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Communication and Interpersonal Skills - Coggle Diagram
Communication and Interpersonal Skills
What interpersonal skills do managers need to engage in effective communications?
The major ones include:
Active listening
Feedback
Empowerment
Conflict management
Negotiating
Active listening
This skill probably is the most important skill that managers need and should develop. Active listening is hard work.
A person has to concentrate and want to fully understand what a speaker is saying.
Active listening requires four elements:
Intensity
Empathy
Acceptance
A willingness to take responsibility for completeness
The human brain is capable of handling a speaking rate that’s faster than that of the average speaker, leaving a lot of time for daydreaming on the part of the listener.
The active listener concentrates intensely on what the speaker is saying and tunes out the thousands of miscellaneous thoughts that create distractions.
What do active listeners do with their idle brain time during active listening?
They summarize and integrate what has been said. They put each new bit of information into the context of what preceded it.
The second element of active listening is
empathy
. Empathy requires one to put yourself into the speaker’s shoes.
You try to understand what the speaker wants to communicate rather than what you want to hear. Empathy demands both knowledge of the speaker and flexibility on the listener’s part. The listener needs to suspend their own thoughts and feelings and adjust to what the listener sees and feel the speaker’s world.
An active listener demonstrates
acceptance
.
He or she listens objectively without judging content, not an easy task. It is natural to be distracted by what a speaker says, especially when the listener disagrees with it. The challenge for the active listener is to absorb what’s being said and withhold judgment on the until the speaker is finished.
The last element of active listening is
responsibility for completeness
.
The listener does whatever is necessary to get the full intended meaning from the speaker’s communication.
Two widely used active listening techniques are listening for feeling as well as for content and asking questions to ensure understanding.
Feedback
Feedback is simply information and is extremely important. Managers need to provide both positive and negative feedback and to identify specific techniques to help make feedback more effective.
Managers on a regular basis must give feedback to employees in order to ensure that organizational goals are met, both positive and negative.
Unfortunately, positive and negative feedback often is treated differently by receivers. Good managers already know and understand this situation.
If feedback is positive, managers are likely to give it promptly and enthusiastically.
If negative, then the story is different. Managers do not particularly like to deliver bad news, because they fear offending the receiver or having to deal with the receiver’s emotional reaction. The result is that negative feedback is often avoided, delayed, or substantially distorted.
Since positive feedback is more readily received and accurately perceived than negative feedback, managers must be aware of situation and learn to use negative feedback in situations in which it is most likely to be accepted.
Research indicates that negative feedback is more readily accepted when it comes from a credible source or if it is objective. If the negative feedback is subjective, then the source needs either high status or credibility for the feedback to be accepted.
Suggestions on
how
a manager can become more
effective in providing feedback
. They include:
Focus on specific behaviors
Keep feedback impersonal
Keep feedback goal oriented
Make feedback well timed
Ensure understanding
Direct negative feedback toward behavior that the receiver can control
Empowerment
1.
What is empowerment? Allowing your employees to make operating decisions which until recently were seen as exclusively managerial jobs.
2.
Driving
increased empowerment
in recent times has been
two factors:
The need to make quick decisions by those who are most knowledgeable about a situation, since the global economy has lead to greater competition.
Downsizing of organizations over the last two decades has left many managers with larger spans of control.
In order to cope with the demands of an increased work load, managers have had to empower their employees.
Two aspects of empowerment are:
Understanding the value of delegating
Knowing how to delegate
When done properly, delegation is not abdication. In other words, there is a difference between temporarily assigning authority to an employee (
delegation
) and giving up authority to employees (
abdication
).
The key word is properly!
Delegation
If a manager dumps tasks on an employee without clarifying the exact job to be done, the range of employee discretion, the expected level of performance, the time frame in which the tasks are to be completed, and similar concerns, then that manager is abdicating responsibility and inviting trouble.
This is NOT delegating properly!
Two important points about delegation that you should remember are:
You should expect and accept some mistakes by your employees. Mistakes are a part of delegation. They often are good learning experiences for employees as long as the costs are not excessive.
To ensure that the costs of mistakes do not exceed the value of the learning, managers need to put adequate controls in place. Delegation without feedback controls is a form of abdication.