Communication is an activity, skill, and art that incorporates lessons learned across a wide spectrum of human knowledge. Perhaps the most time-honored form of communication is storytelling. We’ve told each other stories for ages to help make sense of our world, anticipate the future, and certainly to entertain ourselves. The art of storytelling draws on your understanding of yourself, your message, and how you communicate it to an audience that is simultaneously communicating back to you. Your anticipation, reaction, and adaptation to the process will determine how successfully you are able to communicate. You were not born knowing how to write or even how to talk—but in the process of growing up, you have undoubtedly learned how to tell, and how not tell, a story out loud and in writing.

Effective communication takes preparation, practice, and persistence. There are many ways to learn communication skills; the school of experience, or “hard knocks,” is one of them. But in the business environment, a “knock” (or lesson learned) may come at the expense of your credibility through a blown presentation to a client. The classroom environment, with a compilation of information and resources such as a text, can offer you a trial run where you get to try out new ideas and skills before you have to use them to communicate effectively to make a sale or form a new partnership. Listening to yourself, or perhaps the comments of others may help you reflect on new ways to present or perceive, thoughts, ideas and concepts. The net result is your growth; ultimately your ability to communicate in business will improve, opening more doors than you might anticipate.

Importance of Good Communication Skills

Communication is key to your success—in relationships, in the workplace, as a citizen of your country, and across your lifetime. Your ability to communicate comes from experience, and experience can be an effective teacher, but this text and the related business communication course will offer you a wealth of experiences gathered from professional speakers across their lifetimes. You can learn from the lessons they’ve learned and be a more effective communicator right out of the gate.

Business communication can be thought of as a problem-solving activity in which individuals may address the following questions:

• What is the situation?
• What are some possible communication strategies?
• What is the best course of action?
• What is the best way to design the chosen message?
• What is the best way to deliver the message?

In this book, we will examine this problem-solving process and help you learn to apply it in the kinds of situations you are likely to encounter over the course of your career.

Communication Influences Your Thinking about Yourself and Others

We all share a fundamental drive to communicate. Communication can be defined as the process of understanding and sharing meaning.^[1] You share meaning in what you say and how you say it, both in oral and written forms. If you could not communicate, what would life be like? A series of never-ending frustrations? Not being able to ask for what you need or even to understand the needs of others?

Being unable to communicate might even mean losing a part of yourself, for you communicate your self-concept—your sense of self and awareness of who you are—in many ways. Do you like to write? Do you find it easy to make a phone call to a stranger or to speak to a room full of people? Perhaps someone told you that you don’t speak clearly or your grammar needs improvement. Does that make you more or less likely to want to communicate? For some, it may be a positive challenge, while for others it may be discouraging. But in all cases, your ability to communicate is central to your self-concept.

Take a look at your clothes. What are the brands you are wearing? What do you think they say about you? Do you feel that certain styles of shoes, jewelry, tattoos, music, or even automobiles express who you are? Part of your self-concept may be that you express yourself through texting, or through writing longer documents like essays and research papers, or through the way you speak.

On the other side of the coin, your communications skills help you to understand others—not just their words, but also their tone of voice, their nonverbal gestures, or the format of their written documents provide you with clues about who they are and what their values and priorities may be. Active listening and reading are also part of being a successful communicator.

Communication Influences How You Learn

When you were an infant, you learned to talk over a period of many months. When you got older, you didn’t learn to ride a bike, drive a car, or even text a message on your cell phone in one brief moment. You need to begin the process of improving your speaking and writing with the frame of mind that it will require effort, persistence, and self-correction.

You learn to speak in public by first having conversations, then by answering questions and expressing your opinions in class, and finally by preparing and delivering a “stand-up” speech. Similarly, you learn to write by first learning to read, then by writing and learning to think critically. Your speaking and writing are reflections of your thoughts, experience, and education. Part of that combination is your level of experience listening to other speakers, reading documents and styles of writing, and studying formats similar to what you aim to produce.

As you study business communication, you may receive suggestions for improvement and clarification from speakers and writers more experienced than yourself. Take their suggestions as challenges to improve; don’t give up when your first speech or first draft does not communicate the message you intend. Stick with it until you get it right. Your success in communicating is a skill that applies to almost every field of work, and it makes a difference in your relationships with others.

Remember, luck is simply a combination of preparation and timing. You want to be prepared to communicate well when given the opportunity. Each time you do a good job, your success will bring more success.

Communication Represents You and Your Employer

You want to make a good first impression on your friends and family, instructors, and employer. They all want you to convey a positive image, as it reflects on them. In your career, you will represent your business or company in spoken and written form. Your professionalism and attention to detail will reflect positively on you and set you up for success.

In both oral and written situations, you will benefit from having the ability to communicate clearly. These are skills you will use for the rest of your life. Positive improvements in these skills will have a positive impact on your relationships, your prospects for employment, and your ability to make a difference in the world.

