I recently attended the ‘Communication in Business’ Skills
for Success session given HSBC. Although I knew nothing about this topic before
the session, I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of it afterwards.
The talk started by discussing how to be an effective communicator, which boiled
down to three main components: ethos – why you’re worth listening to; pathos –
why people should listen to you; and logos – are you making sense. By breaking
down your communication into these three parts, you can make sure it gets received
properly. Business communication was also broken down into different levels:
personal - which is one-to one and usually face to face; internal - which would
be communication between departments of a company; and finally external - which
is between a company and customers, or potential customers (i.e. advertising).
There were a number of group activities to show the limits
of communication in a variety of contexts, and how it should be adapted for
different levels. Firstly we were split into three groups and one member of
each group was given a picture to describe, while the others had to relay this
information to another group member, who would try to draw it. After 10
minutes, the drawings were checked against the originals and, universally, they
weren’t fantastic…! This was meant to teach us to understand what we thought we
could do, and what we thought we couldn’t, and the importance of time
management. All the groups didn’t finish the picture and the presenter admitted
it was a largely impossible task.
The second group task was a mock meeting, where each group
member was given a role to play out, from CEO to branch staff. Discussion
afterwards was about the difficulty of communication between people of vastly
different authority in internal communication, and managing different
personalities. The final task was analysis of an email that hypothetically
could have been sent to all members of a company by the CEO. This was again
about the difficulties of internal communication, where different people need
to get different information. The presenter recommended breaking up the email
into several different parts, each part mostly relevant for one group of
people.
I found this talk very rewarding, and although I hadn’t
really thought about how tricky communication could be in a business context,
this gave me the idea that it is an absolutely essential skill to master. For
more advice from HSBC you can follow their graduate blog:
http://www.graduateblog.co.uk/.
Ed (Student Blogger)
Ed (Student Blogger)
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