Improve Your Communication Skills

How to Build Trust, Be Heard and Communicate with Confidence

Alan Barker

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780749486273
• eBook ISBN: 9780749486280
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Communication

Better communication skills will have a direct impact on your career development. Improve Your Communication Skills is your practical guide to effective communication in business. This fully updated 5th edition now features a handy self-assessment tool to help you profile your own preferred communication style, even more practical exercises, useful checklists and top tips, as well as content on influencing others and managing difficult conversations. This book provides vital guidance on improving your conversations, building rapport, giving effective presentations, writing excellent reports and networking successfully. With the help of Improve Your Communication Skills, you will be able to get your message across - every time. The Creating Success series of books...
Unlock vital skills, power up your performance and get ahead with the bestselling Creating Success series. Written by experts for new and aspiring managers and leaders, this million-selling collection of accessible and empowering guides will get you up to speed in no time. Packed with clever thinking, smart advice and the kind of winning techniques that really get results, you'll make fast progress, quickly reach your goals and create lasting success in your career.

Appendix

Where to go from here

Communication is continuous, and we never finish learning how to improve. My blog explores issues and events relating to the material in this book. You can find it at: bit.ly/1zgJBvo.

Here are some thoughts about books and other resources that will take further the ideas we’ve explored in this book.

About this book

• You can find a copy of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s report, Communication Barriers in the Modern Workplace, here: https://bit.ly/2OTJ2Vn.
• Find a link to the Interact consultancy’s report here: https://bit.ly/2DhDrmF.
• The GMAC’s 2017 Corporate Recruiters Survey is available here: https://bit.ly/2Pwo5Au.

Chapter 1: What is communication?

• The fullest explanation I have found of the transmission model of communication is on Mick Underwood’s magnificent (and award-winning) website: bit.ly/29CaP7Q.
• I draw on the work of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell throughout this book. You can find out about their work by going to the Human Givens Institute website (hgi.org.uk). Their book, Human Givens: The new approach to emotional health and clear thinking, is an excellent introduction to this body of knowledge and research.
• Chris Dyas explains his five steps to building rapport here: bit.ly/29xhu5U.
• The Wikipedia article on Paul Watzlawick provides useful information and links.

Chapter 2: What’s your communication style?

• My model of communication styles draws on a number of sources. I’ve borrowed the term ‘functional’ from the styles model illustrated in the 2017 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. This model seems to be based on the work of Mark Murphy, founder of Intelligence IQ – although the report does not, I think, acknowledge him. Murphy’s model is broadly similar to the Wilson Social Styles model and the Insights Discovery method, both of which I have used in my own consultancy work. You can find information on all three approaches online. Insights claims that the Discovery product, like the Myers-Briggs profile, is a personality assessment tool, drawing on the work of Carl Gustav Jung. My own model doesn’t claim to demonstrate anything about personality.
• The ‘push’ and ‘pull’ influencing styles are part of situational influencing theory, often associated with the work of David Berlew and Roger Harrison.
• Empathizing and systemizing are concepts used by Simon Baron-Cohen. Check out his book, The Essential Difference, for more information (Penguin, London, 2003).

Chapter 3: Seven ways to improve your conversations

• First- and second-stage thinking are notions that inform Edward de Bono’s work. Look at Lateral Thinking in Management (Penguin, London, 1982). The four types of conversation derive from the work of Michael Wallacek, who may have been influenced by Werner Erhard.
• Chris Argyris’s ladder of inference is best found in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, edited by Peter Senge and others (Nicholas Brealey, London, 1994).
• For more on mind maps, see Tony Buzan’s Use your Head (BBC, London, 1974).

Chapter 4: The skills of enquiry

Nancy Kline’s Time to Think (Ward Lock, London, 1999) is a fascinating study of deep listening.

