Communicating Effectively for Dummies

317 Pages·2001·2.48 MB·English

by  Marty Brounstein

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Introduction
I
f you’re like most people I meet, you find applying your knowledge and
skills to the tasks of your job is pretty easy. The harder part of your job is
interacting with people. Aside from working in a lighthouse, few jobs exist in
which working with and getting along well with others is unimportant.
As you probably know, success in your work comes from more than just
having expertise in your field or discipline. It also comes from being able to
express that expertise so that others can understand it, from hearing what
others need so you apply that expertise to serve them, and from working
with others in ways that build, not damage, relationships — especially when
you’re in a leadership role.
For many people, the biggest challenges they face in their jobs deal with com-
municating with others. From coworkers and direct reports to your boss and
other members of management, from customers to vendors, you have to
communicate with people to get your job done.
About This Book
I wrote this book to help you — someone who takes your job seriously, who
wants to perform to your best, and who realizes that the greatest challenges
at work usually come from dealing with others. The words in this book apply
to you whether you’re an individual contributor or a top executive.
This book provides you with tips and tools to handle these communication
challenges and achieve results such as the following:
(cid:2) Be heard in the way you want to be heard.
(cid:2) Solve problems and conflicts.
(cid:2) Understand what others really mean regardless of their communication
styles.
(cid:2) Serve customers in ways that meet their needs.
(cid:2) Influence and build cooperation with others to get work done.
(cid:2) Present ideas that capture the attention of others.
(cid:2) Hire well and get hired.
(cid:2) Use e-mail effectively.
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Communicating Effectively For Dummies
The book helps you discover the best ways to maximize your interactions
with others — listening actively and expressing your messages to others
assertively — even when resolving conflicts, dealing with customers, giving
presentations, and so on.
Conventions Used in This Book
Throughout this book, you’ll see references to active listening and assertive
speaking. People listen in a variety of ways, but active listening is the most
effective. When you listen actively, you achieve an understanding of the
speaker’s message as that person meant it. People also speak (express them-
selves to others) in many ways. Assertive speaking is the most effective way:
You express your messages in a direct, positive, and confident way that main-
tains respect for those who hear them.
This book gives you tools to become an active listener and an assertive
speaker. Tools is a term that participants in my seminars often use; it refers to
techniques and skills that you can apply on the job right away.
How This Book Is Organized
This book first lays a conceptual framework to get you thinking about how
you communicate. The rest of the book shows you how to communicate
effectively at work in your person-to-person interactions. Here’s an overview
of what you’ll find in each part of the book.
Part I: Communicating Successfully
In this part, you explore the four ways in which people express themselves
and the four ways in which people commonly listen to others. You see the
behaviors in each way of expressing yourself and listening, many of which
come from old habits and are spurred by feelings of stress. I also introduce
you to the most effective forms of each side of the interaction, assertive
speaking and active listening.
Part II: Tuning In to the Power
of Active Listening
In Part II, you find out all about active listening — how to do it and what it
takes to make it work. You discover what to listen for when others speak to
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Introduction
you and find out how to draw out their messages and understand them. In
addition, I tell you about verbal and nonverbal behaviors to avoid when lis-
tening because they turn off the speaker and interfere with your effort to
truly capture what the speaker means. Most important, you find out that
active listening works best with empathy: the sincerity and understanding
that make you genuine — someone worth talking to.
Part III: Speaking Assertively
In this part, you discover how to express your messages assertively and
learn that howyou say things often carries more weight than whatyou say.
You find out all about the nonverbal tools of assertive speaking, gain tips and
tools on improving the content of your messages, and discover how to use
language in its most powerful and positive form to convey your messages.
You also find new ways to organize your messages so that your listener
understands them clearly and receives them positively.
Part IV: Win-Win Conflict Resolution
Conflicts — differences — are a part of every workplace, but handling them
constructively is no small feat. This part gives you tools and problem-solving
models that can help you deal effectively with any kind of conflict situation.
You also uncover an assertive approach to working relationships, being con-
sistently respectful, that builds relationships long before conflicts happen.
Part V: Tackling Communication
Challenges
This part takes you through some of the most common challenges people
face in their jobs and uses the tools of active listening and assertive speaking
to deal effectively with them. It starts by exploring the technology of e-mail
and its use in person-to-person communications — how best to use it and the
pitfalls to avoid. You also find out how to organize and deliver formal presen-
tations effectively, manage sales situations and service challenges, and deal
with difficult customer situations. This part also shows you how to interview
effectively, whether you’re interviewing prospective employees or trying to
land a job yourself. Finally, I let you in on some communication tips that help
you coach employees, run meetings, and manage upward and across your
organization.
