Ritu's Blog

A true leader is one who can have effective communication with his audience clearly, impact-fully and in a manner in which the listener can prioritize his tasks. If a speaker bears these tips in mind, he will create a team of good listeners and a highly successful company.

Ineffective teams of professionals usually suffer from the same malady—indirect communication. Management guru, Peter Drucker lays great stress on “focusing on the right things,” but when leaders do not communicate these “right things” well enough, it results in inertia. It’s just like having a well-thought out plan that’s not well-executed or carrying out a plan without backing it up with proper communication is a waste of effort. When you send out a message, it needs to be understood by all levels of listeners so that the plan can be taken to the next level.

In an ideal situation, directionless organizations go through each day by completing the tasks assigned to them. When a comfort level sets in beyond which they will not exert themselves, employees will usually take up tasks that come in first. Without proper direction and effective communication, their focus is skewed.

Communication set out by the management of a company can be compared to a stone throw in to a still pond. This can cause one of two results: either ripples spread outwards or they may be focused in one area. In management communication, this kind of targeted communication separates good communicators from bad. For a leader, it’s not enough to shout orders but to ensure that the right orders are communicated. This makes for effective communication.

Tips for effective direct communication: There are three parameters for effective direct communication. They are:

Ensure that your listener understands you: You may talk as much as you want to, but the test of your talk lies in how your listeners process everything you say. It is believed that human beings interpret communication either emotionally or logically. Drucker believed that people are of two kinds: readers or listeners and it paid to know how one prefers to receive his communication. You can send your message across either face to face, or by e-mail, directly or with emotion. Here, the receiver’s preferences are not important. Effective communication results when the receiver correctly interprets and acts on the information he receives.

Follow the 80:20 rule here: A good leader will communicate the kind of behavior that produces the most impactful results. So, it is important for a leader to decide which message will impact 80% of results wanted by following a company’s mission. This alone will form for effective communication. Those who take direction from their superiors without the right context will assume that it is important in its entirety. However, when you receive any communication, it is important to be able to prioritize the important ones from the unimportant items of communication.

Make your message lucid and completely understood: Once a leader expresses his message to his staff, he should not assume that it is clearly and completely understood by the recipients. To ensure that both sender and receiver of the message are on the same page, the receiver should repeat the message received so that the best results are achieved.

Good and productive communication begins when the listener listens to a speaker. The audience decides just how it is going to perceive this communication. Besides, the future actions of the audience determines how well they have received the message and whether the format was of their choice or not. A majority of teams in successful organizations move up uniformly because leaders mold their communication so that the audience moves in the right direction.

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It’s necessary for all employees to be effective at work. They can do this by having the right attitude to work, by aligning their strengths with the company’s goals and by working on their weaknesses. These will make them proud of their work achievements.

If you want to achieve your goals in life, you need to be effective at work. However, you shouldn’t be single-minded about being a perfectionist at work because you could very easily be going on the wrong track without realizing it. This will make you fail in life much faster than otherwise.

When you work in an organization, you are part of the workforce that comprises professionals who strive to achieve an important company goal which is to be effective at work. All employees need to understand this and continue to harness their strengths. In fact, employees should capitalize on their strengths and reach the acme of their performance levels so that they work in a happy environment.

How to be more productive at work: For this, it’s necessary that you be aware of your strengths and your weaknesses. Organizations that struggle to be successful err in focusing on their workers’ weaknesses, which makes them fail and helps widen the performance gap.

But if an organization focuses on an employee’s strengths, it can reap the benefits of his optimal performance and his overall success. So, while it works best for an organization to enhance an employee’s limitations, to do this without focusing on his strengths would only make the organization fail. To take the quick route to organizational success, one should emphasize on areas that bring in the maximum benefit.

As we grow up, we realize our personal preferences and our attitude to the world. For instance, we realize that we prefer to communicate in writing rather than orally. We also come across people who work best instinctively, and those who plan their every move. Then, there are collaborators who work best in a team just as there are those who love to work independently. Everyone knows their strengths, but one’s focus and application to work single them out as effective employees.

