Communication Skills

The importance of good communication

Regardless of the size of your organisation — whether it is a large corporation or a small company – you need good communication skills if you want to succeed.

The purpose of communication is to get your message across to others clearly. Doing this involves effort from both the sender of the message and the receiver. And it's a process that can be fraught with error, with messages often misinterpreted by the recipient. When this isn't detected, it can cause tremendous confusion, wasted effort and missed opportunity.

To be an effective communicator and to get your point across without misunderstanding and confusion, your goal should be to lessen the frequency of these barriers at each stage of this process with clear, concise, accurate, well-planned communications.

Source

As the source of the message, you need to be clear about why you're communicating, and what you want to communicate. You also need to be confident that the information you're communicating is useful and accurate.

Message

The message is the information that you want to communicate.

Encoding

This is the process of transferring the information you want to communicate into a form that can be sent and correctly decoded at the other end. Your success in encoding depends partly on your ability to convey information clearly and simply, but also on your ability to anticipate and eliminate sources of confusion. A key part of this is knowing your audience. Failure to understand who you are communicating with will result in delivering messages that are misunderstood.

Channel

Messages are conveyed through channels, with verbal including face-to-face meetings, telephone and videoconferencing; and written including letters, emails, memos and reports. Different channels have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, it's not particularly effective to give a long list of directions verbally, while you'll quickly cause problems if you criticise someone strongly by email.

Decoding

Just as successful encoding is a skill, so is successful decoding. Just as confusion can arise from errors in encoding, it can also arise from decoding errors. This is particularly the case if the decoder doesn't have enough knowledge to understand the message.

Receiver

Your message is delivered to individual members of your audience. No doubt, you have in mind the actions or reactions you hope your message will get from this audience. Keep in mind, though, that each of these individuals enters into the communication process with ideas and feelings that will undoubtedly influence their understanding of your message, and their response.

Feedback

Your audience will provide you with feedback, verbal and nonverbal reactions to your communicated message. Do pay close attention to this feedback, as it is the only thing that allows you to be confident that your audience has understood your message. If you find that there has been a misunderstanding, at least you have the opportunity to send the message a second time.

Context

The situation in which your message is delivered is the context. This may include the surrounding environment or broader culture such as corporate culture and international cultures.

Even during job interviews, good communications skills must be displayed. Interviewers assess communications skills largely on the quality of the answers. If you can consistently express your answers clearly and well, the interviewer’s assessment on you will also be consistently good.

Speak clearly at all times when giving answers so that interviewers can hear clearly. Do not speak too fast, because the interviewers might miss some information. Avoid using slang or words likely to give offense or be considered offensive. Your answers have to be made so that the interviewers can easily know what you are saying. Use the easiest way to express what you want to say, so it will be understood properly.

The rule for all job interview answers is ‘Start at the beginning, end at the end’. The interviewers have to be able to follow each phase of your answer in a logical sequence, especially when being asked to give examples of work situations. Your answers must address all parts of the interviewer’s questions effectively.

Make sure you understand and answer the question fully. Never go off topic or get sidetracked with your job interview answers. All information in your answers must be relevant to the question.