Introduction
Communication has always been an essential element of every aspect of human life. Very much depends on the person’s ability to communicate with others and to apply efficient communicative skills to achieve their goals. In general, it is possible to state that the ability to communicate constructively shapes the major part of the individual’s success in his or her personal life, at work, and in other spheres.
There are many jobs that involve constant communication with clients, provision of some consultative or advisory services, which are almost solely built on the principles of communication and interaction with people. Business affairs are as well impossible to be accomplished without making business agreements, holding negotiations, and instructing the personnel on the goals to pursue. There is a great multitude of examples of the need for communication skills in daily life, so it goes without saying that business operations require well-developed communication abilities and demand their application on a daily basis.
It is enough to mention the ever-growing globalization of the world and business together with it, so interpersonal and cross-cultural communication acquires key importance in the contemporary world. It is for this reason that one needs to pay close attention to the issue of communication skills in the process of learning business communication and related topics.
Communication Skills and Strategies
Communication, no matter how simple and familiar it may seem, appears to be a complicated and multi-dimensional concept that needs thorough consideration and hard work in the process of acquiring the basic skills necessary for success. It does not correspond to a casual notion of talking as the communication process – it is much deeper in its goals and strategies to accomplish these goals. With the purpose of understanding the phenomenon of communication itself and communication skills in particular it is necessary to pay attention to the following concepts and terminology that will enhance the reader’s understanding of the issue: conscious and unconscious competence, reflective learning, motivation, motor skills, and social skills.
As for conscious and unconscious competence, Ellis (2003) believes that “it implies knowledge of the what (for instance, the core professional concepts) and knowledge of the how (the ways in which we put these concepts into practice)” (p. 2). It may be applied at both levels, as the definition suggests. Reflective learning is an essential element of the process of acquiring communicative skills – it implies not only fulfilling a certain set of tasks but reflecting on the results and trying to introduce change or improvement (Ellis, 2003, p. 3).
Motivation goes without saying – it is the innate wish of the person to act in an innovative way that makes him or her take steps forward in personal development. Motor skills, in the opinion of Hargie (1997), are organized and coordinated, learned actions serial in nature supposing the person’s making some physical actions, i.e. they are formed at the biological and subconscious level to be applied in life (p. 9). Social skills differ in nature and involve interpersonal actions, interaction with other people (Hargie, 1997, p. 9-10).
Motor skills are not the subject of the present paper because they refer to daily actions, routine, and mechanic activities of people they may not even realize. Social skills, on the contrary, have to be thoroughly thought over and trained, as a result forming a communicative personality being able to achieve his or her communication goal and succeed in communication. These skills are multiple; however, the present work will focus only on four of them: listening, negotiation, explaining, and self-disclosure. Listening is one of the most important skills of a good communicator because it has been proven to be a treasure too few people possess.
In the process of a constructive communicative act, it is important not only to clearly express one’s own thoughts and intentions but to give an opportunity to the communication partner to voice his or her opinion. Listening has been always neglected in the process of business communication as there have hardly been any doubts in the employees’ abilities to listen to others speak. However, the recently discovered notion that deserves separate attention and appears to be substantially different from the issue of hearing is active listening. As Ellis (2003) notes, “Successful listening (as opposed to the more passive hearing) is to do with actively processing the incoming information and doing some work – hence the term active” (p. 17).
No doubt active listening represents a challenge for a person willing to undertake it because it involves much extra work being done – first of all, the process of active listening, according to Ellis (2003), involves overcoming a three-stage task of recognizing the gap in understanding, locating it and trying to overcome it (p. 17). There is a set of barriers to active listening as well that prevent the listener to follow the guidelines of active listening and diminish the degree of mutual understanding, e.g. attention span, familiarity with material, negative or stereotyped attitudes to the matter or to the interlocutor, environmental considerations and physical inconvenience (Ellis, 2003, p. 18-19).
The second strategy that should be mastered by the communicator in order to conduct communication activities successfully is negotiation. There is no need to explain how important the process of negotiations is for any business organization – it goes without saying that it is the profitability and at times the very existence of an organization that depends on the result of negotiations with business partners. Thus, it is crucial to pay adequate attention to the way communication skills have to be developed to facilitate the negotiation skills of an individual. Negotiation is a comprehensive activity that demands a wide set of skills from the negotiator to be successful and accomplish the stipulated task. It involves active listening that has already been analyzed, assertiveness in actions and messages, and skillful questioning (Ellis, 2003, p. 57).
