IV. Enhancing Interpersonal Communication Interactions Do you agree or disagree
ID: 450034 • Letter: I
Question
IV. Enhancing Interpersonal Communication Interactions
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
It is not important how a leader communicates with others, what is important is accomplishing the task at hand.
Explain your viewpoint on this question, and provide an example of an organizational leader that you have observed interacting with others internally or externally to resolve a situation or reach a goal. Are this person's interpersonal communication skills effective or ineffective? Why? What have you learned from observing this leader's communication behaviors?
Explanation / Answer
Ways to Improve Interpersonal Communication Skills:
Seek out opportunities to lead:
Great leaders are great communicators. Taking up a leadership opportunity does not mean going after titles; It rather means being proactive and taking the initiative. In a business setting, it may mean voluntarily bringing coworkers together to solve a problem or develop a concept. By forming teams, directing projects, solving problems or leading a product development focus group, you learn how to communicate with people, thereby enhancing your interpersonal communication skills.
Take a speech course:
If you really want to improve your interpersonal communication skills, then taking a speech course may be an idea worth considering. A good speech course helps you build confidence and teaches you how to communicate coherently. This is by far one of the smartest ways to improve your interpersonal communication skills.
Write, write and write some more:
Writing helps you to learn how to express yourself clearly. It makes you think before you speak. Because it requires that kind of control, it helps you to personally communicate to yourself. Internal communication precedes interpersonal communication. Therefore, consistently practicing the art of writing can help you improve your interpersonal communication skills.
Rehearse with a recording tool:
To be able to communicate effectively, you need to understand the way you communicate. By recording yourself, you will have the opportunity to listen or even watch yourself talk so you can observe your body language, tone of voice, language command, confidence level and even what causes you to communicate effectively or poorly. Once you make these observations of yourself, it will be easier to improve in some areas so you become an effective communicator.
Take an acting class:
Acting offers you an opportunity to relate with different kinds of people. It can boost your confidence and language command. Because acting lets you communicate on stage in a manner that will be understood and appreciated by an audience, it can be an avenue to develop your interpersonal communication skills. Watch and learn from effective communicators
There are leaders in every sphere of human life and this includes interpersonal communication. One best way to improve your interpersonal communication skills is to watch and observe how effective communicators communicate. If you want to know whom to learn from, think of the people who leave a positive lasting impression on you anytime you interact with them; those who can motivate you toward a course; and leaders who inspire you – but not manipulate you – to take an action.
Communicating Strategically:
When groups of people work together, misunderstandings and conflict are inevitable. In a business organization, both misunderstanding and conflict can lead to serious problems. Misunderstanding can cause expensive mistakes and business failures, while individuals engaged in internal conflict have less time and energy to spend on working toward the organization’s goals. On the other hand, both misunderstanding and conflict are valuable tools for reaching the authentic understanding that allows a group of people to collectively accomplish a task. Misunderstandings allow the group to locate topics where clearer, more complete, or more detailed communication is needed. Similarly, conflicts are a signal that some kind of problem exists, which must be corrected if the group is to remain productive.
Preventing Misunderstanding:
Communicators should always try to avoid misunderstanding by using a clear, concise business style, of course, and following expected communication formats. Even the best communicators will sometimes find themselves misunderstood, though, or find that they sometimes have trouble understanding others. The best communicators will not simply create or listen to a message and assume that it has been understood exactly as intended. The choice of communication channels, personalities of the individuals involved and the organizational environment itself can all play a role in the final quality of communication.
Communication Channels:
Email:
Email has become such a convenient tool of communication that we sometimes forget that it is not the best way to communicate everything. Conflicts can easily erupt when people don’t get all the information they need. It might take a whole series of emails to cause and unsuccessfully clarify a misunderstanding that could easily be cleared up in just a five-minute phone call.
Conversations:
Conversations are such common, everyday occurrences that people sometimes forget how important they are in the creation and maintenance of positive work relationships. Good conversation structure and careful word choice are important for making each person’s meaning clear, of course, but so are the facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures used to accompany those words.
Communication and Interaction Styles:
Many workplace conflicts are not, in the strictest terms, conflicts at all. Resources are sufficient and goals are shared, but people nevertheless seem to be at cross-purposes. For most people, communication styles are such an important part of their own personality that how a job is done is at least as important as the job itself. Working effectively with others can thus depend on communicating effectively with those who have different communication styles.
Everyone has his or her own communication style, and misunderstandings frequently occur simply because people expect others to prefer the same style of interaction. Individuals who seem to be engaged in conflict without any real misunderstanding or different in goals will sometimes explain that they just have a “personality conflict.” While it is quite true that individuals with very different personalities can annoy each other, and even disagree about the best way to do things, allowing these differences to escalate into conflict will jeopardize the organization’s success.
Communicating in the Work Environment:
Whenever individuals are uncomfortable about engaging in some communication event, there is a tendency to see it as a source of conflict. The normal anxieties of stage fright, for example, are interpreted as concern about the way an audience might react to the speech, and the speaker begins to see the event as a source of potential conflict. Similarly, the writer of a memo considering the audience’s reaction to a negative decision might begin to focus on the potential conflict of the situation rather than the strategic elements of the message itself.
