Communicating Effectively For Dummies

Marty Brounstein

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780764553196
• eBook ISBN: 9781118053720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

A friendly guide that teaches you effective methods of communication to avoid common conflicts and make your voice heard in the office

Communicating Effectively For Dummies ?shows you how to get your point across at work and interact productively with bosses and coworkers. Applying your knowledge and skill to your job is the easy part; working well with others is often the hard part. This helpful guide lets you maximize your personal interactions, even when resolving conflicts, dealing with customers, or giving difficult presentations.

Whether you're the CEO of a major corporation, a small business owner, or a team manager, effective and clear communication is imperative to your success. From keeping your listener engaged to learning to become a better listener, ?Communicating Effectively For Dummies?offers all the strategies, tips, and advice you need to:

• Learn how to become an active listener
• Accentuate the positive in negative situations
• Find win-win solutions for conflicts
• Stay on track when writing e-mails and letters
• Handle presentations, interviews, and other challenges
• Speak forcefully and assertively without alienating others

This friendly and comprehensive guide gives you the keys to a thriving career with expert advice on effective verbal and nonverbal communication. From mastering your own facial expressions (and reading them in others) to being a happy boss, this book covers all the angles:

• Becoming aware of your own assumptions
• Dealing with passive-aggressive communicators
• What to say to help someone open up to you
• Communicating through eye contact and body language
• Maintaining a positive attitude
• Dealing with sensitive issues
• Effective conflict resolution models
• When to use e-mail, the phone, or a face-to-face meeting
• Dealing with angry customers
• Coaching your staff to communicate better

In today's high-stress work environment, good communication skills are imperative for keeping your cool and getting your point across. With your own copy of Communicating Effectively For Dummies, you'll know what to say, how to say it, and that being a good listener can often be the difference between getting ahead and just getting by.

Part I

Communicating Successfully

In this part . . .

People express themselves and listen to others in a variety of ways. In this part, you find out what these common ways are and what makes assertive speaking and active listening the most effective ways to communicate at work.

Chapter 1

Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work

In This Chapter

Recognizing the goal — and challenge — of effective communication

Exploring the impact of assumptions in interpersonal communications

Who 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

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.

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 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 tension, 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:

Listening

Speaking

Reading

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 yourself constructively while interacting with others. Seldom are these interpersonal channels of communication a part of the curriculum in basic education. 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 workplace — 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 ta...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Communicating Successfully
• Chapter 1: Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work
• Chapter 2: Understanding How People Express Themselves to Others
• Chapter 3: Are You Really Listening?
• Part II : Tuning In to the Power of Active Listening
• Chapter 4: Fixing Your Radar on the Speaker
• Chapter 5: Putting Active Listening Tools to Work
• Chapter 6: Giving a Dose of Empathy a la Mode
• Part III : Speaking Assertively
• Chapter 7: It Isn’t Just What You Say, but How You Say It
• Chapter 8: Speaking in the Positive
• Chapter 9: Keeping Your Listener Engaged
• Part IV : Win-Win Conflict Resolution
• Chapter 10: Approaching Conflicts Constructively
• Chapter 11: Communicating to Keep Conflicts Cool
• Chapter 12: Bringing the Conflict to Resolution
• Part V : Tackling Communication Challenges
• Chapter 13: You’ve Got Mail: Managing E-Mail Communications
• Chapter 14: Oh, No! I Have to Do a Presentation!
• Chapter 15: Hurdling Customer Challenges
• Chapter 16: Interviewing from Both Sides of the Table
• Chapter 17: Conquering the Challenges of Management
• Part VI : The Part of Tens
• Chapter 18: Ten Ideas for Effectively Handling Telephone Interactions
• Chapter 19: Ten Tips to Enhance Teamwork
• Chapter 20: Ten Actions that Lend Credibility to Your Communications