Twelve Communication Skills You Need To Develop By Murray Johannsen

Effective communication skills are essential—unfortunately, good communication skills are something most people take for granted and rarely improve.

"Son, don’t assume because you have a mouth and two ears, that you know how to communicate." A Mother's Advice to Her Son

Effective communicators realize early in life that they must improve communication skills. Failure to do so means you can never execute on complex leadership styles or success models such as John Wooden's Pyramid.

In this area you have a twelve different communication skills to prove that can be built through communication skills classes. These are:

Self-Talk

“I frequently lose arguments with myself."—Explanation used to explain why a person ate another chocolate just after saying that they were not going to eat any more.

It's long been known by psychologists there is an internal dialog occurring within the mind that's incredibly important to improve. Yet, most of us pay it no mind.

Even good communication texts rarely mention that importance of improving the communication between Ego and Unconscious. They fail to understand that robust lines of communication need to be cultivated between the Unconscious and the Ego or you see alot of, "I don’t do what I’m supposed to do; and do what I shouldn't do.”

The miscommunication between the Ego and the Unconscious means the mind functions like a young child with two legs that can't work together. Consequently, you see "drunken walks" and frequent falls. And too often, one goes two steps forward, but three steps back.

Interpersonal Communication

"The mind is like a TV set, when it goes stops working, it is a good idea to shut off the sound."—Unknown

Interpersonal communication skills are what's used between two individuals, with one acting as a sender and the other acting as a receiver. Surprisingly, even this relatively simple form of communication is fraught with many types of problems.

Problems include a number of encoding and decoding biases on both the sender and the receiver side. But individuals will also choose the wrong medium, fail to solicit feedback and so on.

Interpersonal Humor:

A little girl and a little boy were at day care one day.
The girl approaches the boy and says,"Hey Stevie, wanna play house?"
He says, "Sure! What do you want me to do?"
The girl replies, "I want you to communicate."
He says to her, "that word is too big. I have no idea what it means."
The little girl smirks and says, "Perfect. You can be the husband.

Listening

"The untrained mind listens for what's said, But the wise mind hears what's said and unsaid."— M. Johannsen

People are terrible listeners—but we do know how to fake it pretty well. We do this with techniques such as nodding at the right moment, period acknowledgments such as, "Ah" and "Ah, ha," and the classic technique present in the marriage, the "Yes, dear." In fact, we are so good at faking listening, that the average person can't even tell.

Leaders cannot afford to develop a reputation for not listening—it's ruinous. Despite this, one of the more common complaints in many organizations is, "My boss doesn't listen to me."

Feedback

"Few managers want to deliver it, most subordinates don't want to receive it. Yet, there is little improvement without it." — M. Johannsen

Communicating to provide feedback is necessary if one is to improve performance. Those with a high need to achieve, those who constantly seek to perform at their best, undertand the need for feedback. In fact, they will often ask for it.

But these are a small minority. The vast majority want to live in the "ignorance bubble" — getting an "attagirl" or an" attiboy" on occasion, but deathly afraid of hearing about mistakes and screw-ups.

Small Group Communication

To improve communication in groups, one must take a very different approach compared to that used in interpersonal communication. If you think about it, business and government is just another stage—one in which you play a role. You may be a bit player, but most everyone gets some type of title. For example, the role played by the vice-president of a small bank is similar to supervisor in a manufacturing firm, although VP title sounds better.

Besides focusing on the task and maintaining good relationships, a meeting leader must also deal with a number of self-orientated roles. These are largely destructive behaviors that prevent the group from doing what it supposed to do while creating a great deal of frustration. Thus, the all too common comment heard after the meeting is over that it was, "It was a tremendous waste of time."

Communication Humor: Lunch on Jesus

An old nun who was living in a convent next to a Brooklyn construction site noticed the coarse language of the workers and decided to spend some time with them to correct their ways.

She decided she would take her lunch, sit with the workers and talk with them. She put her sandwich in a brown bag and walked over to the spot where the men were eating.

She walked up to the group and with a big smile said: "Do you men know Jesus Christ?" One of the workers looked up into the steelwork and yelled, "Anybody up there know Jesus Christ?"

