Developing Effective Communications:

It's been estimated that most humans spend 70 to 80 percent of their time in communication -- writing, reading, talking, and listening. . This suggests that communication may well be the key to success for everybody.

And, ironic as it may seem, public relations experts fret over the feeling that the public misunderstands the objectives of their profession.

What is communication?

We can look up the origin of the word. Communication comes from the Latin communis, "common." When we communicate, we are trying to establishâ??commonness" with someone. That is, we are trying to share information, an idea or an attitude.

The Importance of Effective Communication:

People in organizations typically spend over 75% of their time in an interpersonal situation; thus it is no surprise to find that at the root of a large number of organizational problems is poor communications. Effective communication is an essential component of organizational success whether it is at the interpersonal, intergroup, intragroup, organizational, or external levels.

The Communication Process:

Although all of us have been communicating with others since our infancy, the process of transmitting information from an individual (or group) to another is a very complex process with many sources of potential error.

Communications is so difficult because at each step in the process there major potential for error. By the time a message gets from a sender to a receiver there are four basic places where transmission errors can take place and at each place, there are a multitude of potential sources of error. Thus it is no surprise that social psychologists estimate that there is usually a 40-60% loss of meaning in the transmission of messages from sender to receiver.

Barriers to Effective Communication:

There are a wide number of sources of noise or interference that can enter into the communication process.

Language: The choice of words or language in which a sender encodes a message will influence the quality of communication. Because language is a symbolic representation of a phenomenon, room for interpretation and distortion of the meaning exists. It is important to note that no two people will attribute the exact same meaning to the same words.

• defensiveness, distorted perceptions, guilt, project, transference, distortions from the past
• misreading of body language, tone and other non-verbal forms of communication (see section below)
• noisy transmission (unreliable messages, inconsistency)
• receiver distortion: selective hearing, ignoring non-verbal cues
• power struggles

We help develop customized Communication Skills.