In this part . . .
Chapter 1
Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work
In This Chapter
Recognizing the goal â and challenge â of effective communication
Exploring the impact of assumptions in interpersonal communications
Who needs to communicate effectively with others to be successful at work? In todayâs often fast-paced and ever-changing world of work, the far more enlightened answer to this simple question is: âWho doesnât?â Most must interact in the workplace with bosses and low-level employees, superiors and underlings, managers and the managed â co-workers in some way, shape, or form â to be successful at their jobs. That challenge begins here.
Fewer and fewer jobs today require employees to do tasks by themselves. Instead, many organizations, in the public as well as private sectors, stress that all have customers that they must serve. The two basic types are
External customers: These are people outside your organization who need the products and services that your business provides. In the broadest sense, external customers are people outside the workplace with whom you need to build good working relationships for success on the job. That includes a variety of folks ranging from suppliers to investors.
Internal customers: These are your fellow employees, inside and outside the department where you work, to whom you provide services or assistance.
In addition, the workplace is often structured so that employees do their jobs in cooperative, team-like situations for part or most of their workdays. And if you work in management, most of the demands placed on your job require being able to effectively interact with others â staff, peers, and bosses.
In fact, youâd be hard-pressed to find any job function or field of employment where communicating effectively with people isnât vital. Regardless of your job title or the type of organization or industry you work for, if youâre like most people, the greatest challenges you face lean less toward the technical side of your job (your area of expertise) than they do toward interacting with other people.
Sharing the Rope Versus Tugging on It
Ever play tug-of-war? The two teams on opposing ends of a rope try to pull each other across a dividing center line â sometimes across and into a hole filled with water and mud. Itâs a really dirty competition.
Interactions between people at work often are like tugs-of-war. The rope serves as a metaphor for the bond or connection between two people as they interact. The more it gets tugged between the two parties, the higher the tension, and the less productive the conversations. Alternatively, when neither party makes an effort to hold onto the rope, the bond is broken. In either case, you have varying degrees of a tug-of-war â the stresses and strains that block effective communications.
The goal of successful communications is sharing the rope so that it is strongly held but no one gets dirty â a big challenge but key to the success of communicating on the job.
Understanding where the tug-of-war comes from
As a human being, you communicate with other human beings through four means:
While the advent of the computer and the Internet increased the use of the reading and writing as channels of communication, human beings generally spend more time in the live person-to-person forms of communication: listening and speaking. And remember, speaking includes both the verbal and nonverbal ways people express their messages to one another.
Although youâre taught the traditional Three Rs (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic) from elementary school through high school, if you can read and write, youâre considered literate. On the other hand, you probably didnât receive any formal instruction about how to listen effectively and express yourself constructively while interacting with others. Seldom are these interpersonal channels of communication a part of the curriculum in basic education. Yet listening and speaking are more critical for people to understand each other, work together, and solve problems with one another.
While you probably werenât exactly schooled in how to listen, youâve been told certain things about listening, such as, âListen up,â âBe quiet,â or the ever-popular âShut up (and listen).â Imagine if you were taught to read that way â âHereâs the book, read it!â Youâd be illiterate.
Add elements like stress, tension, and challenge to your picture of the workplace â from encountering differences of opinion to facing demanding customers â and you see how easy it is to get caught up in that tug-of-war feeling. Because the skills needed to effectively handle stressful situations seldom are ta...