TEST for ANCHOR LINKS
There are four major sections on this page:
- Professional Communication
- Communicating in a New Business Culture
- Empathy
- Marketing your Skills in your Field
Choose one of the sections that’s most relevant to your situation, read that section, and complete one learning activities in the section.
Professional Communication
In order to be an effective communicator, you need to consider a few important communication aspects.
Audience
To whom are you speaking, writing, or presenting?
What is their level of understanding of your topic?
What is their level of interest in what you have to say?
Purpose
What is your goal for your communication?
- To inform other co-workers?
- To inform a manager?
- To persuade others to adopt a new policy?
- To teach others about a new policy that’s been adopted?
Medium
How have you chosen to deliver your message, and do you have reasons for choosing this medium?
How are similar messages usually delivered in your organization – through email, meeting announcements, or online newsletters?
Have you considered the benefits and drawbacks of the chosen medium, and what will you do to reduce drawbacks?
Role & Context
What is your role in the organization, and what is your audience’s role?
What type of organization are you a part of? Formal? Informal? Top-down? Flat?
What tone and approach will work best with your role and context?
Read Coursera’s page on Important Communication Skills and How to Improve Them.
This page moves from a general discussion of communication skills to more specific tips on how to improve communication skills in a workplace environment.
Then consider your own experience with communicating in the workplace, in terms of:
- written communication
- verbal communication
- non-verbal communication
- visual communication
Do you normally ask yourself the questions about audience, purpose, medium, role, and context before you communicate? Or do you just start talking or writing? Consider where you are on the gamut of mindful professional communication.
Learning Activity for Professional Communication
Introductory Level
Consider a professional communication situation that did not succeed. It can be a situation in which you were involved, or one that you observed.
Analyze the situation with reference to the communication concepts in the reading. In a 3-4 page analysis, do the following:
- describe the situation
- analyze each factor that went wrong to create the ineffective communication
- evaluate what could have occurred to make the communication effective at each wrong turn
Learning Activity for Professional Communication
Advanced Level
Part 1
Identify an upcoming communication that you have to participate in at work. It can be something you need to create yourself, or it can be a communication that you’re working on as part of a group. Describe the situation.
Part 2
Create a situational analysis, which is like a background or planning document for the communication. A situational analysis identifies and provides information about all of the variables in a communication situation, in order to plan to address those variables effectively in the communication.
Communication Variables
| Audience | all of the variables that deal with the backgrounds and current roles of your listeners or readers – their interests, cultural heritage, education, employment, age, understanding of your topics, role with the company, values, etc. |
|---|---|
| Purpose | the reason why you are creating the communication; what you hope to have happen as a result of the communication |
| Content | the information that you want to send in the particular situation; your main idea |
| Role | your position in the communication (employee, manager, trainer, trainee, etc.) |
| Tone | the way in which you want to communication to “sound” (straightforward, friendly, authoritative, etc.) |
| Organizational & Cultural Contexts | what characterizes the organization: its values, shared history, how communication flows, its level of formality or informality, its goals, etc. Also what characterizes the individual or group in terms of nationality, age, gender, etc. |
| Medium | the way in which the communication is sent (e-mail, in-person discussion, memo, report, blog post, etc.) |
| Constraints | the things over which you have no control (available time in which to create the communication, expectations for format, etc.) |
(Note that a situational analysis identifies the type of information and characteristics of the communication situation; it does not provide the actual information or communication itself.)
Part 3
Explain how you will use the information in the situational analysis to create the communication – why you will use certain approaches, language, etc. (You do not have to do the actual communication.)
Communicating in a New Business Culture
View the following video on cultural differences, to initiate thinking about communicating in a new culture.
View the following video on foreign customs, narrated by a professor at the University of Tasmania, University College. The video provides a fuller definition of the concept of culture and its applications to doing business internationally.
One of the concepts in the video deals with direct and indirect communication, understanding whether you should state a concept blatantly or lead into it more circuitously, based on cultural practices and values.
In a formal study of communication, this concept is called high vs. low context. Higher-context cultures expect indirect communication, while lower-context cultures expect more direct communication.
Read about high and low context cultures:
- High-context and low-context cultures
- What are the differences between high context and low context cultures?
- The 6-D model of national culture
- If you’re interested, you can take the Cultural Context Inventory downloadable PDF.
In addition to defining culture by nation, you can also consider different cultures in the workplace, especially if you are going into a new job, or if you have experienced that your communication style doesn’t seem to be the right “fit” for your current workplace.