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Communicating Effectively For Dummies
Part VI: The Part of Tens
This part gives you quick tips and ideas for specific communication situa-
tions. You find out how to handle telephone interactions effectively and how
to enhance teamwork. You also get a summary of ten actions that make you
more credible in your business communication.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book you may notice small graphics in the margins, called
icons, which are meant to grab your attention and support what you’re read-
ing. Here are the icons you’ll see in this book:
This icon points to practical ideas and tips that enhance your interpersonal
communications.
This symbol serves as a reminder about an idea or point that you’ll want to
keep in mind.
The icon alerts you to behaviors you want to avoid — ones that will hinder
your effectiveness in communicating with others on the job.
Where you see this icon, I provide either a more-detailed explanation of a
communication skill or an anecdote that gives you a clearer picture of that
skill and how to put it into practice.
This icon symbolizes a how-to skill that you’ll want to apply in your commu-
nication practices on the job.
Where to Go from Here
I wrote this book so that each chapter stands on its own, so if you want
to skip around when you read, you can do so and not feel out of place.
Sometimes, I refer to key skills or tools covered in other chapters, but you
can easily turn to that chapter to find what you need. You may, however,
want to start with Chapters 1, 2, and 3 because they give the conceptual
foundation that the rest of the book builds upon.
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Chapter 1
Working at Communicating and
Communicating at Work
In This Chapter
(cid:2)Recognizing the goal — and challenge — of effective communication
(cid:2)Exploring the impact of assumptions in interpersonal communications
W
ho needs to communicate effectively with others to be successful at
work? In today’s often fast-paced and ever-changing world of work, the
far more enlightened answer to this simple question is: “Who doesn’t?” Most
must interact in the workplace with bosses and low-level employees, superiors
and underlings, managers and the managed — co-workers in some way, shape,
or form — to be successful at their jobs. That challenge begins here.
Fewer and fewer jobs today require employees to do tasks by themselves.
Instead, many organizations, in the public as well as private sectors, stress
that all have customers that they must serve. The two basic types are
(cid:3) External customers:These are people outside your organization who need
the products and services that your business provides. In the broadest
sense, external customers are people outside the workplace with whom
you need to build good working relationships for success on the job. That
includes a variety of folks ranging from suppliers to investors.
(cid:3) Internal customers:These are your fellow employees, inside and outside
the department where you work, to whom you provide services or
assistance.
In addition, the workplace is often structured so that employees do their jobs
in cooperative, team-like situations for part or most of their workdays. And if
you work in management, most of the demands placed on your job require
being able to effectively interact with others — staff, peers, and bosses.
In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any job function or field of employment
where communicating effectively with people isn’t vital. Regardless of your
job title or the type of organization or industry you work for, if you’re like
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Part I:Communicating Successfully
most people, the greatest challenges you face lean less toward the technical
side of your job (your area of expertise) than they do toward interacting with
other people.
Sharing the Rope Versus Tugging on It
Ever play tug-of-war? The two teams on opposing ends of a rope try to pull
each other across a dividing center line — sometimes across and into a hole
filled with water and mud. It’s a really dirty competition.
Interactions between people at work often are like tugs-of-war. The rope
serves as a metaphor for the bond or connection between two people as they
interact. The more it gets tugged between the two parties, the higher the ten-
sion, and the less productive the conversations. Alternatively, when neither
party makes an effort to hold onto the rope, the bond is broken. In either
case, you have varying degrees of a tug-of-war — the stresses and strains that
block effective communications.
The goal of successful communications is sharing the rope so that it is
strongly held but no one gets dirty — a big challenge but key to the success
of communicating on the job.
Understanding where the
tug-of-war comes from
As a human being, you communicate with other human beings through
four means:
(cid:3) Listening
(cid:3) Speaking
(cid:3) Reading
(cid:3) Writing
While the advent of the computer and the Internet increased the use of the
reading and writing as channels of communication, human beings generally
spend more time in the live person-to-person forms of communication: listening
and speaking. And remember, speaking includes both the verbal and nonverbal
ways people express their messages to one another.
Although you’re taught the traditional Three Rs (Reading, wRiting, and
aRithmetic) from elementary school through high school, if you can read
and write, you’re considered literate. On the other hand, you probably didn’t
receive any formal instruction about how to listen effectively and express
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Chapter 1: Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work
yourself constructively while interacting with others. Seldom are these inter-
personal channels of communication a part of the curriculum in basic educa-
tion. Yet listening and speaking are more critical for people to understand
each other, work together, and solve problems with one another.
While you probably weren’t exactly schooled in how to listen, you’ve been
told certain things about listening, such as, “Listen up,” “Be quiet,” or the
ever-popular “Shut up (and listen).” Imagine if you were taught to read that
way — “Here’s the book, read it!” You’d be illiterate.
