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Effective communications are too often taken for
granted. They require great sensitivity and technical skills. Their goal is
always to accomplish a purpose, to make an exchange of information in its
broadest sense.
Managers should make every effort to improve their
sensitivities and communications skills. Communications training should be an
essential part of all management and employee development programs.
From a management point of view, the purpose of
communications is usually threefold. They are necessary:
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To implement plans and programs. Without
downward communications, subordinates and employees would never know what
they were supposed to do or what their responsibilities were in the overall
plan. In this sense, employee training is a form of communication.
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To coordinate the actions of all units and
individuals involved. The control process requires a means of communication
to find out what is happening, to compare progress with expectations, and to
initiate corrective action. No amount of preplanned procedures, however, can
carry the full burden of helping units and people to adjust to each other’s
pace and problems. In most large organizations, communications must be
ongoing and persuasive. This prevents chaos and enables individual
perceptions and initiative to fill the gaps that formal plans and procedures
leave open.
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To motivate and promote enthusiasm among those
who perform the work. Communications is part of the activating function of
management. Properly conceived and used, it stimulates cooperation because
it helps employees to relate the plans and goals of the company to their own
personal goals. Good communications help to answer two questions all
organizational members ask: Why? and What’s in it for me?
Communication is the process of exchanging
information, ideas, feeling, between a sender and a receiver. This is an
oversimplification. The communication process involves several elements, any of
which may interfere with an accurate exchange.
There are, for example:
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Message. This is the information, idea, or
feeling that one person (the sender) wishes to transmit to another person
(the receiver). Many communications fail right at the start because the
message is not clear in the mind of the sender.
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Medium. This is the format or language into
which the message is encoded. It may be in words (written or spoken) or in
numbers, which, incidentally, are difficult for most people to decode. It
may be in drawings, as with charts and graphs. It may be in music or in
nonverbal physical expressions and actions. Senders should choose the medium
with which they are most articulate and which the receivers are most likely
to understand. There is a traditional communications problem, for example,
between the accounting department, which lives with numbers, and the sales
and creative people, who are uncomfortable with them.
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Channels of transmission. This choice is
critical, too. The sender must decide whether to send the message via
letter, memo, formal report, telegraph, bulletin board, telephone, by
face-to-face personal conversation, or in group meetings. Many receivers
prefer exchanges so that they may more accurately judge the sincerity of the
sender. Feedback is generally quicker and more effective in personal
exchanges. With written media, use of a report or letter tends to be more
threatening than a memo, especially if the letter is handwritten rather than
typed.
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Decoding. Just as the sender’s encoding of the
message is critical, so is its decoding by the receiver. Much depends upon a
perception of what has been sent. This perception will be affected by the
underlying tone of the exchange: is it pleasant and unthreatening, is it
cold and unfeeling, is it ominously harsh and angry? Did the sender choose
that particular tone, or has he simply been careless in his use of words or
speech? There is also, of course, the language or
semantic difficulty with words and symbols. Employees who are urged to work
“harder” may interpret this word differently from the manager who admonished
them. Many words frequently used in management are non-specific. As a result
their meaning is unclear or ambiguous. Words like “tighter,” “stronger,”
“smoother,” “better,” “faster,” should always be backed up with and example
or a number. For example, the maintenance supervisor who tells the mechanic
to make the bolted connections tighter, might say that they should “resist a
100 Nm torque.”
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Action. The test of an effective communication
is whether or not it stimulates the desired action (or reaction) from the
receiver. Did the job get done as desired? Did the behavior change? Did the
attitude improve? Did the relationship become firmer than before?
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Feedback. There are two ways of looking at
feedback. Action or reaction of the receiver is probably the truest form of
feedback. If the receiver acts the way the sender wished, that tells the
sender that the communication has, in fact, gotten through as intended. The
reverse is also true; when non responsive behavior is observed, this
feedback tells the sender that communications have failed. The second kind of feedback is represented by
the ongoing give and take that occurs during the course of the
communication. Questions, asked by either or both parties, help to indicate
the degree of clarity with which the message has been received. Questions
and their answers help to narrow down the perception gap, since they offer
the sender opportunities to clarify the message or to modify the original
intent, if need be. A manager may have wanted, for example, a job to
be finished by five o’clock this afternoon and instructed his subordinate.
During the course of feedback, however, the manager learns from the
subordinate that there is not enough material on hand to complete the job
this day; the manager then modifies his instructions to allow for its
completion as soon as supplies are on hand the next morning.
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Noise. This is a term that communications
specialists apply to unanticipated interferences that may disturb
communications any place in the system. The sender may have inaccurate or
obsolete information to begin with. The medium may be affected by a recent
change in company terminology for part numbers, for example. The channel may
be clogged by several other directives put into it in the last few days. The
receiver’s perception may be clouded by, or distracted by, personal problems
or irritation with working conditions. Feedback may be counterproductive if
it is used to vent angers that are not related to the particular
communication at hand.
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