Communication Skills Are Desired by Business and Industry

Oral and written communication proficiencies are consistently ranked in the top ten desirable skills by employer surveys year after year. In fact, high-powered business executives sometimes hire consultants to coach them in sharpening their communication skills. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the following are the top five personal qualities or skills potential employers seek:^[2]

1. Communication skills (verbal and written)
2. Strong work ethic
3. Teamwork skills (works well with others, group communication)
4. Initiative
5. Analytical skills

Knowing this, you can see that one way for you to be successful and increase your promotion potential is to increase your abilities to speak and write effectively. An individual with excellent communication skills is an asset to every organization. No matter what career you plan to pursue, learning to express yourself professionally in speech and in writing will help you get there.

What is Communication?

Many theories have been proposed to describe, predict, and understand the behaviors and phenomena of which communication consists. When it comes to communicating in business, we are often less interested in theory than in making sure our communications generate the desired results. But in order to achieve results, it can be valuable to understand what communication is and how it works. All communication is composed of three parts that make a whole: sharing, understanding, and meaning.

Sharing means doing something together with one or more person(s). In communication, sharing occurs when you convey thoughts, feelings, ideas, or insights to others. You also share with yourself (a process called intrapersonal communication) when you bring ideas to consciousness, ponder how you feel about something, figure out the solution to a problem, or have a classic “Aha!” moment when something becomes clear.

The second keyword is understanding. “To understand is to perceive, to interpret, and to relate our perception and interpretation to what we already know.”^[3] Understanding the words and the concepts or objects they refer to is an important part of the communication process.

Finally, meaning is what you share through communication. For example, by looking at the context of a word, and by asking questions, you can discover the shared meaning of the word and better understand the message.

Watch the following video to review types of communication.^[4] Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

• Interpersonal communication is any message exchanged between two or more people.
• Written communication is any message using the written word.
• Verbal, or oral, communication is any message conveyed through speech.
• Nonverbal communication is any message inferred through observation of another person.

Communications Process: Encoding and Decoding

In basic terms, humans communicate through a process of encoding and decoding. The encoder is the person who develops and sends the message. As represented in Figure 1.1 below, the encoder must determine how the message will be received by the audience, and make adjustments so the message is received the way they want it to be received.

Encoding is the process of turning thoughts into communication. The encoder uses a ‘medium’ to send the message — a phone call, email, text message, face-to-face meeting, or other communication tools. The level of conscious thought that goes into encoding messages may vary. The encoder should also take into account any ‘noise’ that might interfere with their message, such as other messages, distractions, or influences.

The audience then ‘decodes’, or interprets, the message for themselves. Decoding is the process of turning communication into thoughts. For example, you may realize you’re hungry and encode the following message to send to your roommate: “I’m hungry. Do you want to get pizza tonight?” As your roommate receives the message, they decode your communication and turn it back into thoughts to make meaning.

Of course, you don’t just communicate verbally—you have various options, or channels, for communication. Encoded messages are sent through a channel, or a sensory route, on which a message travels to the receiver for decoding. While communication can be sent and received using any sensory route (sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound), most communication occurs through visual (sight) and/or auditory (sound) channels. If your roommate has headphones on and is engrossed in a video game, you may need to get their attention by waving your hands before you can ask them about dinner.

The transmission model of communication describes communication as a linear, one-way process in which a sender intentionally transmits a message to a receiver.^[5] This model focuses on the sender and message within a communication encounter. Although the receiver is included in the model, this role is viewed as more of a target or endpoint rather than part of an ongoing process. You are left to presume that the receiver either successfully receives and understands the message or does not. Think of how a radio message is sent from a person in the radio studio to you listening in your car. The sender is the radio announcer who encodes a verbal message that is transmitted by a radio tower through electromagnetic waves (the channel) and eventually reaches your (the receiver’s) ears via an antenna and speakers in order to be decoded. The radio announcer doesn’t really know if you receive their message or not, but if the equipment is working and the channel is free of static, then there is a good chance that the message was successfully received.

The interaction model of communication describes communication as a process in which participants alternate positions as sender and receiver and generate meaning by sending messages and receiving feedback within physical and psychological contexts.^[6] Rather than illustrating communication as a linear, one-way process, the interaction model incorporates feedback, which makes communication a more interactive, two-way process. Feedback includes messages sent in response to other messages. For example, your instructor may respond to a point you raise during class discussion or you may point to the sofa when your roommate asks you where the remote control is. The inclusion of a feedback loop also leads to a more complex understanding of the roles of participants in a communication encounter. Rather than having one sender, one message, and one receiver, this model has two sender-receivers who exchange messages. Each participant alternates roles as sender and receiver in order to keep a communication encounter going. Although this seems like a perceptible and deliberate process, you alternate between the roles of sender and receiver very quickly and often without conscious thought.

The transaction model of communication describes communication as a process in which communicators generate social realities within social, relational, and cultural contexts. In this model, you don’t just communicate to exchange messages; you communicate to create relationships, form intercultural alliances, shape your self-concepts, and engage with others in dialogue to create communities. In short, you don’t communicate about your realities; communication helps to construct your realities (and the realities of others).

