Importance Of Communication Skills

1. Why are good communication skills vital in career success?

Without good communication skills a message can be misunderstood, create frustration, and even cause adversity by a poorly delivered message. A person must have good communication skills if the(goal is to move up in management and hopefully become a major executive leader within an organization. Successful managers are effective leaders and effective leaders must have good communication skills. Executives wants employees that communicatefclearly and accurately and represents their organization in a professional manner.

Several types of effective communicators are: listeners, creators, doers, and thinkers. A listener understands there are more than one way to achieve results.

What steps have you taken to improve your communication skills?

1. Listening. I work on my listening skills every day. Early in my career (20 plus years ago) it was very common for me to interrupt, speak before thinking and not pay attention to the message (I was too busy thinking what I was going to say). Needless to say I was perceived as arrogant and self-centered; by the way, for the record, I am neither of the two. Over the years}have learned to listen when spoken to. However, listening is a major communication skill I struggle with every day. It is amazing what a person learns ifthey are an effective listener.

2. Revise, revise, and revise. I have been told writing is 95% rewriting. Emotionally writing can exacerbate issues at work. When I need to send a bad news email, I try to draft my message email in an indirect manner (most of the time) and delaying sending the message for 10 minutes. I think review the message and edit again, hoping my rewrite will soften my tone. Often I have a co-worker review my message and get her feed back whether the message is clear and but not too harsh. I am convinced having a proofreader has saved me from a lot of tension

Larry Hubka reminds us of an old adage in the business world: "You never get a second chance to make a good first impression." Discuss this statement in the context of the importance of effective communication in the workplace.

Bad first impressions are hard to correct and virtually impossible to reverse, especially when written communication is the cause for the bad impression. It only takes one minor typo, grammatical error, or failing to following a direction to create a bad impression. In our society today with writing software programs there should be no reason a paper is poorly formatted or has spelling errors.

I recently patiicipated in a job application review process; the experience demonstrated how written communication can affect a person 's opportunity for employment. The first step in the process we discarded the application that had typos, grammatical errors, or simply did not following the directions. Sadly, 75 percent of the applications were immediately excluded. A couple were simply instruction but major instructions such as provide a cover letter. The rejected applicants have left a bad impression because of careless error that could have been