Interpersonal Communication is basically the exchange of message, meaning, emotions and feelings either verbally or non-verbally. It is majorly through a face to face communication. For an effective interpersonal communication, the parties concerned have to engage in active listening and giving feedback. Listening process is an action where we make sense, digest and give feedback on what we hear. This process involves, receiving message, try to understand it, take time to evaluate, reason or judge it and finally give a response. In professional situations, for example, in business and organizations, active listening should be employed to attain a good relationship between the clients and the workers. Active listening is a technique applied in training, dispute and conflict resolution and in guidance and counselling. It calls for the listener to give a total concentration to the speaker, understand and contain what is being said. For one to be an active listener. He/she should have a strong interpersonal skill.
Interpersonal skill is a social skill demonstrated by a person ability to communicate well with people, able to manage conflict and disputes with ease, possession a strong sense of empathy for others, have a positive demeanor at all time, be a team worker, patient to listen, ability to negotiate and be a leader with a positive reinforcement. Organizations and businesses consider highly people with such skills, since they attract more clients and hence realization of higher revenue.
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The reputation of any organization or a business greatly relies upon the extent to which it values listening skills. Listening enables the business to acquire facts so that it can make appropriate decisions that befits. Listening to a job applicant you acquire information concerning their experience, skills and reason why they want to work with your company. Through listening, there is development and building of trust. For a project to be successful, all the members should listen carefully to instructions. Paying attention to verbal guidelines and deadlines leads to development of trust (Salustri Vol. 84, Issue 3, May-June 2019). To maintain a high reputation, the business listen to its customers. Failing to listen to them, they may not receive the items or services they wanted. If this keeps on happening, it tarnishes the organization’s reputation and the customers might quit the company. Effective listening motivates employees. A listening manager motivates and improves productivity and morale of the employees. He also discovers the challenges the employees are going through and their possible solutions.
Effective listening reduces errors and wasted time, it also saves money. In order to become a more effective listener, you should maintain eye contact and face the speaker while listening so as not to miss any point in the conversation. You also have to be relaxed and attentive. Giving attention to every detail in the conversation makes you not to miss any point. Keeping also an open mind while in a conversation, that is, listening attentively without judging the speaker and not criticizing mentally what they are talking about, this makes you an effective listener. You also have to listen to the words and try to visualize what they are talking about. You also don't have to interrupt or impose a discouraging facial expression, which will discourage the speaker from speaking openly. In case there is anything not clear you have to wait for the speaker to pause so that you can ask for clarification. Ensure while asking question that you only ask for understanding purpose and not criticizing the speaker. Effective listener tries to feel what exactly the speaker is feeling in their conversation, for example, moving with the conversation wave, feel sad when the speaker feels sad and vice versa. Try as much as possible to acknowledge the speaker positively by giving them a regular feedback. Finally, you have to pay attention to nonverbal cues, for instance, the tone and cadence of the speaker's voice. Try to detect boredom, enthusiasms or irritation in their body language.
Poor listening in a diverse work place leads to inefficiency and losses. Some of the barriers to effective listening includes; distracted and preoccupied, emotions and mobile phones and visual distraction can make one get distracted. Communicating in a noisy environment is also a barrier since workers cannot actually get the right message being communicated. Individual mindset is another barrier when communicating with more people at the same time, it causes inefficiency in listening. Last but not least, is when interrupting the other person, the person in the work place might not give you their full attention sinc6 the conversation they were in was exciting or interesting, or maybe the person was carrying out a more important task.
Building a conducive, healthy and strong culture at the working place is the first priority of every manager. This is achieved by creating a norm where honesty and timely feedback are valued. A feedback culture is focused on genuine and honest feedback between employer and amongst employees themselves. This culture is of utmost importance in posting employees engagement since it creates an atmosphere for better engagement enhancing loyalty and hard work to the company. It also creates a more positive work place. The presences of a satisfying places have an impact of the employee’s performance. It also encourages team work and punctuality in the work place since no worker would want to be suspended from such a wonderful organization due to absenteeism or poor performance. It decreases turn over and resignation or organizational inter transfer and brain drain of workers. A feedback culture addresses employees issues on time giving them no reason to quit the company.
A constructive feedback culture feedback culture is created through peer to peer feedback, nurturing a growth mindset, providing feedback training, using continuous feedback rather than periodic feedback, emphasizing openness and trust, balancing critical feedback with positive feedback, utilizing multiple feedback channel and finally employers should provide employees with flexibility when giving feedback among others. I will personally apologies for poor communication in my work place to my lecture, take the blame and try to illustrate what led to incidences using the above barriers to effective listening and finally promise him that such case will never happen again in future.
References
Salustri, J., 2020. 'The Fine Art Of Communicating In The Digital Age' By Salustri, John - Journal Of Property Management, Vol. 84, Issue 3, May-June 2019 | Online Research Library: Questia. [online] Questia.com. Available at: [Accessed 3 April 2020].