The roles of sender and receiver in the transaction model of communication differ significantly from the other models. Instead of labelling participants as senders and receivers, the people in a communication encounter are referred to as communicators. Unlike the interaction model, which suggests that participants alternate positions as sender and receiver, the transaction model suggests that you are simultaneously a sender and a receiver. For example, when meeting a new friend, you send verbal messages about your interests and background, your companion reacts nonverbally. You don’t wait until you are done sending your verbal message to start receiving and decoding the nonverbal messages of your new friend. Instead, you are simultaneously sending your verbal message and receiving your friend’s nonverbal messages. This is an important addition to the model because it allows you to understand how you are able to adapt your communication—for example, adapting a verbal message—in the middle of sending it based on the communication you are simultaneously receiving from your communication partner.

Eight Essential Components of Communication

The communication process can be broken down into a series of eight essential components, each of which serves an integral function in the overall process:

1. Source
2. Message
3. Channel
4. Receiver
5. Feedback
6. Environment
7. Context
8. Interference

Source

The source imagines, creates, and sends the message. The source encodes the message by choosing just the right order or the best words to convey the intended meaning and presents or sends the information to the audience (receiver). By watching for the audience’s reaction, the source perceives how well they received the message and responds with clarification or supporting information.

Message

“The message is the stimulus or meaning produced by the source for the receiver or audience.”^[7] The message brings together words to convey meaning but is also about how it’s conveyed — through nonverbal cues, organization, grammar, style, and other elements.

Channel

“The channel is the way in which a message or messages travel between source and receiver.”^[8] Spoken channels include face-to-face conversations, speeches, phone conversations and voicemail messages, radio, public address systems, and Skype. Written channels include letters, memorandums, purchase orders, invoices, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, email, text messages, tweets, and so forth.

Receiver

“The receiver receives the message from the source, analyzing and interpreting the message in ways both intended and unintended by the source.”^[9]

Feedback

When you respond to the source, intentionally or unintentionally, you are giving feedback. Feedback is composed of messages the receiver sends back to the source. Verbal or nonverbal, all these feedback signals allow the source to see how well, how accurately (or how poorly and inaccurately) the message was received.^[10]

Environment

“The environment is the atmosphere, physical and psychological, where you send and receive messages.”^[11] Surroundings, people, animals, technology, can all influence your communication.

Context

“The context of the communication interaction involves the setting, scene, and expectations of the individuals involved.”^[12] A professional communication context may involve business suits (environmental cues) that directly or indirectly influence expectations of language and behavior among the participants.

Interference

Interference, also called noise, can come from any source. “Interference is anything that blocks or changes the source’s intended meaning of the message.”^[13] This can be external or internal/psychological. Noise interferes with normal encoding and decoding of the message carried by the channel between source and receiver.

Your Responsibilities as a Communicator – 4 tips

Whenever you speak or write in a business environment, you have certain responsibilities to your audience, your employer, and your profession. Your audience comes to you with an inherent set of expectations that is your responsibility to fulfill. The specific expectations may change given the context or environment, but two central ideas will remain: be prepared, and be ethical.

Preparation

Being prepared means that you have selected a topic appropriate to your audience, gathered enough information to cover the topic well, put your information into a logical sequence, and considered how best to present it.

Organization

Being organized involves the steps or points that lead your communication to a conclusion. Once you’ve invested time in researching your topic, you will want to narrow your focus to a few key points and consider how you’ll present them. You also need to consider how to link your main points together for your audience so they can follow your message from point to point.

Clarity

You need to have a clear idea in your mind of what you want to say before you can say it clearly to someone else. It involves considering your audience, as you will want to choose words and phrases they understand and avoid jargon or slang that may be unfamiliar to them. Clarity also involves presentation and appropriate use of technology.

Conciseness

Concise means to be brief and to the point. In most business communications you are expected to ‘get down to business’ right away. Being prepared includes being able to state your points clearly and support them with trustworthy evidence in a relatively straightforward, linear way. Be concise in your choice of words, organization, and even visual aids. Being concise also involves being sensitive to time constraints. Be prepared to be punctual and adhere to deadlines or time limits. Some cultures also have a less strict interpretation of time schedules and punctuality. While it is important to recognize that different cultures have different expectations, the general rule holds true that good business communication does not waste words or time.

Ethics in Communication

Communicating ethically involves being egalitarian, respectful, and trustworthy—overall, practicing the “golden rule” of treating your audience the way you would want to be treated. Communication can move communities, influence cultures, and change history. It can motivate people to take a stand, consider an argument, or purchase a product. The degree to which you consider both the common good and fundamental principles you hold to be true when crafting your message directly relates to how your message will affect others.

The Ethical Communicator Is Egalitarian

The word “egalitarian” comes from the root “equal.” To be egalitarian is to believe in basic equality: that all people should share equally in the benefits and burdens of a society. It means that everyone is entitled to the same respect, expectations, access to information, and rewards of participation in a group. To communicate in an egalitarian manner, speak and write in a way that is comprehensible and relevant to all your listeners or readers, not just those who are ‘like you’ in terms of age, gender, race or ethnicity, or other characteristics. In business, an effective communicator seeks to unify the audience by using ideas and language that are appropriate for all the message’s readers or listeners.

