Communicating at Work

Tony Alessandra

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9781439104965
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Meetings & Presentations
• Index: Business

In today's competitive workplace, your ability to communicate is your most important business skill.This valuable handbook to better business communication can help you develop the skills you need to succeed. Using real-life examples, it offers practical, easy-to-use instruction in writing effective memos and reports, making memorable presentations, and leading productive meetings. It also introduces key telephone skills, shows you how to interpret body language and personal communication styles -- and teaches you the critical listening and questioning skills you need to get ahead.Whether you're a top manager trying to lead a large organization or one of the millions of people who actually get the work done, Communicating at Work can help you be more effective, get more of what you want out of work, and improve your chances for success.

1

INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.

—WILLIAM JAMES

Almost every problem, every conflict, every mistake, and every misunderstanding has at its most basic level a communication problem. William James saw the communication barrier as “immutable.” We believe that while communication problems may never be completely eliminated, they can be reduced and often avoided.

We live in a world filled with other people. We live together, work together, and play together. In our personal lives, we need each other for security, comfort, friendship, and love. In our working environment, we need each other in order to achieve our goals and objectives. None of these goals can be achieved without communication. Communication is the basic thread that ties us together. Through communication we make known our needs, our wants, our ideas, and our feelings. The better we are at communicating, the more effective we are at achieving our hopes and dreams.

This section will lead you through an interpersonal communication model that will help you understand your own style of communication and the styles that others use. Once you understand how people prefer to communicate, you can adapt your own communications in ways that will enhance understanding and build rapport.

1

FUTURE PERFECT
COMMUNICATION

It is a luxury to be understood.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

When Star Trek’s Mr. Spock wants a perfect transfer of information between himself and another Vulcan, he does a mind-meld. By touching skulls, information flows from one mind to another in a faultless process—free of errors, emotional content, and personal perspectives. Unfortunately mind-melding is not available to us. We have to use a much more flawed technique involving the three “Vs” of communication: verbal, vocal, and visual elements.

This chapter discusses the general communication process, including the most common places it breaks down and how you can avoid problems as you work to communicate. For simplicity and practicality, we show the communication process only from your perspective. That is the only part of the process you can, and need to, control. Of course, in successful relationships, both parties participate meaningfully in the entire two-way process. Figure 1-A presents a model of the communication process. The communication process has five basic elements: two people—the speaker and the listener; two processes—sending and receiving; and one message.

1-A A general model of the communication process

The problem faced in any communication is how to get ideas from one person’s head to another. Since we haven’t figured out how to use Mr. Spock’s mind-meld method of direct transfer, we are stuck with the problem of using an imperfect system that contains considerable opportunity for misunderstandings.

The speaker starts with what he wants to say—the message. To send the message, he translates it into words and actions. Literally, he selects words that he thinks will convey his meaning and he throws in a variety of gestures, facial expressions, etc., that he believes will help transmit the message.

The message to be communicated is carried by the three “V elements”—verbal, vocal, and visual. The words we use make up the verbal element. The vocal element includes the tone and intensity of our voice and other vocal qualities that are often referred to as the “music we play with our voice.” The visual element incorporates everything that the listener can see.

It might surprise you to learn that the most powerful element of communication is the visual. Dynamic visual, nonverbal communication grabs and holds onto the listener’s attention.

Old story: An old codger and a young whippersnapper are on a mule trip. The youngster is having trouble getting his mule across a creek and asks the oldster for help. The wily veteran grabs a big stick and whacks the mule across the head. The mule trots meekly across the creek. The tenderfoot looks amazed and the old guy just says, “First you gotta get their attention.”

Effective communication begins with getting the listener’s attention through strong visual, nonverbal elements and then uses powerful vocal and verbal elements to transmit the message.

The listener “receives” the message through a series of filters: his past experiences, his perception of the speaker, his emotional involvement with the message, his understanding of the verbal content, his level of attention, etc. In a sense, he translates the message into his own words, creating his own version of what he thinks the speaker was saying.

COMMON PROBLEM AREAS

Problems arise in three major areas: sending, the environment, and receiving.

SENDING: As speakers, we don’t send our messages perfectly. The words we choose may be ambiguous; our tone of voice may not reflect our true feelings; our gestures may not convey the importance of the message.

ENVIRONMENT: There might be too much “noise” in the environment. The message might be presented in the midst of many distractions or to a listener whose mind is wandering.

RECEIVING: The message can be garbled during reception. A word or a facial expression might be misinterpreted or a previous experience might cause the message to be translated in a way different from its intent.

While communication can break down in several places, people who understand these problem areas have more control of the process and have fewer communication glitches.

PROBLEMS IN SENDING

Let’s consider the communication involved in a sales situation. This ...