How to Boost Communication Within Your Company: Start With Yourself

Professional communication structures and efficient knowledge sharing are more important than ever for any company. They reduce unnecessary mistakes and failures and boost efficiency and productivity.

Boost communication within your company

Good communication within companies consists of three building blocks we will look at one at a time:

First, we must take a look at our personal communication skills, then examine how communication works within teams, and finally take a look at communication across departments and disciplines. In this first of three blog article, we’ll start with analyzing our individual communication strengths.

Being aware of how others perceive you is the foundation for personal growth

If you want to be a successful communicator, you need to be able to critically observe you own habits and behavior patterns. It will enable you to identify strong and weak aspects about your communication style.

Here is a simplistic pattern of communication many of us often apply without even being aware of it:

1. Something happens that causes us to speak (or write).
2. Depending on the cause, we are affected cognitively and/or emotionally.
3. We react in a specific way, usually according to learned behavioral patterns.

If you add a dash of self-reflectiveness, however, you can break and enhance this pattern: Before you react, you stop to reflect on the factual and emotional aspects of the cause and then make a conscious decision how you want to react. You reaction becomes deliberate and self-directed.

It’s okay to be emotional – if you do it professionally

People are different in how they show their emotions – with some people it’s easy to see when they’re happy, sad, or angry whereas others seem to be consistently calm and serious. But even those people have emotions, they’re just more hidden under a surface of placidness.

An important requirement for successful communication is that you acknowledge your own emotions in any specific situation. Another requirement is your ability to do the same for the person you’re talking to – you guessed correctly, we’re talking empathy skills.

Within companies, people who experience negative emotions most often feel anxious or afraid – or angry. It helps to deal with those emotions if you have prepared a specific behavior beforehand: “Whenever I’m angry at someone, I first take a deep breath, then I ask myself if the other person…” You can also come up with similar plans of how to best react to other people’s emotions.

Be honest, transparent, trustworthy, and reliable

You are self-reflective and you know how to deal with your and others’ emotions – the last ingredient missing for you to become a good communicator is a sound set of inner values that influence how you interact with others. Always be as straight-forward and as truthful as you can, try to appreciate the other person’s views, goals, and interests – and aim to find a solution both of you can be happy with.

In the long run, it will serve you much better than being dishonest, deceptive, and unreliable, especially in communication situations with your own colleagues.

Communication within teams

Now you have everything you need to start successfully with your team mates and stakeholders. For both of those groups, there are certain things to pay attention to – and we’ll deal with those in the two upcoming articles, starting with communication within teams.

This article is based on the following eBook from Daniela Rohan: Navigating Conversations in the Workplace

Here are more interesting blog articles for you to discover:

• 5 Essential Communication Skills Everybody Needs
• Effective Business Communication: Apps to help you!
• How to Write Emails That Get Responses

 
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