The Ethical Communicator Is Respectful

People are influenced by emotions as well as logic. The ethical communicator will be passionate and enthusiastic without being disrespectful. Losing one’s temper and being abusive are generally regarded as showing a lack of professionalism (and could even involve legal consequences for you or your employer). When you disagree strongly with a coworker, feel deeply annoyed with a difficult customer, or find serious fault with a competitor’s product, it is important to express such sentiments respectfully.

The Ethical Communicator Is Trustworthy

Trust is a key component in communication, and this is especially true in business. Your goal as a communicator is to build a healthy relationship with your audience and to do that you must show them how they can trust you and why the information you are about to share with them is believable. Your audience will expect that what you say is the truth as you understand it. This means that you have not intentionally omitted, deleted, or taken information out of context simply to prove your points. They will listen to what you say and how you say it, but also to what you don’t say or do. Being worthy of trust is something you earn with an audience. Many wise people have observed that trust is hard to build but easy to lose.

The “Golden Rule”

When in doubt, remember the “golden rule,” which is to treat others the way you would like to be treated. In all its many forms, the golden rule incorporates human kindness, cooperation, and reciprocity across cultures, languages, backgrounds, ad interests. Regardless of where you travel, with whom you communicate or what your audience is like, remember how you would feel if you were on the receiving end of your communication and act accordingly.

Soft Skills

Your professional success depends on having advanced people (a.k.a. “soft”) skills because most jobs require you to talk to people. Key among these is skill in speaking to and conversing with others in person. Retail sales, for instance, requires the ability to listen carefully to what a customer says they want and “read” their nonverbals to determine what exactly to say and how to say it in order to close the deal with a purchase. Aside from a handful of jobs with minimal human interaction,^[14] the vast majority require advanced soft skills to deal effectively with customers or clients, coworkers, managers, and other stakeholders. Though we’re not born with them, everyone has the capacity to learn, develop, practice, and apply verbal and nonverbal skills to benefit those audiences, their company as a whole, and themselves.

You’ve certainly participated in countless conversations throughout your life, and the process of how to conduct a conversation may seem so obvious that it needs no explanation. Still, you can tell that some are better than others at conversation and some argue that technology is preventing many from developing these skills, so it’s worth breaking down how an effective communicator approaches the art of conversation. A skilled professional knows when to speak, when to go silent and listen, as well as when to stop speaking before the audience stops listening. First, however, it’s worth examining the voice as the pre-eminent communication channel, how to refine our interpersonal skills in the face of the stunting effects of problem technology use, and how to use voice-only technology effectively.

Verbal Communication and Conversation Topics

Before diving into these topics, however, let’s review what face-to-face meetings are all about according to the table below.

Channel: In-person Conversation and Meetings

Your Voice as Your Most Essential Communication Tool

We had hundreds of thousands of years to develop our voice as a communication tool until we added writing to the channel mix relatively recently about 5,000 years ago. Your voice continues to enjoy a privileged place in your communication toolbox, being the first one you use in your infancy when you cry for food and attention the moment you’re born. Since then, you’ve developed richly expressive verbal skills that make your voice your most essential communication tool.

Your voice has qualities that cannot be communicated in written form, and you use these to your advantage when interacting with colleagues. If you’re sending a general informative message to all employees, an email may serve you well, but if you’re honoring an employee for receiving an industry award, your voice conveys your heartfelt congratulations much better than the written word. When trying to make a point very clearly and emphatically, slowing down your pace so that the listener focuses on each word, raising your volume to jolt the listener into paying closer attention, and dropping your pitch to sound more authoritative all have advantages over using all-caps, bold, italics, and/or underlining in an email, which altogether can look angry rather than emphatic. For sheer expressiveness and precision in communicating meaning, your voice is your go-to communication tool.

How your voice quality, volume, and pitch affect your listener’s understanding of the message’s the content is instrumental especially for persuasive messages. Delivering a message with a happy and enthusiastic tone will have a much different impact than serious or sad tones. In most business situations, it is appropriate to speak with some level of formality, yet avoid sounding stilted or arrogant. Your voice volume should be normal but ensure your listeners can hear you. If your audience includes English learners, speaking louder and shouting don’t help them understand you any better compared with accessible word choices delivered in a normal tone. Use simple words and short, active-voice sentences of 10-to-20 words, as well as avoid idioms (figures of speech) that don’t translate literally. Pitch refers to the frequency of your voice, which you can raise or lower for effect. A pleasant, natural voice will have some variation in pitch—raised for lighthearted quips and lower for serious statements—to communicate nuances of meaning and keep the listener engaged. A speaker with the flat pitch of a robotic-sounding monotone voice tends to bore their listeners because they sound bored themselves. Modulating your volume and pitch helps communicate the emotional spin of your messages, making the spoken communication channel an incredibly rich one.

Why, then, is the voice falling into disuse? Why are so many people afraid of using their voice for public speaking and even shy away from one-on-one interaction? Though you probably recognize the importance of literacy and numeracy to your academic and professional success, your schooling probably hasn’t impressed upon you the importance of oracy, and your reliance on writing technology such as texting on your smartphone hasn’t helped either. If you’re encountering this word for the first time, oracy is skill in speaking and reasoning aloud, such as using evidence to make a persuasive argument, as well as collaborative teamwork through conversation. This is what employers expect employees to do, but there’s little direct focus on it in school curriculum, and hence some anxiety around group speaking into the high-school and college years.^[15][16] For the sake of your future employability, then, let’s focus on Conversation 101 by breaking down how we achieve goals through dialogue.

