Good communications are at the heart of any successful business. While good communications are important throughout businesses, they are especially important among managers and others in leadership positions.
Read on as we take a look at why this is so and how you can develop your skills. There are a number of reasons that managers need to have good communications skills in order to be effective.
Disseminate Information
As a manager, an important part of your job is to disseminate information among coworkers. As well as ensuring that they are up-to-date with all the information they need to complete tasks, you also need to provide them with instructions about how to complete them. If you aren’t able to effectively disseminate relevant information to your workers, you will limit their effectiveness.
Whether you are communicating new policies and procedures or you are just emphasizing to your workers the importance of certain tasks, being able to explain yourself clearly and eloquently is important for maintaining an effective workforce.
Consider how it would feel for your workers to be working without proper or clear instruction. Anyone who has had to try and work in such an environment can testify as to how frustrating it is. The bare minimum anyone expects from their employer is that they provide you with the information and instruction that you need to do your job. If you are not providing this to your workers, you cannot expect them to absorb important information as if by magic.
Delegate and Receive Feedback
Within some businesses, communication is well-directed. Everyone has a clearly defined and discrete role. There is little overlap between the duties. Also, everyone’s function is different from everyone else’s, even if their work is related. However, for many businesses, such delineations aren’t clear. There will be a variety of tasks that need completing. There will also be a number of people on staff who could be called upon to complete those tasks.
As a manager, you need to be able to select the best worker for any given task and delegate it to them. However, delegating tasks without explanation and without attention to feedback will quickly breed resentment among workers. On the other hand, ongoing two-way communication that ensures employees are part of the decision-making process leads to positive reactions and better compliance.
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You need to find out if your employees are not happy with the tasks you delegate to them. Then, be prepared to discuss issues with them. You might even need to justify your decision-making process.
Do this and you will help to maintain a positive attitude in your teams. This also improves everyone’s sense of commitment and loyalty to your business. Workers who feel that their managers are listening to them and acting on what they hear are more likely to provide you with the kind of honest feedback you need to improve your managerial skills.
Learn Good Communication for Dealing with Customers
It’s not just other managers and workers within a business that managers need to communicate with. Business owners and managers must also communicate with customers. In situations where customers wish to speak to a manager, they will often be coming at you with problems or complaints. You need to deal with their problems sensitively.
If your business gains a reputation for poor customer service, that will have a negative effect that could ripple throughout your business and create serious problems. For example, a bad interaction on social media in full view of the public eye can lead to days, even weeks, of negative press coverage.
Develop Skills with Receiving Instructions
Managers are not necessarily at the top of the food chain within a business. They often have their own boss they need to answer to. If you are a manager who receives instructions from someone else, good communications with your managers are essential.
Ask clarification questions when you aren’t clear about a task. Bad communication between you and your superiors can become miscommunications that you pass on from them to your team.
How to Develop Your Communications Skills
Remember to Listen
Communication isn’t just about talking to other people. It also involves listening to what they have to say to you. If you aren’t developing your listening skills as well as your speaking skills, you are only developing half of your communication ability. As a business manager, you need to be able to receive feedback from both your workers and from customers. More importantly, you have to be able to act on this feedback. When necessary, you will need communicate it more widely among your workers.
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Remember, there is an important difference between listening to someone and just waiting for your turn to speak. If you are actively listening to what the other person is saying, then you are thinking about how to respond, not just what it is that you want to say to them. Whether you are communicating with your workers or customers, you need to be able to listen to them.
Good Communication Leads to Clarity
Whenever you are communicating with your workers, it is important that there is no ambiguity about what you are saying or what your intentions are. Introducing needless ambiguity into your communications will only make things more difficult for you and everyone else around you.
If you want your workers to complete tasks in specific ways, then you need to clearly communicate this to them and consistently enforce those requirements. That means that if they don’t complete tasks according to your specifications, you need to be able to communicate this to them in a way that is firm but not demoralizing. If your communications are ambiguous or unclear, there is plenty of room for misinterpretation.
Listen to Feedback
Part of good communication is listening. It is important that you take in any feedback you receive. Whether this is feedback from your team members, or from customers who are reporting their experiences to you, you need to listen to what they have to say. Then you need to be willing to act upon it.
Communications Training
A good business owner will invest in providing you and other managers within their business with training in good communication skills. Managers who are naturally good communicators are rare. However, almost any manager can be trained to understand the underlying theory that underpins advanced communication skills.
Managers need to have good communication skills in order to do their jobs effectively. Managers who aren’t able to communicate clearly tend to end up becoming a bottleneck in the company and a hindrance to productivity. If you are willing to work on your communications skills, you will find that they are worth developing.
You can choose to enroll yourself or any manager within your business in a communication skills training course from Findcourses.com. They can help you to find courses in a range of different subjects, many of which are useful to aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs alike.
To read more articles that can help you with running your business, be sure to browse our blog often.