One of the steelworkers yelled down a "Yea. Why"?

The worker yelled back "His wife's here with his lunch.

Persuasive Skills

We live in a persuasive age. Someone, somewhere at this very moment is scheming to relieve you of your hard earned cash. They won't steal it, nothing so primitive as that.

They will persuade you, and you will willingly hand the money over thinking that you made a smart decision, not even realizing the you had been manipulated by these unseen individuals to perform your primary function according to the marketing professors—to buy and consume. In fact, your primary role in life is to be a "consumer."

Long the study of sales people everywhere, those who wish to lead must get good at this communication skill. After all, you can't order your boss to do something, you must persuade. And peers don't accept your idea because it's better, they accept because it was sold.

Nonverbal Communication

Body language contains meaning--sometimes more meaning than what is embedded in the words. Yet, few individuals pay much attention to it and the average person is rather clueless as to what it all means.

Part of this confusion stems from cultural differences. While a smile is universal, the meaning attached to other facial expressions is determined by culture.

Besides cultural differences there are many different types of nonverbal communication. These include: artifacts, haptics, kinesics, facial expressions, paralanguage, gestures, osculesics, chronemics, interpersonal distance,and body movements (Tubbs, and Moss, 2006).

Public Speaking

It's been said that the most common fear of the common man (or woman) is public speaking. Most of that fear is really anticipatory anxiety, where someone imagines an upcoming catastrophe that fails to materialize.

The art of mastering the platform consists of getting good at improving communication skills in:

• The verbal content and visual elements projected on a screen, and
• The nonverbal elements of the presentation.

Communication Skills Using PowerPoint

This is a humorous communication video that you should take a look at.

But paradoxically, people slave over the visuals and devote less time to the verbal and the nonverbal elements. This produces business presentation which can be characterized as pretty but boring, usually shortened into pretty boring.

Interviewing

A number of studies over the years have indicated that interviews have a relatively low correlation when it comes to predicting future job performance. Despite this low validity, corporations everywhere make interviews a must pass initiation ritual to access corporate riches.

So while interviews are not that valuable to the hiring agency, they are super important to the job seeker who must act, must project, must communicate in a way that meets the interviewers criteria for the ideal candidate.

Asking Questions

"Any idiot can state opinion as fact, but it takes a creative mind to ask the right questions." — Unknown

"Every ass loves to hear himself bray." — Thomas Fulle

For some reason, many executives assume that they have to dominate everyone. This is typically done is through communicating in loud voice with a fast tempo, for a long period of time to prevent someone from being able to speak or ask questions. If a question does get asked, the executive has a fall back position—the two-minute tirade of irrelevancy.

The power of questions can be seen in TV shows where during a trial, the defense attorney or a prosecutor can enhance or destroy a witnesses credibility simply by the using well structure questions.

Without improving this communication skill, effective counseling, therapy and group facilitation is essentially impossible.

Cultural Communication Skills

Individuals in business and government need to learn how to adapt their communication patterns to take into account cultural differences. It's not enough to speak the same language, you have to use it properly in a cultural context.

No where is the more obvious than in the communication rituals needed to form a positive first impression. To do so, you must be culturally congruent, must incorporate another's behavioral patterns into your own. So rather than shake hands, you might use a wai in Thailand, a bow in Japan and a kiss in Brazil and France.

Cultural Communication Humor: What Not to Eat

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

*The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

*The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

Organizational

"The first function of an executive is to develop and maintain a system of communication." Chester Bernard, 1886-1961 President, USO: The Functions of the Executive (Harvard, 1938"

In the old days, organizational communication was limited to four types of information flows: upward, downward, lateral and rumors. Today, managers have to worry about communication through these four channel plus electronic communication mediums such as telepresense, virtual meetings, SMS, voicemail, emails, wikis, etc.

The Importance of Good Communication Skills

Good communication skills are essential to success. Yet, few people devote the time and make the effort to improve their communication skills.

References:

Moss, Stewart, and Tubbs, Sylvia (2006). Human Communication, Principles and Contexts, 11th Edition. New York: Prentice Hall.

For More Informational Also Consult These Books