The Five Parts of Conversations

Conversation is one of the main ways we interact in the business environment and yet it’s highly susceptible to miscommunication and misunderstandings. Our everyday familiarity with conversations often makes us blind to the subtle changes that take place during the course of a conversation. Examining it will help you to consider its components, predict the next turn, anticipate an opening or closing, and make you a better conversationalist. Steven Beebe, Susan Beebe, and Mark Redmond break conversation down into five stages that we will adapt here for our discussion.^[17]

Initiation

As the first stage of conversation, initiation requires you to be open to interact and perhaps use small talk to prime yourselves for the intended topic. You may communicate openness with nonverbal signals such as approaching someone, stopping four feet away, facing them, making eye contact, and smiling. When a degree of unfamiliarity comes between the two speakers, small talk helps “break the ice” to clear a path toward the topic at hand. Asking how they’re doing, a casual reference to the weather (“Nice day, eh?”) or a brief back-and-forth about the weekend requires someone to begin the exchange. For the very shy, this may trigger some anxiety whereas extraverts delight in this stage, and “ambiverts” (e.g., natural introverts who have learned to play the extravert game) do it in recognition of its necessity.^[18] If status and hierarchical relationships are a factor, cultural norms may determine who speaks when. Usually, however, initiation just requires a willingness to engage in conversation and a purpose—something to talk about after clearing the small-talk hurdle.

Preview

The preview (a.k.a. “feedforward”) verbally or nonverbally indicates the conversation topic. A word or two in the subject line of an email performs the same job, but in conversation this can be done as easily as just summarizing the topic in a few words (e.g., Can I ask you about how I can minimize my tax liability? or Let’s talk about some basic heavy-equipment safety guidelines before we get started). People are naturally curious and also seek certainty, so a preview conveniently reduces uncertainty by taking a direct approach to signal the speaker’s intent.

A general reference to a topic may also approach a topic indirectly, allowing the recipient to either pick up on the topic and to engage in the discussion or to redirect the conversation away from a topic they aren’t ready to talk about. For instance, a manager needing to talk to an employee about being late for work too often might start off by saying, “That was some nightmare traffic on the highway this morning, eh?” Depending on the employee’s response, the manager could then say what they do to get to work on time, suggesting that the employee should do the same. To reinforce the point, the manager could finally explain that continuing to arrive late will affect the employee’s job security. The savvy communicator would be able to infer from the initial question about traffic where the manager’s going with this line of questioning and may even begin to offer up a convincing excuse for why they’re late and suggest a compromise such as a plan to stay later or make up the lost hours by working from home on the weekend.

Business

You get down to business when you reinforce the goal orientation of the conversation. In workplace communication, we often have a specific goal or series of points to address, but we can’t lose sight of the relationship messages within the discussion of content. You may signal to your conversation partner that you have three points you need to cover, much like outlining an agenda at a meeting. This may sound formal at first, but in listening to casual conversations, you’ll often find a natural but unacknowledged list of subtopics leading to a central point where the conversational partners arrive. By clearly articulating the main points, however, you outline the conversation’s parameters to keep it efficiently on track rather than prone to digress from the main point.

Feedback

Similar to the preview stage, this feedback allows speakers to clarify, restate, or discuss the talking points to arrive at mutual understanding. In some cultures the points and their feedback may recycle several times, which may sound repetitious in the West where speakers typically prefer to get to the point and move quickly to the conclusion once they’ve achieved understanding. If so, then a simple “Are we good?” might be all that’s necessary at the feedback stage. Communication across cultures, on the other hand, may require additional cycles of statement and restatement to ensure understanding, as well as reinforcement of the speakers’ relationship. Time may be money in some cultures, but spending time is a sign of respect in cultures with rigid social hierarchies. The feedback stage offers an opportunity to make sure the information exchange was successful the first time. Failure to attend to this stage can lead to the need for additional interactions, reducing efficiency over time.

Closing

Accepting feedback on both sides of the conversation often signals the transition to the conversation’s conclusion. Closings mirror the initiation stage in that they can be signaled verbally (e.g., “Okay, thanks! Bye”) or nonverbally, such as stepping back and turning your feet and body in the direction of where you’re about to go next in preparation to disengage while still facing and speaking with the other.

