Improved Communicating Skills Will Help You Reach The Top!

Outstanding communicating skills distinguish the world best leaders, managers and supervisors. Moving others to action is their primary responsibility. And they do that by communicating -- selling -- their ideas.

Mankind has ascended to the top of the living order because our species communicates better than other living entities. And within our species, those with the best communicating skills rise to the top -- in whatever their pursuit may be. So how does one develop outstanding communicating skills?

We get better by learning and practicing fundamental communicating skills over and over again. Every great communicator started out as a beginner.

Developing improved communicating skills is a commanding feature in the world's leading management training programs. In one acclaimed training series each month exercise leadership is rotated among the participants. The effect is to make each monthly session a practical communicating skills session.¹ This same approach should be applied to any form of leadership-management-supervisory training. For example, online learning sessions should include follow-up mentoring sessions² which should include exercises applied to current session-related challenges in the work place.

What are the components of improving communicating skills? In communications there are two paths: what goes out and what comes in -- what you send out as a message and what is receive-understood of what you tried to communicate. In training language you have the training session topics of  Presentation Skills and Listening Skills.

Communicating Skills is a core competency area of our demo series.³   The learning module addresses communicating skills for written, face-to-face, telephone and group presentations -- covering both paths of communicating.

For me the session produced positive results. After taking the session I resolved to: improve my own communicating better listening, planning, and understanding of others. I thought it was a great session. My learning outcome was that I committed to start improving my communicating skills at home by better communicating with my wife and puppy.⁴ Using my My Journal, I set up the following reminder email to myself in 15 and 30 days: Have you been working at improving communicating by better listening - planning - understanding?

The best exercise I have used to practice presentation skills is conducted in this manner. Using table groups of 3-4, each participant prepares a 5 minute presentation about something with which they are very familiar -- an event, happening, problem --. The major preparation goes into developing a opening and close (following the session guides). Each participant stands and gives the presentation with the person to the right serving as observer.

One of the more important lessons to be learned for improving communicating skills is importance of body language in conveying meaning face to face communications.  It's so important that I recommend that when telephoning you use a headset. Stand up and use hand movements and body language when you talk. Your voice will pick up and convey the associated body language.

Just remember, improved communicating skills is good for your employees and for your organization.

Regards,

Richard Dowell
President, Best Managers on the Net

We are a business consulting, training and development company dedicated to helping good managers and their companies prosper by reaching for the top.  

¹In one of my own presentation skills sessions one of the participants (the son of a construction company owner) pulled me aside and said he just could not get up in front of a group and say anything. I told him that the primary purpose of the program was to help participants like himself get better at doing just that. A year later he returned to one of our sessions to complete his certificate requirements. I was amazed that he was actively leading -- and helping others lead -- the exercise sessions. He came over to me after the session and looked me in the straight in the eye, grasped my hand and said, "Thank you!" I've never forgotten that moment.

²In skills training each group of participants has an assigned mentor (normally the direct reporting supervisor). The mentor conducts module follow-up either through face-to-face or synchronous online sessions.

³You can enroll simply by signing up for our monthly information Updates either at this site or www.Best-Managers-Business-Online.com.

⁴I'm in the process of writing an article about what we can learn about communicating skills from puppy-dog training.  Here's an insight: perhaps every manager should have a dog and his performance appraisal include an assessment on how well-behaved his dog is.