On Leadership, Humility, and Excellent Communication Skills
On Leadership, Humility, and Excellent Communication Skills
This DATIS blog article, “On Leadership, Humility, and Excellent Communication Skills", was originally posted by Tom Schulte, Linked2Leadership, on March 11th, 2016 and was reposted with permission.
A college professor of communication was once asked by the students why the skills that they teach in the college were so important.
This professor taught the interpersonal skills that were related to the daily life of college students. Additionally he trained them in coursework that helped them prepare for a long professional career that included interpersonal skills.
Doing Some Research
So to answer the question as to why interpersonal skills were so important to them, he gave the class an assignment to examine and study the job postings found in the newspaper or at the online job portals and come back the next day with their observations.
The answer to their question was just simple:
The one common thing that each and every student observed with every job requirement was to possess a definite skill set of having outstanding interpersonal communication skills.
And these requirements are magnified for any leader to really be a person of influence.
Wow, who’da thunk?
Fundamental Communication Skills
So, what are those interpersonal skills and how do they influence our daily life as a leader?
It is clear that the interpersonal communication skills are an important part of everyday life on both the personal and professional fronts. Before we start learning how to develop the interpersonal skills, first let us understand fundamental principles of effective communication. It’s a three level communication approach that includes- ethos, pathos, and logos.
- The ethos symbolizes ethics
- The pathos symbolizes empathy
- The logos stands for logic
All three above factors help you in communicating effectively by developing credibility, understandability of your listener and then coherently presenting the thoughts.
On Macro and Micro Communication
Often people in leadership roles assume that they are effective communicators. Since they often are effective at speaking to people in groups, at events, and at important meetings, the assumption can be that that this skill set transfers to the interpersonal level.
However, when it comes to a one-on-one communication skills, those macro skills often are the worst ways to be effective.
Leaders need to dial it back a bit and take a look at what is the most effective way to proceed on the micro level. What can frequently be found is that some of the things that are missing are there because of blind spots that everyone has.
And what can complicate things for leaders is that they see the remedy to increase their influence and effectiveness is seen as trivial or sophomoric. Consequently people in roles of influence continue to lose out on opportunities to better themselves and their operations because of pride, disbelief, laziness, embarrassment, or apathy.
But for leaders who want to improve themselves and the results they get through their teams, all it takes is just a few steps in humility and desire and the results can be dramatic.
5 Tips for Better Interpersonal Effectiveness
Although these steps may seem simplistic, the power of recalibrating one’s basic approach to interpersonal communication skills can be dramatic.
To get results quickly, here are some of the best ways that can help in improving one’s interpersonal communication skills and become much more effective.
1) Opting for a Speech Course
If you are interested in improving your interpersonal skills, especially related to communication, then it is advisable to take a speech course. A good speech course would help in building confidence in yourself while teaching you to communicate coherently. This could be considered as one of the best ways for improving your skills.
2) Rehearsing with a Recording Tool
In order to communicate effectively, it is important to understand the way you communicate. As you record yourself, you will have a great opportunity to listening as well as watching yourself talk. With this, you can observe your body language, have proper language command, appropriate tone of voice, confidence level and many other things. This will help you to become an effective communicator by improving yourself through the observations made.
3) Look Out for the Opportunities to Lead
We already know that great leaders are the great communicators. So, you must look out for some great opportunities for taking leadership roles along with enhancing your interpersonal skills. Being a leader means you need to be proactive and ready to take the initiative. Also, in a corporate scenario, it could mean voluntarily bringing down the co-workers for solving a problem or developing a concept.
4) Develop Good Writing Practices
Writing could help you in expressing yourself clearly. It helps you thinking twice before you speak. It has been observed that the internal communication precedes the interpersonal communication, so it helps you to personally communicate to yourself. The ultimate solution for this is developing good writing practice in order to improve your interpersonal skills.
5) Enroll in an Acting Class
Acting gives you an opportunity to relate to different kinds of people. This helps in boosting your confidence and the language command as well. As acting lets you communicate on stage in a way that the audience should understand you, it can prove to be a great platform to develop your communication skills.
Final thought:
You must have met the leaders in every sphere of human life and one thing that makes them more influential is their interpersonal communication. As a result, if you want to rock your world, you can follow above-stated some of the best tips that can help in improving yourself with excellent communication skills.
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