It is essential not to forget that negotiation first of all implies exercising certain influence on people with whom negotiation is conducted, which also depends on the ability to express one’s opinion and judgment in a specific way. Besides, as emphasized by Ellis (2003), negotiation is also a creative process including such elements as finding the balance between parties, finding the approach to the specific partners in the negotiation, conducting problem-solving activities, and engaging partners in long-term relations (p. 58). For these reasons, all efforts of the negotiator as well as his or her negotiation skills have to be focused on these major goals.
The third communication strategy implying the multi-aspect application of communication skills is explaining. Hargie (1997) speculates much over the topic of the importance of explaining in the process of communication and arrives at the conclusion that this skill has been widely neglected and underestimated recently (p. 183). The reasons he sees for this are first of all the unwillingness of people to accept the authority of other people mixing it with the imposition of someone’s opinion and limiting their personality, and secondly, the way explaining is perceived and taken for granted as an indispensable part of communication (Hargie, 1997, p. 183).
However, in the same section, Hargie (1997) underlines the importance of explaining as a necessary link between such aspects of human cognition as understanding, language, logic, rhetoric, critical theory, and culture (p. 183). As one can see from the following list, explaining appears to be a much deeper concept than anyone would have suggested. This is what causes particular attention to explaining in the recent business communication literature and research – its importance is being gradually recognized and should be not underestimated in the conditions of the contemporary business process.
There are the following types of explanation detected by Hargie (1997): interpretive, descriptive, and reason-giving (p. 185). Interpretative explaining gives the broad answer to the question ‘What?’ and defines concepts, events, and processes in such a way so that the person to who they are explained would obtain a detailed understanding thereof and would be able to apply them in further activities. Descriptive explaining gives the answer to the question ‘How?’ thus explaining the manner in which things are done. People who have acquired descriptive knowledge of certain things are likely to be able to produce some actions or some things in the future, knowing the procedure and the peculiarities. Finally, reason-giving explaining should be focused on the justification of certain actions, events or notions – it gives the answer to the question ‘Why?’ and explains to people what this or that thing, process, or event is necessary.
The last communication strategy to be dealt with in the present work is self-disclosure. As admitted by McKay, Davis, and Fanning (2009), self-disclosure is a key component of human communication. It is present in every communicative process and is unavoidable:
“Self-disclosure makes relationships exist and builds intimacy. It clarifies and enlivens. Without self-disclosure, you are isolated in your private experience” (McKay et al., 2009, p. 24).
Despite its seeming unavoidability the issue that should worry a person in the process of communicating with others is the extent to which they should disclose themselves for this act to be appropriate and effective (McKay et al., 2009, p. 25). There is a huge number of situations, partners, and circumstances that demand different patterns of behavior and cause problems or lead to success.
The authors distinguish four types of self-disclosure among which a communicator should choose according to the situation, the individual profile of character and behavioral peculiarities, etc. They are open self (known to self, known to others), blind self (discoverable by others, known to others), hidden self (known to self, kept from others), and unknown self (unknown to self, unknown to others) (McKay, 2009, p. 25). Judging from the situation and the pursued goals the individual may choose from these alternatives and define the measure for self-disclosure for him- or herself.
Conclusion
Communication is a key element of human interactions, which acquires specific importance in the context of conducting business affairs. Communication skills are multiple in nature and application, so they have to be paid particular attention to in all business processes and should correspond to the particularly stipulated business goals. There are several communication strategies that involve the implementation of different communication skills and their proper combinations, thus the aspect of establishing efficient business communication with the application of communications skills should become the central focus of every organization’s daily functioning.
Communication skills are learned skills and they can be acquired be means of an efficient training schedule established in an organization. The importance of communication skills in the business process is a matter of agile interest nowadays, so they should be never underestimated or neglected in the business process both by employers and the staff of every company.
References
Ellis, R 2003, Communication skills: stepladders to success for the professional, Intellect Books.
Hargie, O 1997, The handbook of communication skills, 2nd edn, Routledge.
McKay, M, Davis, M, & Fanning, P 2009, Messages: The Communication Skills Book, 3rd edn, New Harbinger Publications.