TABLE OF CONTENTS In Section 1 we looked at communication as a mechanistic process. It's a useful starting point, but in practice the way we communicate is influenced by a whole range of factors which can be summarized into being a combination of:
| Nature (i.e. your genetic characteristics) | + | Nurture (i.e. the effect of your life experiences) | = | What you are like as a person |
What you are like as a person influences how you communicate and interpret messages. It underpins the process we explored in Section 1.
Your effectiveness as a manager is likely to increase the more you:
recognize that there are many factors which affect the communication process
become sensitive to the way it affects how you communicate.
In this section we look at some of the theories that contribute towards understanding what makes us tick as people and therefore influence how we communicate. We look briefly at:
states of mind
being assertive
attitudes and assumptions
level of trust.
At the end of the section you're asked to review and plan how you communicate drawing on what's been covered in the first two sections.
