4 Principles of Effective Communication for Business Success

Human interactions are complicated. We each have different temperaments, opinions, limitations, beliefs, worldviews, and childhood conditioning.

If you consider it, it’s amazing two or more people can communicate at all.

And the truth is we rarely do communicate well at work or home.

We can mitigate most workplace conflicts by applying a little more spirit and a little less ego.

Humans are hard-wired to be self-serving, but successful communication requires graciousness.
                                         

1.How to Be Gracious

The fastest way to achieve graciousness is to remember that the person you’re communicating with has inner tensions just like you.

They experience negative emotions like fear, anger, and guilt just like you. They have uncertainty about the future just like you.

Plato is often quoted saying, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle.” He didn’t say it, but it’s still a good dictum.

Life is often challenging. Most of us have inner and outer turmoil. Or, as bestselling novelist Andy Andrews says, we’re either in a crisis, coming out of a crisis, or heading for a crisis.

2.Begin in a friendly way.

Whenever possible, start your conversations with praise and honest communication. Smile. A genuine smile helps people relax. (It will elevate your mood too.)

Be inviting and open instead of serious and demanding. To accomplish this, we must first be friendly toward ourselves.

3.Give honest and sincere appreciation.

How often do you offer genuine appreciation to your colleagues versus the times you criticize and condemn them (even if you don’t say it out loud)?

It takes training to show appreciation. Research reveals that our brains have a bias towards negativity. It reacts more strongly to negative stimuli than it does to positive stimuli. We tend to look at what’s wrong with people, ideas, and situations.

4.Become genuinely interested in others.

Interest starts with curiosity. If we’re all self-interested, how can you be curious about others? Realize that everyone you meet is a reflection of yourself. We are mirrors for each other.

Patients With Locked-in Syndrome May Be Able to Communicate After All

ALS progresses, the neurons that control muscle movement begin failing, one after another. Patients lose the use of their arms and legs, and eventually, their breathing. Now they’re locked in, dependent on a medical ventilator. The last to go is the eyes, a condition called complete lock-in.
         

How do you know what someone is thinking, if you can’t communicate with him or her? For a long time, scientists thought that, at this stage, patients were incapable of directed thought. But a team of researchers at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering, in Geneva, Switzerland, has new evidence that contradicts this, and a new way to get insight into what completely locked-in patients are thinking.

The way they did this was to apply traditional means of non-invasive brain scanning in a new application. EEG, which reads brain waves, can record a person’s awareness and vigilance. Near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS, measures the oxygenation of the blood in a person’s brain, which a lock-in patient can learn to control—if they are aware and vigilant.

Even just knowing the mental state of locked-in patients could have huge ramifications for the way we approach care for them. Birbaumer’s study featured just four patients, but each had chosen, while they still could, to continue to receive care and to stay alive. Using the new technique, Birbaumer asked each patient questions from the World Health Organization’s quality of life assessment, and received almost uniformly positive answers. All four people repeatedly responded “yes” to the question, “Are you happy?” But Birbaumer says only 5 percent of ALS patients choose to go on artificial respiration.

“The reason that people decide to die when they [have to] go on respiration is mainly caused by the negative attitude the environment and the family and the doctors have toward the disease and toward paralysis,” says Birbaumer. “The outside world are judging the quality of life terrible … doctors and the whole medical establishment and insurance companies and everybody reinforces that belief, and that’s why the people then die, which is a tragedy. This is an immense tragedy.”

How To Close Communication Gaps For A New Corporate Strategy

As an executive in a large Jamaican company, how do you ensure that good strategic ideas spark the right conversations between important stakeholders? Too often, these dialogues get trapped at the top or bottom of organisations so that fruitful meetings between leaders and those being led never take place. Sadly, poor corporate results ensue leaving everyone mutually mystified, annoyed and disenchanted.
           

By contrast, small companies have it easy. In a start-up in which I'm involved, a person with a bright idea is never more than one or two steps away from someone who can implement it. There's lots of opportunities to explore ideas in deep conversations, tearing suggestions apart in order to improve them. Obviously, this can't be done via email, memo or in a speech. These channels just don't get the job done.

If your company employs hundreds or thousands, quick water-cooler or coffee conversations simply don't take place. They take too much work. It's easier to let the status quo remain, along with stubborn, distant feelings. The top-down, one-way communication that remains is stilted, dry and dull. Over time, you'll also see the following three problems crop up.

The net result of these problems is that key information and strategies never make their way from the top of your organisation to the bottom, and vice versa. Left to fester, this condition makes the company vulnerable to disruption by smaller, nimble competitors. A typical example? Jamaica's Cable and Wireless in 2001 had leaders who ignored the threat of Digicel, even as many of their own employees knew better. How can your company and other large firms reduce the risk inherent in their size?

1. Offer internal strategy conferences
Conduct an internal symposium in which employees present critical trends and ideas. Demand a high standard of content and use it to shape the firm's strategy. Where necessary, teach employees the complexity lying below the surface via structured learning opportunities.

2. Create long-term brainstorming sessions
In structured workshops, give employees a chance to look 25-30 years ahead to select a preferred future.

3. Conduct research
While companies often rely on outside experts to tell them which direction an industry is heading, motivated employees can often do a great job if given the same time and resources. Their findings may have higher quality as they will be informed by their exposure to daily reality.

