We all know that communication is the driving force behind business successes and failures. Great communication will make your team/company a winner, while poor communication will render you a failure or in the best case an also ran.
I have come up with a theory on how to communicate properly and have distilled it to a few easy to follow steps:
1. Figure out what the person you are communicating with needs from you. Be as anal-retentive as possible here, because a simple oversight can cause a week of lost productivity and major losses.
2. Give the person what they need. This requires some analytical thinking because sometimes you cannot divulge certain information and in that case you have to give the person you are communicating with an answer that is palatable but not full of crap.
3. Follow up to make sure the person has accepted the communication and that they are content with its contents. This does not mean that they need to be happy with what they received, just that they do not require any further information. You could be telling someone that their family just died and that they owe you a lot of money for burial costs, but the important part here is that they know where to send it and by when.
4. Empathize or at least sympathize with the other person. They might be saying that they understand the information when they really do not. Make sure that you are getting through and try to see things from their point of view.
If you do this, then you should get somewhere in your communications and they will not be the cause of your failure (heck, you might not even fail).
I think that often times people lack the ability to pluck the useful information from what people are saying. Sometimes when communicating in a business environment I feel as if people are more worried about what and how they are saying something rather than listening to my part of the conversation. Just my 2 cents.
ReplyDeleteMost of the same can be said for relationships, romantic and otherwise.
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