On successful completion of my studies, I hope to pursue a career in art directing. I would like to work with a team of employees who produce artwork for advertisements, magazines and various products in the consumer market industry. My career choice will involve the supervision of graphic designers, artists, photographers and production staff.
Since I will be working with various people, supervisors and subordinates alike, it will be crucial for me to possess certain communication skills. Further, it will be necessary for me to understand inter-cultural communication, considering the cultural diversities in the contemporary workplace.
Consideration my cultural differences and background, effective listening will be a very important skill for me to possess, develop and nurture. Reflective listening is one of the major points of intercultural communication.
It will be necessary for me to use proper listening strategies such as; reiterating what I think I heard to help me validate it and assess the accuracy of what I understood. Listening skills will be very critical, more so being able to integrate their techniques, i.e. active listening, critical listening and empathetic listening.
However, there are other interpersonal communication skills that will be especially helpful. It will be necessary for me to use emotional intelligence, for example in a scenario where the customer was mean or rude to one of my graphic designers’ due to dissatisfaction, it will be imperative that I read the emotional situation and give a word of encouragement to my colleague. Effective communication will also require me to be aware of my body language, tone and the choice of words I use.
Communication strengths and weaknesses
Being self-aware is very important in any given social or professional setting where there will interaction between people. After assessing myself keenly, I realized some of my communication strengths and weaknesses and how they could affect various scenarios and outcomes in my future career.
I consider myself as having various interpersonal communication skills. The most prominent strength is my ability to use the active listening technique. I find myself creating a mental outline of the important points contained in what the other party is telling me. This enables me to generate questions, which shows the other party I am interested and mentally involved.
This may go a long way in me having a good relationship with my superiors in my future job. I also have the ability to engage in necessary eye contact and maintain a moderate smile while in a conversation, more so when listening to someone. I also try to be enthusiastic in my communication.
I also have my fair share of weaknesses. I tend to be too “touchy” when I am communicating with people. For example, touching someone’s arm when emphasizing a point or, putting my arm around someone when discussing something. This has been proving to be very unsettling for some and quite embarrassing for me. I also realized that my strength of being able to use active listening sometimes works to my disadvantage.
This is because, in the process of me forming a mental outline of the main points in a bid to formulate questions, I sometimes get mentally distracted and find myself steering the conversation in a different direction, which I can imagine, can be rather irritating. Lastly, I realized that I have the tendency to tap my foot due to impatience when I feel the other party should get to their point quickly.
Communication plan
As is human nature, it is more likely for an individual to be able to identify their strengths more readily, than their weaknesses. It is for this reason that I intend to come up with an effective plan to help me analyze the interpersonal communication weaknesses I may have overlooked.
It will be imperative for me to discuss with my colleagues/team how we communicate and our preferred mannerisms of being communicated to. Hand in hand, I will use the team members to help me identify my communication skills and weaknesses and this will help me identify the areas that need improvement.
This will help me work on things like being too “touchy” because colleagues can explicitly state that they do not welcome that as a means of being communicated to. It will also be necessary for me to learn a bit of different cultures to be able to analyze various intercultural communication scenarios.
Conclusion
By virtue of doing this project, I have learned that the integration of effective communication skills in work ethic is very important as it determines the overall work atmosphere. In carrying out my research, I have learned that one should be keen on understanding intercultural communication as different cultures have different perceptions with respect to: body language, tone of voice and respect.
Further, learning how to engage effectively in interpersonal communication with your superiors and subordinates is a continuous process. One should be able to learn from his/her interactions by analyzing how previous conversations went. For instance, if a conversation went well, one should analyze the factors that contributed to that and remember the crucial points for future use.