Add elements like stress, tension, and challenge to your picture of the work-
place — from encountering differences of opinion to facing demanding
customers — and you see how easy it is to get caught up in that tug-of-war
feeling. Because the skills needed to effectively handle stressful situations
seldom are taught, you may have trouble sharing the rope. Instead, communi-
cation is more adversarial, ranging from waging verbal war against the other
person to appeasing that person just to get past a difficult situation to using a
subtle but negative get-evenapproach. Adversarial ways of communicating,
represented by the tug-of-war, block people from working out their differ-
ences and interacting respectfully.
Achieving the goal in communicating:
Mutual understanding
Interpersonal communications involves senders and receivers. A senderis the
speaker, expressing his or her message to other parties. Areceiver, on the other
hand, is a person who listens to one or more speakers. In a good conversation,
participants take turns being senders and receivers. When participants in a
conversation try to be senders at the same time, the tug-of-war rope stretches
taut. Or if one participant is a receiver but tunes out the sender, shows little
interest in the conversation, or passes judgment on nearly every point that the
sender makes, the tension mounts as the tug-of-war goes on.
The goal of the communication process is mutual understanding — sharing
the rope together and maintaining its strength. When this goal is achieved,
participants hear each other out and understand where everyone is coming
from. They don’t battle as adversaries or competitors. Instead, they commu-
nicate in a collaborative fashion — a conversation characterized by respect
and sincerity. They may have their differences, but differences aren’t an
excuse to have a tug-of-war; rather, differences are issues to work through to
reach the desired outcome.
Achieving mutual understanding is no small feat because most people aren’t
taught how to communicate as senders and receivers. As a result, when they
express messages (that is, when they speak), they use four common
approaches that are primarily based on old habits (discussed in further
detail in Chapter 2). Those four approaches include
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Part I:Communicating Successfully
(cid:3) Aggressive speaking
(cid:3) Nonassertive speaking
(cid:3) Passive-aggressive speaking
(cid:3) Assertive speaking
People commonly engage in four similar ways of receiving (that is, listening)
messages (see Chapter 3 for further details), including the following:
(cid:3) Passive listening
(cid:3) Selective listening
(cid:3) Attentive listening
(cid:3) Active listening
Of these common approaches to speaking and listening, the more effective
forms of communication — the ways that help you achieve the goal of mutual
understanding — are:
(cid:3) Assertive speaking, or the act of expressing yourself directly, positively,
and with confidence, so that your point comes across clearly and so that
you maintain respect toward others.
(cid:3) Active listening, or the act of providing nonverbal and verbal feedback
to a speaker that allows his or her message to be expressed and shows
understanding of that message.
To communicate successfully, you must be able to combine active listening
and assertive speaking.
Keep in mind that active listening and assertive speaking don’t provide you
with special formulas to get people to do what you want. If that is your only
intent, you’ll come across as a manipulator.
Hold the Pickles, Lettuce,
and Assumptions
To listen actively and speak assertively, you must first become aware of and
perhaps even change the pattern of your assumptionswhen interacting with
others. That is no easy feat.
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Chapter 1: Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work
Understanding assumptions
and how they can help
An assumptionis a belief that something is true without proof or demonstra-
tion, or that a person is going to behave a certain way before that person has
a chance to act. Assumptions are part of the human condition. You’ve proba-
bly been making them (and have had them made about you, too) all your life.
But not all assumptions are negative:
(cid:3) Processing stimuli: Assumptions help you gather the information and
stimuli to make sense of the world around you. When you’re driving, for
example, assumptions help keep you alert and aware of what other dri-
vers may do so that you stay safe.
(cid:3) Anticipating problem situations: Assumptions can help you prepare for
problems and plan how to respond appropriately if difficult challenges
arise.
(cid:3) Trying new things: Assumptions can help you make educated guesses
about new people or situations. They can aid you in drawing upon past
experiences and determining how to apply them in future situations — in
essence, allowing you to take risks and do something new and different.
Avoiding the downside of assumptions
You’ve no doubt heard that old saying that goes something like this:
“When you assume, you make an A S S out of U and ME.”
Reporting the downside of assumptions
A reporter for a local newspaper wrote a story priest had, in fact, been wearing a helmet at the
about an accident. A priest from the local parish time of the accident and the assumption made
was struck by a car and suffered a head injury him look irresponsible. By acting on his assump-
while riding his bicycle. The reporter writing the tion without knowing all the facts first, the
story assumed that the good father was not reporter was the biggest donkey of all.
wearing a helmet when the accident occurred.
The next day, the priest called the reporter to
inform him of a major error in the story: The
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