Accelerating Leadership Development by Jocelyn Berard

Author:Jocelyn Berard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

Keys to Effective Communication

Deloitte's Alan Booth studies and thinks a great deal about communication. He believes that effective communicators employ candor (giving the truth of what is happening, not a sugar-coated version), brevity (speak too long and you lose your audience) and color (your words need to be said or written in an interesting way). He considers great communications an essential element of building relationships and influencing others.

Booth stresses that leaders should be careful not to spin or oversell their message too hard to achieve buy-in from those in their organization. An insightful practice for the Deloitte executive is to look at online news articles. Typically, those articles with the most opinion or spin provoke a flurry of (often negative) commentary and reaction from their readers.

Ultimately, communication needs to be effective, no matter what medium is used. In fact, only a small amount of meaning is conveyed through oral communication alone. Speaking and listening are not just about hearing and processing words. There are also paraverbal and nonverbal cues that contribute to how a spoken message is understood.

Various studies show slightly differing numbers, but the consensus is that only 10 percent of communication is actually verbal (the words), while 40 percent is paraverbal and 50 percent is entirely nonverbal. The takeaway here is that it is not only what you say that counts, it is, more importantly, how you say it. So if approximately 50 percent of the meaning of the message is affected by nonverbal cues, what does that mean when we can't talk face to face—when we have to use e-mail, blogs, Twitter and even conference calls or webinars? Attention needs to be paid to apply good communication practices to the new shortened and speedy interactions of today's world.

The oft-quoted percentage breakdown of how we communicate comes, for the most part, from the research of Professor Albert Mehrabian, who pioneered our current understanding of communication, making a huge contribution to our early understanding of body language and nonverbal communication. Mehrabian found that in the communication of a message pertaining to feelings and attitudes:

7 percent of the message is contained in the words that are spoken.

38 percent of the message is paralinguistic (the way the words are said).

55 percent of the message is contained in the facial expression.

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