The reality is that much workplace communication occurs because there is some kind of disagreement or concern about resources, goals, or lack of information. Any communication under these circumstances has the potential to either resolve the issue or produce conflict. The good communicator does not avoid communication because it might produce conflict; he engages in communication in a way that the issue is resolved without creating additional conflict.
Anger, Frustration and Worry
When communication occurs in response to some kind of negative event—credit has been denied, sales are down, quality criteria have been missed—the participants are often angry, frustrated or worried. Communicators in these situations need to be careful to consider the emotional impact of any messages, and to pay particular attention to the ways in which communication can reduce the effect of negative emotions.
The number one reason people get fired is anger, and the number one problem people have anger at work is not being “heard and respected”.
Communicating Under Stress
Emotional outbursts can be frightening and upsetting to everyone in the organization, but the long term condition of workplace stress can have even more damaging consequences. Without an immediate event to trigger emotional reactions and thus bring attention to the problem, people can suffer from stress without even realizing that their mood, thinking patterns and work productivity are being undermined. Communication can seem to produce even more tension and ultimately conflict, but an immediate cause of the problem is not apparent unpleasant personalities, poor communication skills, or lack of skill with the job are presumed to be the source.
Even the friendliest of co-workers can become snappy and mean when they are under stress. Clear thinking can be difficult, and people can begin to focus on information or relationships that are not relevant to the task at hand. In general, people who are stressed tend to do more of what they already know they do best. So, the detail person who is under pressure really digs into those details, and the problem-solver tries to put all her problem-solving skills to work at once.
Difficult People
Many situations in which people seem to be behaving badly can be the result of emotional responses or stress reactions, but sometimes there seems to be no cause at all. Whether because of long term psychiatric issues, medical conditions, or just plain nastiness, there will always be a few individuals who are consistently difficult to communicate with. Communicating in these circumstances calls for particular attention to the context and to the long term relationship.
Difficult Coworkers
Sometimes organizational policies or employment law create a situation in which a person is kept on the payroll even though he or she is unable or unwilling to interact productively with others. Sometimes a supervisor is able to assign such a person to a private area or highly individualized tasks in order to reduce his or her impact on others, but often there will be at least minimal contact as work is passed from one person to another.
Working with such a person can be frustrating, but everyone in the organization will benefit when co-workers work together to minimize the negative impact.
Difficult Customers
At least 80% of entry level workers will be dealing with customers in some capacity , and unless the position is in sales or marketing, most of those customers have a problem of some kind. While there might be a legitimate reason to be angry or stressed by the situation. Preventing conflict by building solid relationships can be more difficult with customers, since most interactions are with individuals you’ve never met before.
When responding to a complaint, make two assumptions: that the complaint has some merit, at least in the customer’s mind, and that any hostility is atypical for the person and merely caused by the situation. From this perspective, it will be easier to communicate with the tone of a friend.
Difficult Supervisors
Discovering Causes of Conflict
Goal Conflict:
With all the emphasis on reducing misunderstanding with communication, it’s important to realize that some conflicts come about because we understand each other perfectly: we want different things. More importantly, we want different things that can’t be obtained simultaneously. The simple fact that business organizations are comprised of multiple functional areas virtually guarantees that conflicts will arise.
Conflicting Demands and Responsibilities:
The business goals of various departments and divisions of a company are likely to be different, and can be oppositional at the level of individual or group tasks. Even though everyone might recognize their goals are designed to achieve a common organizational goal, the structure of the organization requires conflict.
Process Conflict
In any large organization, the diversity of cultural backgrounds and personality types will inevitably lead to some conflicts about how communication ought to be done. Conflict is less frequent when a group shares underlying rhetorical norms about who ought to participate in decisions, what the basis for those decisions ought to be, and how the decision-making process should work. Similarly, individuals who share a cognitive style will find themselves to be more “compatible” because they prefer to communicate about goal conflict in generally the same way.
Emotional Conflict
Resolving Issues Productively
Regardless of the underlying issue, its resolution will depend on a communication process to locate a solution and take steps to avoid the same issue in the future. Simply avoiding the symptoms of conflict by refusing to address issues does nothing to resolve the issue; everyone in the business is put at risk when problems are left unsolved. Similarly, calming people’s emotions with supportive behaviors or empty promises to solve the problem is an unproductive and dangerous way to “resolve” conflict.
There are three basic ways to address conflict: avoidance, defusion and confrontation. Avoidance can be appropriate when there are negligible consequences or when one or both parties are unable or unprepared to confront the issues at that time. If there are significant consequences of the conflict, avoidance should be understood as only a short term delay.
Defusion involves minimizing the effects of the conflict—placing difficult topics on the meeting agenda late so that people won’t have energy to fight; transferring a person to another shift so that interaction with others is limited—but similarly fails to address the underlying issues that have caused the conflict.
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