how to communicate effectively

Business Communication

How to Communicate Effectively

Ricardo Leiva

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

• Use the Paiboc questions to analyze your purpose, your audience and the situation.

• Purposes: What must this message do to solve the organizational problem? • List all your purposes. • Specify exactly what you want your reader to

know, think, or do. • Specify exactly what kind of image of yourself

and of your organization you want to project.

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

• Purposes come from you and your organization.

• Your audience determines how you achieve those purposes, but not what the purposes are.

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

• Audience: What characteristics of your readers are relevant for your message.• Who is my audience? • Why is my audience important? • What do I need to know about my

audience?

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

• Understanding your audience is fundamental to the success of any message.

• You need to adapt your message to fit the audience’s goals, interests, and needs.

• Good Bus Comm is audience-centered.

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

• What information must your message include? • Make a list.

• The information you need to give depends on your audience (well informed, less informed, etc.)

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

• What readers benefits can you use to support your position? • Brainstorm to develop reasons for your

decision• What is the logic behind your argument • Possible benefits to readers if they do

as you ask. • Identify at least five reader benefits.

• What is a benefit depends on your audience.

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

•What objections can you expect your readers to have? • Some negative elements can only be deemphasized. • Others can be overcome. • Be creative.

•Different audiences will have different attitudes.

I. PAIBOC QUESTIONS

•How will the context affect the reader’s response? •Think about:

•Your relationship to the reader•Morale in the organization•The economy•The time of the year

•People exist in a context.

I. KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE(S)

•What do I need to know about my audience?•Knowledge: You don’t know exactly what your audience knows. •They may not remember the old information when they receive the new message.


• Personality: If your primary audience is just one person, his or her personality is relevant.

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: four dimensions to identify people


• Introvert-Extravert: • Sensing-intuitive: Sensing types gather

information step-by-step through their senses. Intuitive types see relationships among ideas.

• Thinking-feeling: how someone makes decisions. Thinking types use objective logic to reach decisions. Feeling types make decisions that feel ‘right’.

• Judging-perceiving: the degree of certainty someone needs. Judging types like closure. Perceptive types like possibilities.


•Values and beliefs: • What are the organization’s goals? Making money? Serving customers and clients? • What does the organization value? Diversity or homogeneity? Creativity or following orders? • How do people get ahead? Are rewards based on seniority, education, being well-liked, or serving customers?• How formal are behavior, language, and dress?• You must know the rules of your organization


• Past behavior• How people have behaved in the past often predicts how they’ll behave in the future.

• Take the time to analyze your audience and to revise your draft with your analysis in mind. • You can adapt your message's strategy, organization, and style to meet the audience's needs.

I. ADAPTING YOUR MESSAGE TO YOUR AUDIENCE

Strategy

• Make the action as easy as possible.

• Protect the reader's ego.

• Decide how to balance logic and emotion, what details to use, and whether to use a hard-sell or soft-sell approach.

• Choose appeals and reader benefits that work for the specific audience.

• Emphasize positive aspects, decide how much information to include, and overcome obstacles.


•Organization

•Get to the point right away.

• Exceptions: • When we must persuade. • When we have bad news.

•Make the organizational pattern clear to the audience.


• Style• Use easy-to-understand words• Use a mixture of sentence lengths, and

paragraphs with topic sentences. • Avoid defensive or arrogant words. • Avoid words that have a negative reaction:

criminal, un-American, crazy, fundamentalist, liberal.

• Use the language that your audience knows best.

• Use conversational, not ‘academic’ language.


Document Design

• Use lists, headings, and a mix of paragraph lengths to create white space. • Respect the organizational culture.

Photographs and Visuals

• Use bias-free photographs. • Decide to be more informal or more formal: cartoons and photos of "high art."

I. HOW DO I REACH MY AUDIENCE(S)?

•Communication channels vary in:• Speed

• Accuracy of transmission

• Cost

• Number of messages carried

• Number of people reached

• Efficiency

• Ability to promote goodwill


•The bigger your audience, the more complicated channel choice becomes•Few channels reach everyone in your target audience. •Use multiple channels.


•Depending on your purposes, the audience, and the situation, one channel may be better than another.

•Use written messages to:• Present many specific details • Present extensive or complex data• Minimize undesirable emotions


•Messages on paper are more formal than e-mail messages. •E-mail messages are appropriate for routine messages to people you already know. •Paper is usually better for someone to whom you're writing for the first time.


•Use oral messages to: • Answer questions, resolve conflicts, and build consensus. • Use emotion to help persuade the audience. • Get immediate action or response. • Focus the audience's attention on specific points. • Modify a proposal that may not be acceptable in its original form


•Scheduled meetings and oral presentations are more formal than phone calls or stopping someone in the hall.

• Important messages should use more formal channels, whether they're oral or written.


