TABLE OF CONTENTS The foundation of all business interaction is communication. There is no recruitment, retention, or promotion of employees without it; there are no clients, nor is there a business, without it. People in organizations spend over 70 percent of their time in interpersonal situations, whether it is one-on-one, meetings, telephone, e-mail, or some other form of communication. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that poor communication is the source of much of any organization s problems. Conversely, improving communication likely represents the single greatest opportunity for organizations to reach higher levels of success, however they define it. With a culturally diverse workforce, the potential both for problems and for opportunities is greater.
Getting it right means building rapport, finding common interests, exchanging information, persuading, and getting the work done. Getting it wrong, on the other hand, leads to confusion, anxiety, frustration, and misjudgments. Benignly, this can be visualized as two ships passing in the night. Or more negatively, it could mean offense, escalating insult, and conflict, like two ships colliding in the night.
Communication styles are so deeply ingrained that it is difficult for us to be consciously aware of them. Through hundreds and thousands of hours of relatively successful exchanges within our home culture, our responses tend to be automatic. In this chapter, we attempt to make conscious what is normally unconscious in our communication.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet leading to extraordinary communication. Rather, there are hundreds of small things we can do that cumulatively...