It works for employees to transfer their personal strengths to the work sphere. However, those who crib about their bosses restraining them from doing as they want need to introspect and find the solution to their problem within them. Such workers usually stagnate at work and underperform because they feel limited by their organization. However, they can be effective at work by following the company’s values and mission and achieve the company’s goals. So, it’s really up to oneself to achieve the best results.

As you tailor your strengths to suit your job, automatically you suppress your restrictions. For example, perhaps you’re a salesperson who pays great attention to detail. However, your limitation lies in the fact that you forget the people you deal with on a personal level. To overcome this problem, you could build a better relationship with your client by asking him more focused questions and taking a greater interest in him, though this may be exhausting and tough. A more professional route would be to jot down the chief points regarding your client, such as his name, what he or she considers important, services he or she is interested in, etc. This will be easier for you to accomplish and to remember your clients by.

To be effective at work, align your strengths with your role in the company. This will help you exceed your expectations, and your boss and colleagues will be proud of your achievements and you will be seen as a productive employee.

Now, you will have enough energy to work on your suppressed limitations. This will give you the necessary organizational success and fulfillment in your personal life too.

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Organizational relationships have come a long way from tightly structured job profiles to each worker not knowing what his neighbor does. Still, workers today contribute to the overall organizational success by building and maintaining relationships

A typical organization is composed of a variety of people with a spectrum of traits that influence its progress. Whether these people and their traits influence the organizational growth and success positively or negatively, it is imperative that all those playing a role in it communicate well enough to achieve the highest level of performance by applying the least resistance.

How to build and maintain organizational relationships: This is a two-step approach you can adopt for successful and productive organizational relationships: One, by accepting that all human behavior brings about impactful results; and two, by communicating proactively about how you work with others.

• Acceptance of human behaviors: As mentioned above, this is the first step to build and maintain successful organizational relationships. Each employee brings with him to the workplace a different set of strengths, abilities, values and traits. So, to expect all workers to work in the way a leader does is futile.

Managers go wrong when they train their juniors to work in much the same way as they do—an exercise that causes frustration in the juniors and causes them to go astray in the face of a common task. While the task may be easily done, the problem lies in not customizing the result to each worker. The idea is that there may be many ways of doing any one task, so each one should be allowed the freedom of finding their own way of doing it.

For a worker to perform at his optimum, he or she needs to customize his or her strengths to the task to be done. For this to happen, a good starting point is to find out who among the staff is a reader and who is a listener. If the boss is a listener while his junior is a reader, to send e-mails and memos will only slow down the tempo at work.

The junior will always write out his ideas and proposals while his boss will read his e-mails and wonder why the junior isn’t discussing it with him. The point to be stressed here is that the boss’ core message should reach his team members because if it doesn’t, it could severely impact the success of the organization.

• Communicate proactively within the organization: There is a wide delineation in jobs today, so the kind of work you do in your organization could be vastly different from you’re your neighbor sitting next to you does. In earlier times, roles at work were strictly demarcated and one’s roles and duties were well-known. But today, we live in a knowledge-based society where this demarcation is totally absent, making organizational relationships difficult.

Today, it is necessary for all workers to communicate your values, strengths and way of working before you can demonstrate it. People usually believe that it is the boss’ duty to ask what they do, but the truth is that it is only his duty to see that you achieve the pre-determined results. How they want you to bring results to the table depends on how junior and boss communicate. All the junior needs to do is to introduce his work, working style, duties at hand and core values to the boss and tell him how the former plans to contribute to the organization and shows results. This is sure to bring a positive response from the boss who will then discuss how to go about the job at hand. This not only changes mindsets but also instills a lot of trust in the boss.

Organizational relationships aren’t based on likes and dislikes but on an understanding of how workers perform. Shooting orders and showing muscle power cannot sustain the organizations of today, but they should be nurtured on a worker’s understanding of his colleagues and knowledge of how each one contributes to the overall success of the organization.

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