grelohi.com

Are you sending and receiving accurately?

Communication skills are some of the most important skills that you need to succeed in the workplace.

We talk to people face to face, and we listen when people talk to us. We write emails and reports, and we read the documents that are sent to us. Communication, therefore, is a process that involves at least two people – a sender and a receiver. For it to be successful, the receiver must understand the message in the way that the sender intended.

This sounds quite simple. But have you ever been in a situation where this hasn’t happened? Misunderstanding and confusion often occur, and they can cause enormous problems.

If you want to be an expert communicator, you need to be effective at all points in the communication process – and you must be comfortable with the different channels of communication. When you communicate well, you can be very successful. On the other hand, poor communicators struggle to develop their careers beyond a certain point.

So are you communicating effectively?

Before you start communicating, take a moment to figure out what you want to say, and why. Don’t waste your time conveying information that isn’t necessary – and don’t waste the listener or reader’s time either. Too often, people just keep talking or keep writing – because they think that by saying more, they’ll surely cover all the points. Often, however, all they do is confuse the people they’re talking to.

To plan your communication:

• Understand your objective. Why are you communicating?
•     Understand your audience. With whom are you communicating? What do they need to know?
•     Plan what you want to say, and how you’ll send the message.
•     Seek feedback on how well your message was received.

When you do this, you’ll be able to craft a message that will be received positively by your audience.

Good communicators use the KISS (“Keep It Simple and Straightforward”) principle. They know that less is often more, and that good communication should be efficient as well as effective.