•With oral and written messages you should: • Adapt the message to the specific audience. • Show the audience members how they benefit from the idea, policy, service, or product. • Overcome any objections the audience may have. • Use you-attitude and positive emphasis. • Use visuals to clarify or emphasize material. • Specify exactly what the audience should do.


•Different communities may prefer different channels for the same message •Computer scientists and librarians want the information online. •Faculty want the information on paper.•Maintenance workers want to get answers on voice mail.

I. POSITIVE EMPHASIS

• How do create positive emphasis? • Avoid negative words and words with

negative connotations. • Focus on what the reader can do rather than

on limitations. • Justify negative information by giving a

reason or linking it to a reader benefit. • Omit the negative if it is truly unimportant. • Put the negative information in the middle

and present it compactly.

I. EXAMPLES

• Be aware of the power implications of the words you use.

• “Thank you for your cooperation” • Generous coming from a superior

to a subordinate• Not appropriate in a message to

your superior.

I. EXAMPLES

• Different ways of asking for action: • Order (lowest politeness): Listen to me right

now• Polite order (mid-IeveI politeness): Listen to

me pIease • Indirect request (higher politeness): It is

assumed that students listen to teacher• Question (highest politeness): Would you be

please listen to me?

I. EXAMPLES

•Be more polite:• If you ask for something inconvenient to the reader• If it is more heIpful to you than to the reader.

•You need to be Iess polite if you ask for something small, routine, or to the reader's benefit. • It depends on your culture

I. EXAMPLES

•Lower politeness: To start the scheduling process, please describe your availability for meetings during the second week of the month.

•Higher politeness: Could you let me know what times you' d be free for a meeting the second week of the month?

I. EXAMPLES

•Higher levels of politeness may be unclear. •A question may seem like a request for information•You may respond: "No, I can’t." •In other cases, it will be an order, simply phrased in polite terms.

I. EXAMPLES

•Requests are more friendly with conversational language.

•Poor tone: Return the draft with any changes by next Tuesday.

•Better tone: Let me know by Tuesday whether you'd like any changes in the draft.

I. EXAMPLES

•When the stakes are low, be straightforward.

•Messages that “beat around the bush” sound pompous and defensive.

I. EXAMPLES

• Poor tone: Distribution of the low-fat plain granola may be limited in your area. May we suggest that you discuss this matter with your store manager.

• Better tone: Our low-fat granola is so popular that there isn't enough to go around. We're expanding production to meet the demand. Ask your store manager to keep putting in orders, so that your grocery is on the list of stores that will get supplies when they become available.

I. EXAMPLES

•Better tone: Store managers decide what to stock. If your store has stopped carrying our low-fat granola, the store manager has stopped ordering it. Talk to the manager. Managers try to meet customer needs, so if you say something you’re more likely to get what you want.

I. EXAMPLES

•When you must give bad news, consider hedging your statement. • Auditors rarely say directly that firms are using unacceptable accounting practices. • They use three strategies to be more diplomatic: • specifying the time (“currently, the records are quite

informal”)• limiting statements (“it appears,” “it seems”)• using impersonal statements that do not specify who

caused a problem or who will perform an action.

I. EXAMPLES

• What's the best way to apologize?

• When you are at fault, admit it forthrightly • Apologies may have legal implications• Some organizations prefer not to apology• Think about your audience and the

organizational culture• If the error is small, and you are correcting it,

no explicit apology is necessary

I. EXAMPLES

•Negative: I'm sorry the clerk did not credit your account properly.

•Better: Your statement has been corrected to include your payment of $263.75.

I. EXAMPLES

• If you’re not at fault, don’t apologize• Done everything you can and or it’s

not your problem, you are not at fault. • Include an explanation so the reader

knows you weren't negligent. • If the news is bad, put the explanation

first. • If you have good news for the reader,

put it before your explanation.

I. EXAMPLES

• Negative: I'm sorry that I could not answer your question sooner. I had to wait until the sales figures for the second quarter were in.

• Better (neutral or bad news): We needed the sales figures for the second quarter to answer your question. Now that they're in, I can tell you that ...

• Better (good: news): The new advertising campaign is a success. The sales figures for the second quarter are finally in, and they show that ...

I. EXAMPLES

• You-attitude:

• Negative: I'm sorry that the chairs will not be ready by August 25 as promised.

• Better: Due to a strike against the manufacturer, the desk chairs you ordered will not be ready until November. Do you want to keep that order, or would you like to look at the models available from other suppliers?

I. EXAMPLES

•When you apologize, do it early, briefly, and sincerely.

•Apologize only once, early in the message.

•Let the reader move on to other, more positive information.

I. EXAMPLES

• If you produced a big problem, you don't need to remember all the bad things that happened

•The reader know that

•Focus on what you have done to correct the situation

I. EXAMPLES

• If you haven’t produced a problem or you don’t know it, don't raise the issue at all.

• Negative: I'm sorry I didn’t answer your letter sooner. I hope that my delay hasn’t inconvenienced you.

• Better: I’m sorry I didn’t answer your letter sooner.