Sometimes a speaker introduces new information in the conclusion, which can start the process all over again. If words like “in conclusion” or “okay, one last thing” are used, a set of expectations is now at play and the listener expects a conclusion in the very near future. If the speaker continues to recycle at this point, the listener’s patience will be stretched and frustration sets in. They will have mentally shifted to the next order of business, so this transition must be negotiated successfully to maintain good relations between speakers. Mentioning a time, date, or place for future communication clearly signals that the conversation, although currently concluded, will continue later. “I’m just heading to a meeting right now but I’ll catch you back on the fifth floor tomorrow afternoon, K?” for instance, allows you to respectfully disengage.^[19]

Improving Your Conversation Skills in the Smartphone Era

If you prefer to text rather than talk to people most of the time because that’s how you’ve (and everyone else has) been doing it throughout high school and even in college, you’ll probably find yourself at a disadvantage when entering the workforce. The reason is twofold: (1) When you enter the working world, you join several generations of adults who grew up without smartphones and therefore tend to prefer talking over texting because it’s a tried, tested, and true way to efficiently communicate understanding. Managers, coworkers, customers, and other stakeholders come with high expectations for the quality of conversational skill in the people they interact with, and have little patience for those who are years behind where they should be in basic oracy. (2) You could be addicted to technology, which negatively affects your ability to interact with people in person according to a growing body of research.^[20][21][22] Why talk to people when sending a text is just so easy and comfortable?

In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, psychologist Sherry Turkle draws on clinical research to show how profoundly dissatisfied with ourselves and each other technology has made us. Smartphones and social media apps promise to connect us more but effectively isolate us. After a decade of smartphone use, teenagers whose 10-hour-per-day addiction to screens, preference for texting over talking, and habit of filling every idle moment with media consumption arrive at college with under-developed skills in conversation, empathy, patience, and self-reflection.^[23] When teens use technology to shield themselves from the countless awkward, embarrassing, and regrettable in-person interactions that, by a slow learning process, lead eventually to social competence and confidence, they enter the workforce in a state of arrested development.^[24] “Adulting” becomes a terrifying prospect compared with the protective comfort zone of the screen. Turkle’s guide offers an antidote to the socially stunting effects of technology.

Motivational speaker Simon Sinek presents similar advice to Millennials while sympathizing with them for the “bad hand” they were dealt by a “failed parenting strategy” that raised unrealistic expectations of fulfillment in a whole generation. He similarly points the blame at mobile devices for the short-term dopamine-hit micro-reward feedback-loop pleasures they offer at the expense of the long-term development of soft skills. The enchantment of social media is that it offers users an easy out from the difficult learning experiences that develop the social coping mechanisms helping them through the trials of adolescence. The devices hook you with instant gratification: “Everything you want you can have instantaneously,” he says, “except job satisfaction and strength of relationships. There ain’t no app for that. They are slow, meandering, uncomfortable, messy processes. . . . What this young generation needs to learn is patience—that some things that really matter like love or job fulfillment, joy, love of life, self-confidence, a skill set—all of these things take time. . . . The overall journey is arduous and long and difficult.”^[25]

Sinek advocates for better leadership in business and industry to teach Millennials the social skills they were robbed of by constant access to addictive technology.

One practical solution Sinek offers is banning cell phones in meeting rooms to remove the temptation of using them rather than conversing with colleagues. He argues that relationships and trust are built especially through small talk about work and life before and after meetings. Additionally, innovation happens in idle moments when you notice opportunities in the world—opportunities you’re blind to when your attention is absorbed by a little screen. “We have to create mechanisms where we allow for those little innocuous interactions to happen.”^[26] Rather than a quick fix, steady consistency in developing social skills is necessary to bring Millennials up to speed in oracy.

If anything in the above paragraphs sounds true to life, the onus rests largely on you to improve your conversation skills with all the advice that is available (ironically) on the very devices in question. For instance, we can draw on a very accessible TED Talk by Celeste Headlee, a talk-radio host and author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. We’ll adapt her well-viewed speech for our own purposes below and build on them with a few points of our own.^[27]

1. Be present: Devote your undivided attention to the person you’re speaking with and don’t multitask. You won’t have to pretend to pay attention by nodding and making eye contact if you’re doing that anyway by actually paying attention. The worst offenders are those to whip out their phone and engage with it rather than the people around them, called “phubbing” (for “phone snubbing”).^[28]Though you may feel that you can get away with phubbing in your college classes by discreetly hiding your cell phone under your desk, your instructor knows exactly what you’re doing when all your attention is on your lap. The rudeness of it will likely get you slightly blacklisted—or fully blacklisted if you do it too much.
2. Be prepared to learn: A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue where you simply unload your opinion on someone and receive nothing in return except for the satisfaction of dominating them with it. In certain situations, such as a TED Talk itself, you give up your right to speak because of the faith that you’ll learn much more by listening to a wise speaker who needs time to get their points across.
3. Ask open-ended questions: The more vague your questions are (starting with the 5 Ws + H), the more freedom you give your conversation partner to answer on their own terms, whereas very specific questions limit the possible answers. If you ask “How did that make you feel?” for instance, you’ll get a more expressive answer than if you limited your speaker to a yes or no answer with a question like “Did that make you happy?”
4. Go with the flow: Respond to your conversation partner’s main points rather than with some digressive story you were reminded of by one of their minor points. When you respond in that way, it reveals that you haven’t been listening past the part that inspired the barely relevant thing you feel contributes to the conversation, though it really doesn’t move the conversation along so much as derail it.
5. Admit to not knowing: Make your confession of ignorance an opportunity to learn rather than claim to know something you don’t.
6. Honor the uniqueness of their experience: When the speaker relates something that happened to them, resist the urge to make it about you by equating their experience with yours. If they’re talking about grieving a death in the family, for instance, don’t dishonor that information share by responding with how you felt when your dog died. It’s not the same.
7. Cut yourself off before repeating yourself: If you have only one point to make, “hit it and quit it” rather than spin your wheels saying the same thing over and over, even if you change the words.
8. Stay out of the weeds: Rather than struggle to offer up all the details (the names, places, dates, etc.) and digress on minutiae, focus on your main points.
9. Listen: A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue, and therefore requires that you actively pay attention to what the speaker says in order to understand it rather than to merely reply to it.
10. Be brief: People are busy and have things to do, so if your conversation detains them for longer than they have time for, you will stretch their patience. As Headlee says, “A good conversation is like a miniskirt: short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject.”^[29]

