Achieving Career Success Through Effective Communication

Organizations such as Hallmark understand that achieving success in today's workplace is closely tied to the ability of their employees and managers to communicate effectively. Communication is the process of sending and receiving messages. However, communication is effective only when people understand each other, stimulate others to take action, and encourage others to think in new ways.

Effective communication offers you and your organization many benefits. When you communicate effectively, you increase productivity, both yours and that of the people around you. Effective communication helps you anticipate problems, make decisions, coordinate work flow, supervise others, develop relationships, and promote products. It helps you shape the impressions you make on your colleagues, employees, supervisors, investors, and customers. It helps you understand and respond to the needs of these stakeholders (the various groups you interact with).²

Without effective communication, people misunderstand each other and misinterpret information. Ideas misfire or fail to gain attention, and people and companies flounder.³ Fourteen percent of each 40-hour work week is wasted because of poor communication between staff and management.⁴ Whether you are pitching a business proposal, responding to a customer inquiry, or explaining a new process to your teammates, your ability to communicate effectively increases your chance for career success (see Figure 1–1).⁵ Moreover, improving your communication skills will help you adapt to the changes occurring in today's workplace.

Figure 1–1	The Benefits of Effective Communication

Good communication skills have always been important in the workplace. They are even more vital today. Effective communication helps us adapt to the continuing advances in technology, the globalization of the marketplace, the ability to access vast amounts of information, and the increased use of teams.

Technology brings new and better tools to the workplace, increasing the speed and frequency of communication and allowing people from opposite ends of the world to work together seamlessly, 24 hours a day. The Internet, e-mail, voice mail, faxes, and pagers make it possible for more and more people to telecommute from home, from the road, and from satellite offices around the globe. Depending on which study you read, between 20 and 58 percent of employers now offer telecommuting arrangements for their employees. In fact, current estimates put the number of U.S. telecommuters at about 16 million.⁶

The increased use of technology in the workplace not only facilitates new working arrangements but also requires employees to communicate more effectively and efficiently. Technology showcases your communication skills—your writing skills are revealed in every e-mail message, and your verbal skills are revealed in audio and video teleconferences.⁷ Technology also increases the frequency with which you communicate, and it extends the reach of your messages. Intranets are private corporate networks based on Internet technology, and extranets are the extension of private networks to certain outsiders such as suppliers. Both facilitate communication among employees, managers, customers, suppliers, and investors. Moreover, the need to communicate effectively with people outside the organization is magnified as more and more businesses transact electronic commerce (e-commerce), buying and selling goods and services over the Internet

For example, during their first Internet Christmas season in 1999, customers flocked to Web sites to do their shopping, but these companies were unprepared to handle the flood of orders that poured in. When employees explained that they could not guarantee product delivery by Christmas day, angry customers from all over the world complained by phone and e-mail. Then, when employees tried to explain the company's position and offer possible remedies, they faced another wave of customer inquiries, and so on.⁸

More and more businesses today are crossing national boundaries to compete on a global scale. Over 2 million North Americans now work for foreign employers, and the number of foreign companies that have built plants in the United States is increasing.⁹ A growing percentage of the U.S. work force is made up of people with diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, a trend that will continue in the years ahead. In the United States, for example, women and ethnic minorities are entering the work force in record numbers (see Figure 1–2). By 2010 Hispanic Americans will become the largest minority group, and by 2050 the number of minority workers will almost equal that of white workers.¹⁰

Figure 1–2	Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Work Force

Increased globalization and work force diversity mean that employees must understand the laws, customs, and business practices of many countries besides being able to communicate with people who speak different languages. Take 3Com's sprawling modem factory in Chicago. The plant employs 1,200 people, and the vast majority are immigrants. Urbane Asians with multiple college degrees work alongside people only recently arrived from Central American villages. Serbs work with Bosnian Muslims and with Iraqis, Peruvians, and South Africans. The employees speak more than 20 different languages, including Tagalog, Gujarati, and Chinese. English skills of varying degrees tie them together.¹¹

Overcoming language barriers is just one of the many communication challenges employees face in today's workplace. Chapter 3 discusses intercultural communication in detail and explains how understanding other backgrounds, personalities, and perceptions helps you become a more effective communicator.

In the age of information, "organizations will live or die, depending on their ability to process raw data, transform the data into information, distribute the information appropriately, and use it speedily to make decision," notes professor Fernando Bartolome in his book The Articulate Executive.¹² In other words, to be successful in today's workplace, employees must know how to find, evaluate, and process information effectively and efficiently, and they must be able to communicate this information to others. As one project manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center put it, "Knowledge may be power, but communication skills are the primary raw materials of good client relationships." Every job description for a new position on this manager's staff includes the following line: "Required—effective organization skills and mastery of the English language in written and oral forms."¹³ Because ideas and data are replacing natural resources and physical materials, communication skills are even more necessary in this information age.

The command-and-control style of traditional management structures is ineffective in today's fast-paced, e-commerce environment.¹⁴ Successful companies such as Hallmark no longer limit decisions to a few managers at the top of a formal hierarchy. Instead, organizations use teams and collaborative work groups to make the fast decisions required to succeed in a global and competitive marketplace. As Andy McMillen knows, the challenges of working in teams increase as more and more team members come from different departments, perform different functions, and have diverse cultural backgrounds. As Chapter 2 discusses in detail, in order to function in a team-based organization, you must be able to clarify, confirm, listen to and understand others, give balanced feedback, explore ideas, keep everyone involved, and credit others' work.¹⁵ Moreover, you must understand how groups interact, reach decisions, work collaboratively, and resolve conflict. Clearly, working in teams requires effective communication, but understanding this need is only the first step toward developing effective communication skills.

Many companies provide employees a variety of opportunities for communication skills training. Some companies offer seminars and workshops on handling common oral communication situations (dealing with customers, managing subordinates, getting along with co-workers); others offer training in computers and other electronic means of communication. But even though you may ultimately receive training on the job, don't wait. Start mastering business communication skills right now, in this course. People with good communication skills have an advantage in today's workplace.

One way to improve your communication skills is to practice. Lack of experience may be the only obstacle between you and effective messages, whether written or spoken. Perhaps you have a limited vocabulary, or maybe you're uncertain about questions of grammar, punctuation, and style. Perhaps you're simply frightened by the idea of writing something or of appearing before a group. People aren't "born" writers or speakers. The more they speak and write the more their skills improve. Someone who has written ten reports is usually better at it than someone who has written only two.

You learn from experience, and some of the most important lessons are learned through failure. Learning what not to do is just as important as learning what to do. One of the great advantages of taking a course in business communication is that you get to practice in an environment that provides honest and constructive criticism. A course of this kind also gives you an understanding of acceptable techniques, so you can avoid making costly mistakes on the job.

No matter what career you pursue, this course prepares you to handle the communication tasks that await you. This book helps you discover how to collaborate in teams, how to listen well, how to master nonverbal communication, and how to ensure successful meetings. You'll also learn about communicating across cultures and through the Internet. This book presents a three-step process for composing business messages. It gives tips for writing letters, memos, e-mail messages, reports, and oral presentations, and it provides a collection of good and bad communication examples with annotated comments to guide you with your own communication efforts. Finally, it explains how to write effective résumés and application letters and how to handle employment interviews. But before you delve into those topics, it's important that you understand what it's like to communicate in an organizational setting.