Effective Communication Skills

The Importance of Communication
In a survey conducted by the Katz Business School at the University of Pittsburgh, organizations rated communication skills as the most important factor used in selecting their management staff. The study found that oral and written communication skills were important in predicting job success, as was the ability to communicate well with others in the workplace.
A University of Pittsburgh study found that the most important factor in selecting managers is communication skills.
This makes sense when you think about it. If you can communicate well, you can get your message across to others in an effective way and they then have accurate instructions to complete their assigned tasks. If you are not able to communicate well, the messages you send get lost in translation. Communication breakdowns result in barriers against your ability to develop both professionally and personally. Even though communications skills are so important to success in the workplace, there are many individuals who find these skills to be a stumbling block to their progress. They struggle to convey their thoughts and ideas in an accurate manner, making it difficult to progress and nearly impossible to lead well.
However, there is hope for anyone who finds communicating to be difficult. These skills can be practiced and learned. It takes learning about how communication works, how to communicate exactly what it is you want to say, what mode of communication is best, and what factors are influencing the ability for you to send and receive messages with acumen.So if we look at communication from another angle, it involves the perception of the information as much as the delivery of that information. In other words, we can define communication as the art and
process of creating and sharing ideas. Effective communication depends on the richness of those ideas. In order to be effective at communicating, there are a number of skills that you can rely. Which skill you choose will depend upon your situation, the recipient of your communication, and the information that you need to convey.
What Are Communication Skills?
Imagine you are on one side of a wall and the person you want to communicate with is on the other side of the wall. But there’s more than the wall in the way. The wall is surrounded by a moat that is filled with crocodiles and edged by quicksand. These barriers could be things like different cultures, different expectations, different experiences, different perspectives, or different communication styles, to name just a few. Communication skills are the tools that we use to remove the barriers to effective communication.
You might experience only one of these barriers at a time, or you might find yourself facing them all. Getting your message to the other person requires that you recognize these barriers exist between you, and that you then apply the proper tools, or communication skills, to remove those barriers preventing your message from getting through. Of course, communication is a two-way street. The person on the other side of those barriers will also try to send messages back to you.
Your ability to understand them clearly could be left to a dependence on their ability to use communication skills. But that’s leaving the success of the communication to chance. Instead, you can also use your own communication skills to ensure that you receive messages clearly as well.
Finally, there isn’t only one point in your communication with another person at which you have to watch out for barriers. To be successful at communicating, it’s important to recognize that these barriers to communication can occur at multiple points in the communication process.