Written by: Rodolfo Parlati, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Modern society requires leaders to be able to communicate on several levels effectively. In many cases, conventions, biases, and wrong beliefs lead to a distorted perception of your communication’s effectiveness. Indeed, communicating effectively with your interlocutor means knowing how to express yourself verbally, with your body language and the expressions of your voice clearly and coherently.
In a world in which people constantly live a frenetic life, where your run your race despite what happens around you, they tend to forget the importance of emotions. At the basis of effective communication, there is a need for emotional contact, understanding, meeting, welcoming, support, and trust.
Whenever you try to communicate with others by only “sharing” information, you don’t communicate at all. What remains is a simple illusion. For example, today’s leaders need to build a clear vision and inspire their teams. This will need to follow and make it their vision, too. To do this, they have to connect with people on an individual level and lead others to move from an “I” to a “we” mentality. Leaders need to create an environment based on mutual trust by improving both their verbal and non-verbal communication.
10 Simple Points To Develop A Leadership Based On Effective Communication
To communicate effectively, you cannot pay attention only to how you say something, but it is also essential to take into consideration the person to whom you are speaking. That said, there are some rules that, if put into practice, can optimize the effectiveness of your communication as a leader. Therefore, if you want to improve your communication skills at work, follow these 10 simple points:
1. Be authentically yourself
If you want to become an effective communicator, you need to capture the attention and earn the trust of your interlocutor. Being authentic demonstrates a higher level of awareness and respect for others’ emotions and thoughts. It means not being afraid of what you feel and welcoming your interlocutor’s sensations.
2. Avoid generalizations and speak in the first person
You should always avoid generalizing because this only decreases the responsibility you take for what you are saying. At the same time, by speaking in the first person, you can guarantee a higher value of the message you are sharing with your interlocutor.
3. Be Assertive in your communication
Assertiveness is the ability to express yourself, your emotions, and ideas sincerely and calmly, respecting the rights and the point of view of others, without attacking or offending. Before speaking, you need to clarify in your mind what you want to say and express your opinion in a calm way, use a relaxed tone of voice and maintain eye contact with your interlocutor. Motivate your "don’ts" or your requests and show respect if you do not agree with their point of view.
4. Ask questions
Questions allow you to show interest in your interlocutor, accumulate more information, and even guide the conversation. You can do it by exploiting two types of questions: open questions, which require a detailed answer and allow you to obtain more information and better understand the wishes and requests of the person, and closed questions, that provide a dry answer, basically yes or no, and allow you to obtain the information you need quickly.
5. Listen actively to your interlocutor
Active listening helps you build a relationship of respect and trust and is very important for effective communication and enriching your life and the others’. To do this, you need to show interest, focus the conversation on your interlocutor, not make judgments, and not interrupt.
6. Share emotions
Being an effective communicator also means knowing how to share emotions. These make a message authentic and alive by revealing a sincere interest in what the person is saying and manifesting our feelings and thoughts.
7. Be a master of the topic
Effective communication also goes through mastering the subject you are going to talk about. Improvising only leads you to share a message that won’t surely be understood correctly by your interlocutor.
8. Use a persuasive language
If you can touch the emotions of the person in front of you, you will have a good chance your message will be memorable. You can do it by assuring your message is understandable, believable, emotionally involving, and contagious. Furthermore, this helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your communication by answering the questions: ‘What is working?’, ‘What is not working?’, and ‘Why?’.
9. Keep aligned all the communication channels
Effective communication takes into consideration all the channels n the same way, and not a single one at a time. Your words, tone of voice, gestures, and body language have all the same importance and are part of a unique message you want to transmit to your interlocutor.
10. Summarize
At the end of a conversation with a person, it is useful to briefly summarize what has been said, remembering what the expectations of the two parties are, and defining the goals. This will allow you to make sure that both you and your interlocutor have clearly understood each other.
In Conclusion
Effective communication, mostly in the workplace, can affect the productivity of a team and even the success or failure of a project. Becoming an effective communicator requires consistency, commitment, clarity, discipline, open-mindedness, and a deep willingness to listen to what people are saying sincerely. With practice, you can improve and become a leader able to communicate well both in the workplace and in everyday life. By making the effectiveness of communication a priority and building a valuable communication system able to connect all the people involved, leaders can radically improve both their effectiveness as communicators and their performance.
Rodolfo Parlati, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rodolfo Parlati is a Professional Life & Executive Coach. Always inspired by the desire to impact others positively, his mission is to help people and professionals be happy and successful by finding out their inner potential and exploring the right path to follow to "give shape" to their goals. Passionate about building connections, the key elements of his coaching strategy are creating meaningful actions to attain the clients' goals, knowing what is holding them back, and supporting them in finding higher awareness. His natural curiosity has always driven him to be an eager lifelong learner, explore new fields, and look for the answers to any question.
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