Headlee concludes that these tips are all variations on being interested in what people have to teach you. If you add the following to Headlee’s advice, you stand a good chance of improving your conversation skills.

Mirror the Speaker

You may have occasionally caught yourself automatically imitating your conversation partner’s posture, facial expression, and manner of speaking. When they look relaxed or lean in, talk slow because they’re calm or talk fast because they’re in a rush, or widen their eyes with excitement, you follow suit in every case. Coined the “chameleon effect” by psychologists, mirroring is unconscious physical behavior motivated by our desire to fit in so our conversation partner identifies with and likes us.^[30] It supports the cliché that imitation is the highest form of flattery, and happens not only for romantic partners but also for good friends and even workplace colleagues.

Though it happens unconsciously, mirroring deliberately has been found to be especially effective as a sales technique and in job interviews, though only if the person being imitated doesn’t notice the imitator doing it. If you can be subtle and natural about it, intentional mirroring forces you to read your conversation partner’s verbal and nonverbal messages closely. Done effectively, mirroring benefits both speakers by building the trust and rapport necessary to collaborate effectively or close a deal^[31].

Correctly Pronounce Words and Names

Though it’s difficult for learners of English to get the hang of it, take care to carefully pronounce your words. State them the way native English speaker tend to speak them, especially those whose job is to speak, such as radio hosts and actors. An excellent strategy is to watch movies with subtitles to associate the written words with those heard, and then to imitate the pronunciation. When you get more familiar with the language, you can move up to listening to the radio, such as the CBC, and continue to work on the accent at a normal conversational pace without subtitles.

Even native English speakers should be careful with pronunciation, especially with words they rarely hear, if ever. Mispronunciation can negatively impact your reputation or perceived credibility. Instead of using complicated words that may trip you up, choose a simple phrase if you can, or learn to pronounce the word correctly before using it in a formal interactive setting (University of Minnesota Libraries, 2015, 19.4).^[32] If you think you’ll stumble over a word like archipelago, for instance, just use a synonymous phrase such as “island chain.”

The importance of pronunciation is nowhere more important than with people’s names. Some take offense to their name being mispronounced, and especially with their name being confused with a different but similar name. If someone’s name looks unpronounceable on paper, simply asking them how they prefer their name to be pronounced is better than confidently mispronouncing it.

Be careful also with where stresses go when pronouncing words. Every word with more than one syllable has stressed and unstressed syllables. We pronounce the word syllable, for instance, by stressing the first syllable (SIH)—i.e., raising our volume slightly and spending a little longer enunciating it compared with the two following unstressed syllables (lah-bul), which we enunciate quicker and quieter. Stressing the middle syllable (sih-LAH-bul) would sound strange.

Be especially careful pronouncing words you’ve only seen in writing. If you’ve only ever read the fancy word superfluous, for instance, but never heard anyone say it aloud, you’d sound slightly silly pronouncing it in conversation by stressing the first syllable (SOO-per-FLOO-us) as you normally would when pronouncing the word super. Many online dictionaries such as Dictionary.com feature an audio button you can click on to hear the word pronounced correctly. In the case of superfluous, you can hear it pronounced properly with the stress on per with the other three syllables unstressed (soo-PER-floo-us).

Treat Conversations Like Volley Sports

A conversation isn’t a monologue where you fire words at a wall until you have nothing left to say. It’s more like a game of volleyball, tennis, or ping-pong where possession of the speech right is exchanged back and forth. If it’s a friendly game, the objective is to volley words for as long as it’s fun or productive. This may mean asking a good question, which lobs the speech over the net to your conversation partner. They answer and can either ask you a feedback question in return or you can respond to their answer with a statement. Every time you speak, you must set up your conversation partner to be able to respond with either a statement or question, and expect them to do the same. Conversations would be frustrating if all the other person did was either spike the ball repeatedly to score points against you so that you could never touch it (i.e., delivered a monologue where you couldn’t get a word in edgewise), or just bounced the ball out of bounds every time you volleyed it straight to them—i.e., answered in a way that stalled the conversation, such as with one-word answers to your questions or bizarre statements you don’t know how to respond to. A conversation must be a dynamic process where both sides make a determined, concerted effort to keep it going until the objective has been reached or the clock runs down.

