4 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators
I recently facilitated a webinar for the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) entitled ‘Developing Quality Workplace Relationships through Skilful Communication’. A key feature of the webinar was about 4 essential communication habits and how these are pivotal to the quality of our relationships, be that in the workplace or in our personal lives.
The 4 Habits are:
- Self-assessment of your communication style. Here I referred specifically to the My Styles Inventory I developed and how this can help people understand their own and others’ ways of communicating
- Empathic listening. I have written about this communication skill in previous blogs. It is good to remind ourselves that we can engage in ‘not really listening’ as Stephen Covey points out.
- Skilful questioning. To help us understand, to resolve conflict, to help other people shift their thinking & behavior.
- Strengths-based feedback. This topic made the webinar attendees think about the use of that word ‘but’ as a real deficit term when giving someone else feedback. Few people continuing listening to the feedback after the word ‘but’ has been used. The strengths-based model replaces it with ‘and’.