The purpose of communication is to get your message across to others clearly and unambiguously.
Doing this involves effort from both the sender of the message and the receiver. And it's a process that can be fraught with error, with messages often misinterpreted by the recipient. When this isn't detected, it can cause tremendous confusion, wasted effort and missed opportunity.
In fact, communication is only successful when both the sender and the receiver understand the same information as a result of the communication.
By successfully getting your message across, you convey your thoughts and ideas effectively. When not successful, the thoughts and ideas that you convey do not necessarily reflect your own, causing a communications breakdown and creating roadblocks that stand in the way of your goals – both personally and professionally.
In a recent survey of recruiters from companies with more than 50,000 employees, communication skills were cited as the single more important decisive factor in choosing managers. The survey, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Business School, points out that communication skills, including written and oral presentations, as well as an ability to work with others, are the main factor contributing to job success.
In spite of the increasing importance placed on communication skills, many individuals continue to struggle with this, unable to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively – whether in verbal or written format. This inability makes it nearly impossible for them to compete effectively in the workplace, and stands in the way of career progression.
Getting your message across is paramount to progressing. To do this, you must understand what your message is, what audience you are sending it to, and how it will be perceived. You must also weigh-in the circumstances surrounding your communications, such as situational and cultural context.
Communications Skills – The Importance of Removing Barriers:
Communication barriers can pop-up at every stage of the communication process (which consists of sender, message, channel, receiver, feedback and context – see the diagram below) and have the potential to create misunderstanding and confusion.
To be an effective communicator and to get your point across without misunderstanding and confusion, your goal should be to lessen the frequency of these barriers at each stage of this process with clear, concise, accurate, well-planned communications.
You can find out which barriers your communications tend to stuck at by taking ourHow Good Are Your Communication Skills? self-test. But in summary, here's some more information about each stage of the communication process:
Source...
As the source of the message, you need to be clear about why you're communicating, and what you want to communicate. You also need to be confident that the information you're communicating is useful and accurate.
Message...
The message is the information that you want to communicate.
Encoding...
This is the process of transferring the information you want to communicate into a form that can be sent and correctly decoded at the other end. Your success in encoding depends partly on your ability to convey information clearly and simply, but also on your ability to anticipate and eliminate sources of confusion (for example, cultural issues, mistaken assumptions, and missing information.) A key part of this is knowing your audience: Failure to understand who you are communicating with will result in delivering messages that are misunderstood.
Channel...
Messages are conveyed through channels, with verbal including face-to-face meetings, telephone and videoconferencing; and written including letters, emails, memos and reports.
Different channels have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, it's not particularly effective to give a long list of directions verbally, while you'll quickly cause problems if you criticize someone strongly by email.
Decoding...
Just as successful encoding is a skill, so is successful decoding (involving, for example, taking the time to read a message carefully, or listen actively to it.) Just as confusion can arise from errors in encoding, it can also arise from decoding errors. This is particularly the case if the decoder doesn't have enough knowledge to understand the message.
Receiver...
Your message is delivered to individual members of your audience. No doubt, you have in mind the actions or reactions you hope your message will get from this audience. Keep in mind, though, that each of these individuals enters into the communication process with ideas and feelings that will undoubtedly influence their understanding of your message, and their response. To be a successful communicator, you should consider these before delivering your message, and act appropriately.
Feedback...
Your audience will provide you with feedback, verbal and nonverbal reactions to your communicated message. Pay close attention to this feedback, as it is the only thing that allows you to be confident that your audience has understood your message. If you find that there has been a misunderstanding, at least you have the opportunity to send the message a second time.
Context...
The situation in which your message is delivered is the context. This may include the surrounding environment or broader culture (i.e. corporate culture, international cultures, etc.).
Removing Barriers at All These Stages
To deliver your messages effectively, you must commit to breaking down the barriers that exist in each of these stages of the communication process.
Let's begin with the message itself. If your message is too lengthy, disorganized, or contains errors, you can expect the message to be misunderstood and misinterpreted. Use of poor verbal and body languagecan also confuse the message.
Barriers in context tend to stem from senders offering too much information too fast. When in doubt here, less is oftentimes more. It is best to be mindful of the demands on other people's time, especially in today's ultra-busy society.
Once you understand this, you need to work to understand your audience's culture, making sure you can converse and deliver your message to people of different backgrounds and cultures within your own organization, in this country and even abroad.
Presentation skills and why you need them
It's hard to imagine your career going anywhere unless you can deliver an effective presentation. Unfortunately, most technology industry folks seem to be missing the presentation gene. How can I generalize like that? Because, I've been watching them struggle for a quarter of a century.