Telephone and Voicemail

The simplest form of audio-only conversation—i.e., talk stripped of all nonverbals—is a telephone call. A phone call is advantageous whenever you need the live volley of conversation with someone to sort out details in a timely manner, but are too distant from them physically to do it in person. Some make the mistake of choosing written channels like email or text, drawing out the communication process over hours or days, to discuss matters that would take mere seconds or minutes by phone. As long as you don’t need details permanently recorded in writing, phone is an expedient channel to discuss details for any busy professional.

Though you’ve probably talked on the phone countless times throughout your life, you may not yet have had the chance to do so professionally where the expectations for competence are much higher than in social or family contexts—so much so that some executives hire professional voice coaches to help them increase their effectiveness in phone communication. The importance of audio communication in business and industry has increased with the availability of conference calls, voice over internet protocol (VoIP), voice-activated electronic menus, and voice-to-text dictation software such as that in the Gboard (Google keyboard) app for smartphones. We’ll examine below how to improve your phone game in an age where many prefer to text rather than call. First, however, let’s review what the telephone and its modern adaptations are all about according to the table below.

Channel: Telephone and Its Adaptations

Your Voice on the Phone

When you lack the nonverbal context of your conversation partner being able to see how you say what you say, take pains to ensure that your voice accurately communicates your message. Without nonverbals, your choice of words and how you say them, including spacing or pausing, pace, rhythm, articulation, and pronunciation are more relevant than when you talk in person. Consider these five points:

1. Speak slowly and articulate your words clearly. You don’t have to slow down your normal pattern of speech much, but each word needs time and space to be understood or else the listener may hear words running together, losing meaning and creating opportunities for misunderstanding. For instance, numbers such as “18” may sound like “80” and vice versa if you’re speaking too quickly and have an accent, which could lead to disaster if you’re, say, discussing price in a six-figure real estate deal.
2. Use vivid terms to create interest and communicate descriptions. When using the phone to deliver bad news, talking on the phone or producing an audio recording lacks an interpersonal context with the accompanying nonverbal messages. Unless you use vivid language and crisp, clear descriptions, your audience will be left to sort it out for themselves. They may create mental images that don’t reflect your intended meanings and lead to miscommunication.
3. Be specific. Don’t assume that they will catch your specific information the first time. Repeat as necessary, especially addresses and phone numbers.
4. Show consideration for others by keeping your phone conversations private. Avoid calls in a crowded elevator, for instance.
5. Silence cell phones and other devices when in a meeting or eating with colleagues. Recall Simon Sinek’s explanation for why this is important.^[33]

As the response from the receiver to the sender, feedback is also an essential element of phone conversations. Taking turns in the conversation can sometimes be awkward when you can’t see when your conversation partner is about to speak. With time and practice, each “speaker’s own natural, comfortable, expressive repertoire will surface.”^[34]

Telephone Conversation Organization

Recall from above that conversations follow a predictable five-part pattern:

1. Opening
2. Preview
3. Business (a.k.a. talking points)
4. Feedback
5. Closing

The table below illustrates what this would sound like in a phone conversation.

Five-stage Telephone Conversation

Leaving and Receiving Voicemail

When you phone someone but are sent to voicemail because they don’t pick up, switching to monologue mode means that you can only get as far as the preview stage of the conversation structure outlined above. You’d still open by saying hello, your full name, and company. The limit on how much recording time you have (30 seconds? 60?—you may not know) and absence of feedback from the listener, however, means that you can really only say what the call is about in concise, clear terms. A long, rambling voice mail message may be cut off and you may not even know it, as well as increases the possibility for misunderstandings without being present to clarify based on your listener’s responses. Anything that needs discussion must be saved for the actual conversation, especially anything of a sensitive nature. Recording confidential information is potentially dangerous to you and others.

Add your contact information, even if you think the person already knows your phone number, and say it twice slowly so that the listener has additional time to get a pen and paper if they’re still looking for them the first time you say it. Imagining you were writing down your phone number as you recite it will help you deliver it at a listener-friendly speed (University of Minnesota Libraries, 2015, 15.2).^[35] Precise pronunciation is crucial because “60” and “16” or “90” and “19” may sound the same in a strong accent.

Be prepared to receive voicemail by recording a professional-sounding call-back message that begins after about 4-5 rings. Top professionals record a new one every morning when they begin work and include the date in it. They can thus state what their availability is throughout the day and assure the listener how quickly to expect a call back. When you receive a voicemail, return the call as soon as possible. The 24-hour rule of email doesn’t apply with voicemail because the person who called you chose this channel deliberately expecting to discuss something with you “live” in a timely manner. With so many channels available, using the phone implies a sense of urgency.

Content Attribution

This chapter contains content from the following sources:

Chapter 1: Effective Business Communication by Venecia Williams from Fundamentals of Business Communication, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), except where otherwise noted.

Section 13.1 “Verbal Communication and Conversation” by Jordan Smith et al. in Chapter 13: Interpersonal Communication from NSCC Communication Skills For Trades, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), except where otherwise noted; which is a derivative of Chapter 10, Section 1 from Professional Communications by Jordan Smith; Melissa Ashman; eCampusOntario; Brian Dunphy; and Andrew Stracuzzi, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 except where otherwise noted.

References

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