Communicating Effectively (Week 3)

Each person likes to hear information, communicate, or give news in their own way. Me I do better speaking with someone over the phone instead of face-to-face. Some people, like my grandfather, hate to talk on the telephone. Some express themselves better in a letter whether it is through the traditional post office or electronic.

In the example, we were given the same message in three different formats: e-mail, voice-mail, and face-to-face, and then decide if we could infer any difference between the three examples.

The following are my initial responses of each example:

Example

E-mail Correspondence: Jane seemed understanding of Mark's time, but persistant of completing a project. She showed desperation by giving other options, but did not give enough detail for Mark to not have to contact her. Creating an e-mail session that could be numerous.

Voice-mail Correspondence: Once again Jane was not very detailed in her request. She did not specifiy a report, just that she needed it. I heard a monotone voice that did not seem desperate to get the job done. You could sense some understanding of his time.

Face-to-face Corresponde: Starts out friendly, but I would not worry about putting it off since there seemed to be no urgency in her voice. Her change of voice made it less confrontational. Once again lack of details.

Since I had no tone of voice to hear, just words chosen, I felt the e-mail was more understanding and better conveyed the necessity. Body language and verbal tone can often be a hinderance in determining compassion or urgency. Saying the same phrase in three different tones will give you three different reactions.

A media that I viewed ("Practicioner Voices: Strategies of Working with Stakeholders") had interviewed Vince Budrovich and he gives the advice "Tailor your communication strategy to fit the specific needs of each stakeholder." One needs to take into consideration certain words can be offensive or thought of as rude to one person can be harmless to another.

There were two lessons I learned from this communication example.

1. Detail is very important, each one of the correspondences were written as if the recipient knew exactly what was being talked about. That is not always the case. If someone is working on several projects and/or several reports not getting a specific title or description can waste valuable time with more correspondence to figure out that information.

2. Perception can be the biggest problem for any type of communication. "To make sense out of a message, to determine the meaning to attribute to it, the receiver uses perception" and this perception is not always what the sender is hoping for (Waltman, 2010).


References

Waltman, J. (2010) Communication. Retrieved from http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/Bun-Comp/Communication.html