Overtime Rule Hang-Up Requires Careful Communication About Pay Decisions

If employers have announced employee raises or eligibility for overtime pay because of the Department of Labor's (DOL's) revised overtime rule, they may need to honor those commitments. Communications about the impact of a court's decision to temporarily block implementation of the overtime rule should honor any contracts created in prior messages about the rule.
           

The overtime rule was originally scheduled to take effect Dec. 1 and would have raised the exempt salary threshold from $23,660 to $47,476. Employers were left with the choice of raising the salary of employees within the range of the old and new thresholds to $47,476 or reclassifying them as nonexempt. But after a judge on Nov. 22 barred the rule from taking effect, employers aren't sure what to do.

Promised Pay Increases

"Employers should carefully consider all communications to employees, particularly promised pay increases that may have triggered employee reliance," said Kathleen Anderson, an attorney with Barnes & Thornburg in Fort Wayne, Ind.

"If annual increases can be given to those employees who were expecting an increase to at least $47,476 per year, then that should be communicated as well," said Alfred Robinson Jr., an attorney with Ogletree Deakins in Washington, D.C., and former acting administrator of the DOL's Wage and Hour Division.

Back-and-Forth Changes

But "if employers decide to undo already-implemented changes, they should emphasize the advantages of the original compensation method," Swartz said. "For example, they should emphasize the flexibility that exempt status affords and the benefits that come with exempt status. Of course, an employer's messaging will depend on the number of impacted employees and the company's internal assessment of employees' reaction to the back-and-forth changes."

The Global Search For Education: What Skills?

Employers want to hire people with 21st-century skills and they can’t find enough qualified candidates. The problem, says Charles Fadel, Founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign, is that our education system “is biased for college entrance requirements via tests such as the SAT which are partially obsolete, and never reflected particularly well the needs of employability.” So given the dramatic transformations we are seeing in the workplace, what are the most effective ways to close the increasingly widening education-to-employment gap?
             

Today in Part 4 of The Global Search for Education 5-part series with Charles Fadel, our focus is on skills. The OECD’s Andreas Schleicher calls Fadel’s book, Four-Dimensional Education: The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed, a “first of its kind organizing framework of competencies needed for this century which defines the spaces in which educators, curriculum planners, policy makers and learners can establish WHAT should be learned.”

Let’s talk about skills. What are the essential skills being left out of curriculum or that are not getting enough emphasis in curriculum?

First, let’s be clear in indicating that this is about skills not character qualities - these have been covered elsewhere before. The skills we are talking about are: creativity, critical thinking communication, and collaboration. They are essential for both the world of work and success in life.

Secondly, pedagogy needs to change - for instance, it is hard to imagine how a passive listener would learn how to communicate and collaborate.

Learning Arabic made easy

He was responsible for introducing Arabic as a second language in Indian schools here. His ‘Arabic for English Schools’ is a recommended series for CBSE schools in India and abroad.

And he delivers Arabic lessons as Radio Teacher on UAE-based Radio Voice of Kerala, followed by thousands of listeners worldwide.
And now Amanulla Vadakkangara has come up with another hands-on solution to learning Arabic, a language guide book that anyone can use to learn basic spoken Arabic at home.

Spoken Arabic Guide is the latest book in the series of language guides by the Doha-based Vadakkangara, who is also a writer, an academic and an entrepreneur. After teaching at local community schools, he has conducted multiple courses of Arabic learning for the local expatriate community members.

The book was officially released here recently at a ceremony at Friends Cultural Centre (FCC). Dr M P Hassan Kunhi, a long time Doha resident and a prominent Indian entrepreneur, released the book by handing over a copy to Muhammedunni Olakara, global chairman of Anti-smoking Society.

Dr Kunhi, in his speech, highlighted the importance of Vadakkangara’s initiative and how useful it will be for people coming to work in Qatar. He urged expatriates to take advantage of the opportunity and make the best use of the resource.

He also mentioned a recently announced decision by the Ministry of Economy and Trade, making it mandatory for all business tools including invoices, product labels, service lists, and warnings about health risks to be in Arabic.

His major books on Spoken Arabic are Spoken Arabic Made Easy, Spoken Arabic for All, Spoken Arabic Tutor, Spoken Arabic Master, A formula to speak Arabic and Spoken Arabic Gurunathan. He has successfully conducted several batches of Spoken Arabic programmes in Qatar.

Learn British Sign Language to help us all communicate

British Sign Language courses are on their way to Whitby so more people can communicate with deaf children. The ideahas come from Sara McLanaghan, a level three British Sign Language (BSL) who works in a mainstream school to support a profoundly deaf child, Alfie Blackwell. Currently, Sara and the boy’s parents are the only people in the area that can fluently communicate with him, aside from the teacher of the deaf and other professionals – but other than that he is very isolated. Sara said: “I want to change this and bring British sign language to Whitby.
                   

 
“BSL is such an amazing skill to have and can lead you down so many different paths.” Sara is running a course in Whitby on behalf of MeSign, British sign language specialists, which will run from September 22 until April at Eskdale school on a Thursday evening, 6-8pm. The course cost is £380 per person and this covers exam costs. At the end of the qualification, students will gain level 1 in signature British sign language. There are limited spaces on the course.

If it fills up, she is hoping to carry on to do another level 1 class and a level 2 class in Whitby as well, along with the linguistics of British sign language.