Why they're so deficient in this regard, I have no idea. But they stand there, like they're glued to the floor, with their 90-slide presentation with a dozen bullets and sub-bullets and a book of text on each slide. Then they complain that executives and salespeople make all the money.
Look, a presentation is a rare opportunity to make an impression that might impact your future. It can be a gateway to big things ahead, but it can just as easily be a roadblock to professional growth. As for becoming a project leader, manager, or executive, good presentation skills are a requirement.
I've seen presentations that were so inspiring I left the room with adrenaline squirting out of my ears. A great presentation can change your life. From the presenter's perspective, connecting with an audience, communicating your vision and passion for a subject, well, it's a beautiful thing.
Conversely, I've sat through presentations that were so bad I wanted to strangle the guy just to put him and the audience out of their misery. I'm not sure what it's like to bomb that badly, but I suspect its effects can linger for a long, long time. You definitely want to avoid that.
The last Train Wreck post was about overcoming your fear of public speaking. This one's about giving a great presentation. You can spend days in training to learn this stuff; I'm going to give it to you in five minutes. And the best part is it's free.
Ten rules for delivering a great presentation:
Developing the pitch. When you sit down to develop the pitch, first come up with your point of view and a handful of key points you want to get across. Then build a storyboard around that, one slide per thought. Keep the number of slides to a minimum. Allow for two to four minutes per slide, depending on how much dialog or interaction you expect.
Getting off to a good start. You can start your presentation with a big gesture, perhaps an open-armed greeting. It may seem uncomfortable at first, but it's a great way to break the ice and it comes across way better than you think. You can start with an engaging or humorous anecdote, or an ice-breaking graphic or video, but keep it relevant and appropriate or it may backfire. Most people should not tell a joke. I don't.
The old axiom. Start out by telling the audience what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. It's old advice, but I've followed it for 25 years and it works.
Don't read what's on the slide. If you occasionally want the audience to read what's on the slide, turn to look at the slide and read silently along with the audience. Otherwise, know your pitch cold (which means without having to look at it except for the briefest cue) and speak in your own words.
Engage the audience. Ask questions. If they don't respond, try offering an answer and asking for a show of hands. Then ask easier questions. Make the audience feel like they're part of the experience.
Be accessible to the audience. Don't stand behind a podium. If you need a microphone, use a wireless one. Get close to the audience. Move from one side of the room or stage to the other, from time to time. Try to maintain eye contact with an individual as you walk, like there's an imaginary rubber-band between you and that person. But don't bounce around like a ping-pong ball.
Make eye contact. But do so only for a few seconds per person. Too short and you'll seem uncomfortable and fail to engage; too long and you'll make the audience uncomfortable. Don't bounce your eyes around constantly. There's a trick to finding the right balance that comes with experience.
Make liberal use of hand gestures. They're very engaging and interesting. But when you're not doing that, keep your hands at your sides. Do not hold onto the back of a chair or a bottle of water or put your hands in front of you, behind you, or in your pockets. Avoid nervous habits.
Don't block the audience's view. Do not step in front of the screen or block it from view (unless you're doing the occasional walk-across). Gesture with your hand, but don't touch the screen. Don't use a pointer unless you're far away from the screen. Better still, just don't use one; they're unnecessary and distracting.
Learn to pause for effect and emphasis. Practice being comfortable with silence for two or three seconds. It's the most dramatic way to make a point. Avoid ahs, uhs, and other fillers of uncomfortable silence; they're incredibly annoying and detract from your presence.
Ten pointers for developing killer slides:
1. Keep your text crisp, brief, pithy, crystal clear; do not be wordy or verbose; I can't emphasize this enough
2. Don't overdo the slide template. A solid background with contrasting text and a logo in the corner works best
3. Make one key point per slide
4. Have no more than six bullets per slide, preferably a lot less, and one line of as little text as possible per bullet; avoid sub-bullets entirely
5. Just capitalize the first letter of each title, bullet or phrase; left justify all text
6. Bullets are not sentences; they can be phrases; omit periods and needless words
7. Text should be a minimum 24 points for bullets (28 or 32, if possible), 36 points for the title; don't mix fonts or point sizes
8. A picture really is worth a thousand words
9. Mix it up; a graph here, a picture there, a quote, whatever; it's all a nice change from slide after slide of bulleted text
10. Animation's a nice touch, but don't go nuts with it; it can be distracting
If possible, videotape yourself presenting to an empty conference room. Put a yellow stick 'em on each chair to represent people. Try to get someone who knows something about this sort of thing to provide feedback. Most companies hire speech coaches for executives and up-and-comers. Try to get in on that, if you can.
Remember, learning to give effective presentations will boost your career. Moreover, you weren't born with the ability. That means, just like with anything else, you have to make an effort to learn the skills. Learn them; it'll make a difference.
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