What is Communication?
As a leader it's important to understand what is communication and how a message goes from a sender to a receiver. Gaining knowledge of communication will provide you with the ability to communicate effectively with your staff and will give you the added bonus of being capable of identifying and preventing problems in your workplace communications, before they become the source of major problems.
Hence the importance of taking the time to understand what is communication, is to guarantee that we, as leaders, communicate effectively.
So, what is communication?
I like to think of it as the action of transmitting information between two or more individuals with the purpose of informing the receiver(s)
What a leader needs to know how to communicate effectively
Communication is definitely a very large subject that has been studied from all possible angles. Breaking the communication process down helps our comprehension of what communication is:
The Message
Every communication has to start with an initial message. This is the original idea, desire, thought, emotion, story, etc. that the creator of the message wants to convey to another person. In simplified terms, this is what you are trying to say.
Encoding
Since humans don't come with the ability to telepathically convey their thoughts and emotions to each other, we have to use various mediums to convey our ideas. The most widely-used would be language. However, the use of other mediums that utilize the five senses can also be used to encode the message and pass it to the intended recipient.
Deciphering
Once the idea and been encoded and transmitted via the desired medium, the recipient of the message has to process and decipher it into its original idea. Most of the time, our brains do this without conscious control. We understand a sentence because we are deciphering it through our learned knowledge of the rules for any given language.
Comprehension
Just because a message is deciphered does not mean it is comprehended. For example, fox bill gaming two bubble gum, is just a string of words that is decoded, but makes no sense. As such, we have to go back to the sender of the message and ask for clarification with regards to the message and its purpose.
Share your thoughts
Sharing your thoughts on communication will benefit every leader that are constantly seeking to improve their communication skills. Leaders communicate constantly, thus increasing our communication skills will consequently increase our leadership skills.
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