Learning Activity for Communicating in a New Business Culture
Introductory Level
Choose a culture unfamiliar to you, one that you’d like to learn more about. It may be the culture of someone you work with, or it may be a culture that you know your company will be doing business with. Find 2-4 different resources about that culture, and create a list of business “do’s and don’ts” based on your research. You may want to structure your research in one of the following ways, using:
- the 7 dimensions of workplace culture
- Dr. Rajendra Curry’s dimensions of values, customs, religion, etiquette, infrastructure, and social institutions
- Hofstede’s 6-D model of national culture
- or any other structure that makes sense to you, given the research you uncover
Submit:
- list of do’s and don’ts
- bibliography
Learning Activity for Communicating in a New Culture
Advanced Level
Complete the initial learning activity above.
Then work with the following scenario.
Your company, which sells specialty cookware (pots, pans, kitchen utensils), has gone international. You work in digital marketing. You are charged with working with your counterpart in ___ (the culture you researched) on a digital marketing project with the goal of highlighting the global reach of the product as a method of promoting sales. You have not met your counterpart, but know that you both are expected to deliver a marketing plan to management in two months.
Create the following, applying what you learned through your research into the culture new to you:
- an overall communication strategy for working together – what are the top 5 things you need to keep in mind during this project? – and rationale for this overall strategy
- a rationale for the medium of the introductory piece and the actual introductory piece
- an agenda for your first meeting and rationale for your method of approach
- concepts that you would include in a marketing plan, and a rationale for inclusion
Submit:
- list of do’s and don’ts
- bibliography
- the four items listed above
Empathy
Empathy is an important aspect of effective communication. Empathy means to put yourself in another’s shoes, to understand experience from another’s perspective. According to Dictionary.com, empathy is
“the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.”
That’s the simple definition. For a fuller definition, which also draws upon brain science, history, and sociology, view the following video.
Empathy is not just an abstract concept. It’s referred to as an important characteristic in customer service, for example, in the HEARD technique (from Disney[1]) of engaging with customers:
| H | Hear | Listen to the customer and let the customer explain as fully as he/she wants to explain. |
| E | Empathize | Show through your language that you understand how the customer feels. |
| A | Apologize | Apologize if you can do it sincerely. Your tone will tell. |
| R | Resolve | Quickly move to conclusion, asking what you can do to correct the situation. |
| D | Diagnose | Diagnose why the situation happened, and focus on solutions so that a similar situation does not happen again. |
For a very concrete example of showing empathy through your communication, view the following video.
Empathy is an important communication skill. You will be a more effective communicator if you can express understanding of where another person is “coming from,” and how another person perceives experience.
Watch the following video and consider how the experience would be different with more empathetic communication.
The video “Bad Customer Service Rep” is also available with closed captions.
Although it’s obvious to consider empathy in terms of customer service, realize that empathy supports effective communication in all phases of experience, from work to parenting to friendship.
Learning Activity for Empathy
Introductory Level
Part 1
Consider a situation at work that did not go well because a person or group was not empathetic in communicating to their audience. Explain the situation.
Part 2
Evaluate how more empathic communication might have helped the situation become resolved with a more positive outcome.
Submit your evaluation in one of the following forms:
- a brief essay (2-3 pages)
- a dialogue
- a short video with “actors” representing the original participants and showing the actual and projected outcomes
- any format that you choose
Learning Activity for Empathy
Advanced Level
Review Rifkin’s video on The Empathic Civilisation. Do further research, analysis, and writing about the concept of empathy. This may take one of many forms:
- Develop an annotated bibliography listing at least 5 relatively current articles dealing with empathy. Read each article in order to create the annotation. Then, in a few paragraphs after the annotated bibliography, link your readings to concepts that Rifkin offers.
- Rifkin asserts that, with our technical abilities to connect, we can re-think the human narrative and prepare the groundwork for an empathic civilization, including not only humans but all aspects of the planet. Do one of the following related to this assertion:
- Option 1 – Respond to this assertion with your reflections, based on your own experiences, observations, and some additional research (at least 1 journal article). What personal experiences support or contradict this assertion? What current events support or contradict this assertion? Do you think that this idea is feasible? Why or why not?
- Option 2 – Create a proposal to present to your local chamber of commerce to offer training in empathic response to your community. Include research (at least 1 journal article) to support your proposal.
- Option 3 – Envision the future that Rifkin asserts is possible. Write a creative piece that illustrates this future, with specific examples in personal, communal, national, international, global, and environmental arenas.
Please identify your choice at the top of the assignment.
