good we are – or think we are – at communicating, most of us can benefit from paying regular attention to this. When we keep our communication skills in absolutely tip top condition, we see improvements in the effectiveness of almost everything we do. So, which aspects of communications would you benefit from working on, and how can you improve those skills?

How Do We Communicate?

•      When we think about communicating, we often focus on one side of the communication process – what and how we’re communicating, and on the impression we’re creating. But communication is, of course, a two-way process. It involves much more than simply writing or speaking; it also involves reading, watching or listening – by the audience with whom you are communicating.

•      When you communicate, what are you trying to achieve? Speaking, writing and presenting are ways of helping someone else to understand the information and ideas that are in your mind. It sounds clear, but it’s well worth reminding yourself of this regularly!

•      The path of an idea from your mind to someone else’s is known as the Communications Process.

•      When communications are ineffective, it means something has gone wrong at one or more of the stages in this process. Effective communications means thinking through every stage and so reducing the chances of this happening. For example, are your ideas clear, well-structured and supported by good data? Have you done everything you can to communicate them clearly? Have you checked that your channel is working correctly, from a technical perspective? Have you done everything you can so that your receiver can pay attention to your message? And have you checked the level to throw your message at, so that you’re confident that your receiver has the knowledge and experience needed to understand and use your message?

•      The five key forms of communication helps you think through what you can do to make the communication process work effectively. We look in turn at listening, report-writing, presentations, writing email, and managing meetings. The first of these – listening – involves decoding, while the remaining four belong in the encoding part of the overall process.

Listening Skills

•      When you listen, do you really HEAR what the other person is saying?

•      Because listening involves decoding what someone else is saying, it’s a great place to start improving your communication skills. We know that communication can break down at any point in the Communications Process but, particularly in one-to-one discussions, problems often arise in this decoding stage. By thinking about and working on our listening, not only do we improve our own listening skills, but also we get an appreciation of the challenges we face as speakers.

•      Too often, we don’t really listen to what the other person is saying. Perhaps we’ve come to the conversation with defined ideas of what they’re going to say, and we occupy ourselves with formulating our response while they’re talking. Or perhaps we think we understand what they’re saying, but in fact we’ve miss-interpreted the words they’ve used. Equally, the other person may think you haven’t listened, because your body language has indicated disinterest. If they think this, even if you were actually listening attentively, they may go away from the conversation feeling dissatisfied.

•      Being a good listener is just as important a skill as speaking, writing, and giving presentations. Good listening, supplemented by asking good follow-up questions, plays a key part in building relationship and avoiding misunderstandings, particularly if the other person isn’t expressing all that clearly.

The higher the chance in a conversation, the more critical it is that you’re certain you have understood the other person’s point of view correctly and fully. So it’s particularly important to think about listening well when you’re negotiating, taking instructions or dealing with a key customer or contact.

          Writing Skills

•      Written reports are an essential form of communication in many areas of business. Whether you’re reporting on team progress, writing up a client meeting, or describing how your project is going, your objective is to express all of the relevant information in such a way that the reader can understand it quickly and easily.

•      The exact format of your report depends on several factors. These include its purpose, the level of detail required and the formality needed. For example, if your report is a detailed 50 page document, it will benefit from extra structure such as a table of contents and numbered sections. But such additions would clutter up a two-pager about yesterday’s brainstorm session.

•      Whatever the length of your report, structure is still an essential feature of a business report (you’re not writing a novel here!) Include summaries, and use headings, bullets, tables and charts to break up the text and present information as concisely as possible. This will help make your report more effective for its readers, and you’ll reduce the chance of them skipping a key point.

•      Also, make sure that your language is appropriate for the audience you’re writing it for. If you’re a programmer and you’re writing for other programmers, it may well be efficient to use highly technical jargon. But if there’s any chance that your audience might include non-technical people, the use of jargon risks both misunderstandings and losing your reader’s interest. And when that happens, you’re perceived as a poor communicator.

With the right structure in the place and appropriate language, you’ll be well on the road to creating a good report. However, make sure you don’t spoil it with sloppy spelling or punctuation. While some people no longer find this important, there are still many who care deeply about this. Paying attention to spelling and punctuation continues to be good practice and makes for a professional report. Lower your standards on these details and you again risk being perceived as sloppy, and a poor communicator.

•      Presentations Skills

•      We’ve probably all sat through a poor presentation. But what makes you leave the room thinking “That was a complete waste of my time”? There are several reasons, and if you can avoid them when you’re planning a presentation, you’ve got a good chance of making your next presentation effective and full of impact.

•      First of all, was the message pitched wrongly? At a sales conference, you need to tell sales people about the key points about your new products, so they can convince others to buy them. The sales people don’t necessarily need to know about the clever new production process, or how product development is financed.

•      Next, the message may have been relevant, but was it badly delivered? Common communication barriers include a mumbling presenter who didn’t look you in the eye, or one who spoke too fast. Equally, perhaps the presenter simply read from a terrifically detailed set of slides but you, sitting at the back of the room, couldn’t read them because the text on the slides was so small.

Finally, was it ill-prepared? The material needs to be rehearsed, and the room and logistics need to be ready. The last thing any presenter wants to deal with is the fiasco of a projector not working, or of people being unable to hear at the back of a large room.

Email-Writing Skills

•      Emails have become one of the most common forms of written communication. Yet how much attention do we pay to writing them clearly and concisely? The easier you can make it for the readers of your emails to understand them and act on them quickly, the more effective you’ll be. (If they’re easy to process, you’ll get your answer in minutes. If they’re difficult, be prepared to wait for days… or weeks.)

•      Writing an email is, in some ways, no different from the old practice of writing a business letter. Email communication tends to be a little less formal, but it still usually works best when it’s well-structured, and when writing is clear, well spelled, and well punctuated. For example, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with starting a business email “Hi James”, but if James is a senior partner in a law firm, and you’ve never met him in person, it might not be appropriate for this situation. If you start off on the wrong foot, your reader may well be irritated before he or she even starts to consider your message, making them less open to what you’re saying.

•      The first barrier to communication by email is where the recipient does not receive, or does not read it. But why would this happen? First, it might not be delivered if the recipient’s mail system decides that it’s spam. For a legitimate message, the most likely reason for this to happen is that there is no subject line.

Even if a message without a subject line is delivered, there’s still a chance that the recipient won’t read it. He or she might decide that it is a “suspect” message, and delete it without opening it, just in case it is carrying a virus. And even if they don’t take such drastic action, a message without a subject is hardly going to be the one jumping out at them from a crowded Inbox saying “open me first”.

Effective Reading Skills

            Reading is also an important communication skill, which is concerned with decoding of message by the receiver. Efficiency in reading can greatly influence the effectiveness of communication. It also involves comprehension. Some people may have well-developed reading skills and they may go through a lengthy report with comprehension very quickly. They can be regarded as efficient communicators. On the other hand, there may be many people who are poor readers. They may take too much time to go through even a very simple writing. It is extremely important for a reader to budget his/her time carefully in reading different literature. As extension workers we generally receive a lot of messages through reading. Thus we must know the reasons for poor reading and also know how to improve effective reading skills. This can also benefit us as effective writers.