Chapter 5: The skills of persuasion

• Aristotle explains his three modes of appeal in The Art of Rhetoric (Penguin Classics, London, 1991).
• Caroline Goyder includes her ideas on voice production in her book Gravitas (Vermilion, London, 2014).
• Peter Thompson’s Persuading Aristotle (Kogan Page, London, 1999) entertainingly relates classical rhetoric to modern business techniques.
• For more on pyramids, look at Barbara Minto’s The Pyramid Principle (Pitman, London, 1987).

Chapter 6: Tough conversations

• Find out how well Paul McLean’s model of the triune brain is surviving:
  • bit.ly/1PaQK8G.
  • bit.ly/1PB8vID.
• Find out more about the limbic system here: bit.ly/29HkLz9.
• Explore our needs as human beings here: bit.ly/29xg4mm.
• And you can take an online emotional needs audit here: bit.ly/29xg1at.

Chapter 7: Making a presentation

• You can find a worked example of Monroe’s motivated sequence here: bit.ly/1ndUE4m.
• PRAISE is based loosely on the material in Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (Arrow, London, 2008).
• Jens Kjeldsen has analysed slide usage in his paper, ‘The Rhetoric of PowerPoint’: bit.ly/209vX7d.
• Max Atkinson’s book Lend Me Your Ears (Vermilion, London, 2004) takes a strikingly new approach to the subject of presenting and speech writing.

Chapter 8: Putting it in writing

• Justin Kruger’s paper on email’s potential for misunderstandings is here: bit.ly/SyB0jo.
• Kristin Byron’s article, ‘Carrying too heavy a load?’, is available here: bit.ly/1OrR5QJ.
• Jay Heinrichs talks about the tenses of persuasion in his book Thank You for Arguing (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2013).
• Alan Barker’s Writing at Work (Industrial Society, London, 1999) is a comprehensive guide to writing business documents.

Chapter 9: Networking

• Two books taking usefully complementary approaches to networking are Steven D’Souza’s Brilliant Networking (Pearson Education, Harlow, 2008), and Power Networking by Donna Fisher and Sandy Vilas (Bard Press, Atlanta, GA, 2000).

Table of contents

• Creating Success online course advert
• Creating Success Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• About this book
• 01 What is communication?
• The transmission model
• Pattern-matching: The secret of understanding
• Communication: A new definition
• Conversation: The currency of communication
• 01 What is communication style?
• Communication style questionnaire
• Understanding your communication profile
• Four communication styles
• Understanding others’ styles
• Body language: Non-verbal communication
• Adapting our communication style
• The uses of conversation
• 03 Seven ways to improve your conversations
• Clarify your objective
• Structure your thinking
• Manage your time
• Find common ground
• Move beyond argument
• Summarize often
• Use visuals
• 04 The skills of enquiry
• Paying attention
• Treating the speaker as an equal
• Cultivating ease
• Encouraging
• Asking quality questions
• Rationing information
• Giving feedback
• 05 The skills of persuasion
• Character, logic and passion
• What’s the Big Idea?
• Arranging your ideas logically
• Expressing your ideas
• Remembering your ideas
• Delivering effectively
• 06 Tough conversations
• Six tough conversations
• 'What makes conversations tough?
• How we make tough conversations tougher
• Three steps towards better tough conversations
• 07 Making a presentation
• Preparing for the presentation
• Managing the material
• Controlling the audience
• Looking after yourself
• Answering questions
• 08 Putting it in writing
• The trouble with email
• From speaking to writing
• Editing your work
• 09 Networking: the new conversation
• To network or not to network?
• Preparing to network
• The skills of networking conversations
• Following up and building your network
• Appendix Where to go from here
• About this book
• Chapter 1: What is communication
• Chapter 2: What's your communication style?
• Chapter 3: Seven ways to improve your conversations
• Chapter 4: The skills of enquiry
• Chapter 5: The skills of persuasion
• Chapter 6: Tough conversations
• Chapter 7: Making a presentation
• Chapter 8: Putting it in writing
• Chapter 9: Networking
• Copyright