Interpersonal communication is a necessary ingrediant for great leadership. Discover what makes or breaks relationships and interviews. This article focuses on: Two-way communication, Effective listening, Communication in relationships, Nonverbal communication, Types of questions, and How one can use these when interviewing.
	Developing interpersonal communication ability is critical to personal success. However, most people neglect to do so. [Image by: DailyPic]
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What's Essential To Effective Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication skills are one of the most basic, yet one of the most ignored of the many communication skills necessary to be a leader. ONE CANNOT LEAD THE MASSES UNTIL YOU KNOW HOW TO PERSUADE A FRIEND. And it is surprisingly difficult to get a friend to act even in their best interest. Have ever tried to get someone to exercise more?

This communication skill conceptually is rather simple, having just two individuals, with one acting as a sender and the other acting as a receiver. Besides that, you have a couple of hidden processes known as encoding and decoding with the selection of media an important consideration. Last but not least, don't underestimate the importance of feedback.

To build interpersonal skills, you to focus on building a number of component skills. The major component skills include:

* Master NONVERBAL communication
* Learn TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION techniques.
* Choosing the type of LISTENING most appropriate to the situation.
* Creating positive IMPRESSIONS.
* Developing sound RELATIONSHIPS
* Using relevant of QUESTIONS.

Surprisingly, even this relatively simple form of communication is fraught with many types of problems. The short list includes:

* Encoding problems on both the sender side
* Decoding biases the receiver side
* Choose the wrong communication medium,
* Bad timing
* Fail to read feedback, and so on.

Suggested Readings:

1.Tapscott, Don (1998). Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
2. Baron-Cohen, Simon (2004). The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain. New York: Basic Books.
3. Bate, Barbara & Taylor (Eds.) (1988). Women Communicating. Norwood, NJ: Ablex

On the Net:

Slanguage.com. This site monitors the use of the new words as it changes and evolves.
Social Intelligence. This page by Karl Albrecht introduces this aspect of intelligence, one not all people have a great deal of.

Listening is important—it's hard work—it's something few people do will. That's because the communication skill called listening requires constant mental energyand it easier to fake it (Communication, Fluency).

Plus there are actually different types of listening. For example, you can listen passively actively, or empathically. One can listen to memorize or evaluate based on logic.

Most of these are not done well. Most people confuse sympathy with empathy, forget 95 percent of want they hear a 24 hours later and arent' wizards at evaluateing logic either (Kaneman)

This interpersonal communication skill can be improved but it requires both knowledge and effort. For many years, I actually did this wrong. I hand thought the fundamental probeme was a series of barriers (xxx). Turned out , the real problem was one of related to limitations of attention. There are five of these.

Serial Information drastically diminishing parallel language processing

Capacity Limitations cause that information overload

Fatique counteracts vigilence

Short Attentions Spans

Attention is selective--it misses more than it processes

People focus it internal when they should have it external.

So remember the words of Andre Gide, "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens, we have to keep going back and begin again."

Do you know the answer to this? According to the research, _________ percent of meaning is communicated nonverbally. The answer: xxxx. It's actually higher than this if you are talking about first immpressions.

As you know, emotions and mostly communicated though voice characteristics and facial expressions. If you don't pay attention to these, it is like having the right eye shut and the left one looking left when it should be looking right. You miss so much.

To make matters worse, highly intelligence people tend to engage in a form of self-talk. This is a special type of self-talk in which the person speaks but pays not attention to what to the other person. For example. that classic self-talker really doesn't care whether there words are understood or confusing. But periodically, they will come out of their mental masterbation to see that you haven't left. And of course you will nod politely. They in-term will think that you agree with everything they have just said. It's not that hard to identify the self-talker, all you have to do is look into the eyes.

Besides besides the problem of self-talk, there are many different types of nonverbal communication. Test yoursef. How good are you areat nonverbal communication? Do you know the meaning of the following terms.

• artifacts,
• haptics,
• kinesics,
• facial expressions,
• paralanguage,
• gestures,
• osculesics,
• chronemics,
• interpersonal distance, and
• body movements.

Most people underestimate the power of question—especially those in Western culture. We have a car salesman mentality, everything thinks persuasion in about the bombing loud voice who must drone on for 2 minutes

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This is a classic hammer pounding on a flat tire. Much better to use questions to inflate the person to discover the answer themselves. What many fail to recognize is the questions have the power to same goal as persuasive statements.

Communicating through questions is subtle, more indirect. It possesses the additional advantage that the person typically doesn't become defensive as a result of during interpersonal communication.

How many types of questions are there? We cover the uses of eight major types.

Without using this interpersonal communication technique, group facilitation is essentially impossible. Another other situations such as therapy will suffer as a result.

Good communication skills produce good relationships—it's are simple and as complex as that. While Americans tend to deemphasize the importance of relationships due to the overuse of contracts in business, most cultures follow a different set of rules. Business doesn't begin until the realtionshiop is sound. So if one cannot communicate, if one doesn't have the interpersoanl skills, you are like a dentist without a drill--helpless.

Additionally, certain types of influence techniques require this use of this set of interpersonal communication techniques. One cannot expectations for example. It has been shown in the psychological research that communicating expectations are increabily important. (Rosenthal, xx).

In in this area: one uses one's interpersonal communication to:

• Establish trust
• Build rapport
• Establish first impressions,and
• Generate Empathy

Interviewing

Why should one be better at interpersonal communication? It's because these skills are so important in so many situations--and one of teh most important situations in an internview.

If you think about it, your first interpersonal task is to build the relationship. After all, someone is not going to hire someone they don't like.

References:

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

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