Secrets of effective communication skills that no one told you before
During 12 years of my stint as an L&D professional, involved with multiple training programs on many different competencies delivered in India and cross globe. One thing I can tell you with a certain degree of certainty. Effective communication skills training is the program that is most in demand and often most misunderstood in an organization as well as for an individual.
Let us look at the reasons why effective communication skills training is in so much demand within organization and these are my honest observations.
Effective communication with whether clients, individuals, teams or external stakeholders; is a key to organizational success. If you can influence all these stakeholders with proper channel of communication and solve the problems, you are going to succeed in whatever industry you are present.
Effective communication is considered as a panacea (cure all) to all the challenges within the organization. A leader not performing well, let him go through the communication skills program. Sales not happening, let the sales people go through a workshop on effective communication skills. Sad but it’s true!
Many organizations have a training budget and they need to spend the same to develop individual competencies of their employee. In some organization lack of structured TNI leads to L&D managers choosing communication skills program as a go to program to start with. Again, sad but this is a reality and I have seen enough instances to testify to that.
Effective communication skills training programs are confused with emotional intelligence program. While there are many training programs including what we at Conceptial Training and Consulting offer which include emotional intelligence in our communication skills module. There are majority of the communication skills program that do not include EQ as a module and still want to solve the problem through the same. Not the best thing to do, but it happens and can be easily corrected through initiative by the training partner
No coming back to elements of effective communication training program. I have already mentioned above what it is not. I will summarize what all actually does it cover
Understanding your current competence with respect to communicating with others and with feedback and self-reflection
How to communicate with different kinds of people based on pre-defined classification that you learn during the program
How to communicate to persuade a target audience, the persuasion techniques.
Communication with key objective in mind
Handing difficult conversations (Has elements of emotional intelligence and not all programs cover that)
Sophisticated active listening and questioning techniques
How to tailor your communication style when dealing with different types of people
The keys to communicating constructive criticism successfully
How to assert yourself effectively and appropriately in a conflict situation
Business writing and email etiquette is included in some programs
Body language and effective opening techniques are included in some programs
One common thread of communication no one told you about
Every communication whether verbal or written must be based on simple but power principle of AIDA. This is used across marketing world and there is a reason all top brands with humongous budget use it. It is effective and give results. For those who may not have gone in details, I am providing the illustration below.
AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. If you have these four elements any communication you will attract attention, influence and get results
Attention: This is where you start by grabbing the attention of your listener or reader. I will not go into the details due to paucity of space but storytelling, elevator pitch, shock statement, asking a yes question and interesting and unknown facts statement are some of the techniques used to achieve the same.
Interest: relating to her audience and understanding them by stating the real-life challenges, issues, facts, reality that resonates with them. This piques their interest and letting them get engrossed and invested in the conversation
Desire: About that moment of the shift, from intellectual curiosity to making the decision ‘I want that for myself.’ That’s at the heart of desire. Again there are various techniques used and would be covered in the next blog due to paucity of space.
Action: Whether you foresee or not, any communication must lead to some action by the receiver. Making sure that you incorporate the statement for the same would lead to results that can surprise you
I have touched upon some of the nuances of Effective communication skills training. Please do subscribe to us to for more such articles.
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