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How to Improve Your Communication Skills
December 17, 2008
Communication skills are important to personal and business success because so much of what employees do every day is communicate – they communicate internally (with other employees) as well as externally (with customers and suppliers). How good are your communication skills and what can you do to improve them?
Let’s look at a sales representative, for example. They must be able to interact every day with a wide variety of customers, each with a different level of knowledge about the company’s products and technology. Sales representatives must be able to quickly adjust their communication style to suit their customer and be able to translate technical jargon into terms that are easily understandable. Without this communication ability, sales suffer, customer satisfaction suffers and company revenue suffers. Making the communication situation even more difficult for a sales representative is that no two people are alike.
I look at a typical day in my work life and almost every hour is about communicating effectively and efficiently, be it from reviewing and responding to email in the morning from people located all over the world, to holding global conference calls for projects with employees and consultants from different cultural backgrounds, to coaching someone in their preparation for a project phase review with the executive team. I must proactively think through the message I want to send, encode it properly and use the most appropriate channel for communication so it can be decoded effectively by others located in different cultures. If I cannot communicate effectively, from writing to listening to speaking to presenting, then I will negatively impact my career, project or department results and the overall company financial results.
Recruiters focus a lot of time and effort on finding employees with good communication skills for all the above reasons and because for a lot of companies, their most important assets go home each night – their employees. That means employees are the “face” of the company and the company’s products and they must be effective communicators to ensure the right message gets across both internally and externally. Poor hiring choices can result in very high costs to companies due to additional recruiting costs, retraining costs and the cost for severance packages. According to an article on MindTools, “In a recent survey of recruiters from companies with more than 50,000 employees, communication skills were cited as the single most important decisive factor in choosing managers.”
How good are your communication skills? Here are a few tips to improve communication from an article by Sarah Fenson on Inc.com:
- “Don’t take another person’s reaction or anger personally, even if they lash out at you in what seems a personal manner.”
- “You don’t have to have all the answers. It’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know.’”
- “Understand that people want to feel heard more than they care about whether you agree with them.”
- “Look for common ground instead of focusing solely on differences.”
- “Improve your listening skill.”
To read the entire article, titled, “A Crash Course in Communication”, just click here. And remember, good communication skills can be the key that helps unlock the door to future job promotions…it’s worth the time and effort to improve your communication skills.
~ Lisa Quast
Sources: Article from MindTools retrieved 5 December 2008, from http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/CommunicationIntro.htm
Article from Inc.com, “A Crash Course in Communication”, retrieved 5 December 2008, from http://www.inc.com/articles/2000/08/20000.html
Topics: Improve Your Skills | 1 Comment »
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December 21st, 2008 at 8:04 pm
[...] Quast of Career Woman Inc. tells us How to Improve Your Communication Skills – something we should never stop [...]