Katalina King's List: Communication Training

• • Being right ;)
• Communication Freezers
• Gender Differences in Communication
• Telling the other person what to do:
• Many words in the English language mean different things to different people.
•                                                  

  Consensus	Distinctiveness	Consistency	Type of attribution
  High consensus	High distinctiveness	Low consistency	External
  Everyone else behaves the same way.	This person does not usually behave this way in different situations.	This person does not usually behave this way in this situation.
  Low consensus	Low distinctiveness	High consistency	Internal
  No one else behaves the same way.	This person usually behaves this way in different situations.	Every time this person is in this situation, he or she acts the same way.

• OB Toolbox: Tips for Reducing Miscommunication-by-Jargon

   
   
  • Know your audience. If they weren’t sitting beside you in law school, medical school, or in that finance or computer class, then assume they don’t know what you are talking about. Speak for the other person and not yourself.
   
  • Decode your acronyms. If you use an acronym in verbal or written communication, explain what it means after you use it for the first time. Your audience will filter your message otherwise, as they wonder, “Now what does ROI stand for?” (It stands for “return on investment,” btw—by the way.)
   
  • Limit your jargon use. Jargon doesn’t necessarily make you sound smart or business savvy. It can create communication barriers and obstacles and hurts your ability to build relationships and close deals.
•  

  Performance is a function of the interaction between an individual’s motivation, ability, and environment.
• • What are the implications of contrast error for interpersonal interactions? Does this error occur only when we observe physical objects? Or have you encountered this error when perceiving behavior of others?
   
  • What are the problems of false consensus error? How can managers deal with this tendency?
   
  • Is there such a thing as a “good” stereotype? Is a “good” stereotype useful or still problematic?
   
  • How do we manage the fact that human beings develop stereotypes? How would you prevent stereotypes from creating unfairness in decision making?
   
  • Is it possible to manage the attributions other people make about our behavior? Let’s assume that you have completed a project successfully. How would you maximize the chances that your manager will make an internal attribution? How would you increase the chances of an external attribution when you fail in a task?
• Generally speaking, women like to ask questions before starting a project, while men tend to “jump right in.”
• FilteringThe distortion or withholding of information to manage a person’s reactions. is the distortion or withholding of information to manage a person’s reactions.
• Psychoanalyzing the other person:
• Attempting to educate the other person:
• Threatening with “or else” implied:
• For example, when speaking with nonnative English-speaking colleagues, avoid “isn’t it?” questions.
• When perceiving the physical environment, we fill in gaps and extrapolate from the available information
• “People aren’t happy when the unexpected happens, but they are even unhappier if they find out you tried to hide it,”
• This behavior is known as “rehearsing.”
• OB Toolbox: 10 Ways to Improve Your Listening Habits
• Selective perception refers to filtering what we see and hear to suit our own needs.

• The biggest single problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

   

  George Bernard Shaw
• Making suggestions or telling the other person what they ought to do:
• flat organizational structure and prides itself on its extreme transparency
• An attributionThe causal explanation we give for an observed behavior. is the causal explanation we give for an observed behavior.
• “Things will get better.”
• Simply put, we overestimate how similar we are to other people.
• false consensus error.
• “You should…”
• Don’t multitask while listening.

• Asking excessive or inappropriate questions:

   
   
  • “Why did you do that?”
• Communication
• such as gauging their own weirdness, open-mindedness, and sense of family.
• Selective perception may perpetuate stereotypes, because we are less likely to notice events that go against our beliefs.
• Keep in mind that men tend to focus more on competition, data, and orders in their communications, while women tend to focus more on cooperation, intuition, and requests.
• Making light of the problem by kidding:
• Alternating our use of he and she when referring to people in general
• The problem for behavior in organizations is that, when people believe that a behavior is common and normal, they may repeat the behavior more freely.
• What is the goal of this communication?
• •  
   
  •  Perception
• Remembering that terms that feel respectful or comfortable to us may not be comfortable or respectful to others
• It’s great to be surprised.

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• Curiosity and creativity are never far apart. You need to be curious to identify problems worth solving, and then come up with new solutions.
• In a world where everything we do is counted in the billions (clicks, visits, users), it’s easy to think solely in terms of numbers and digits. That’s why we try to focus on one real person.
• Collaboration is essential to problem-solving
• “It’s too easy to say ‘no’ all the time. It’s too easy to be cautious. Pushing the boundaries of creativity means saying ‘yes,’ taking risks, trying new things, learning, and being surprised. So we don’t just open-source ideas at Google, we open-source our brand.”
• breaking down creativity as several interwoven processes: the first is generative (‘It may begin with a thought that is literally half-formed’); and the second is evaluative (‘At the right time and in the right way, critical appraisal is essential.
• • "organic" :)
• What you want to do is free up the abilities of everybody to contribute ideas, because everybody has ideas, and you need to create a climate in which that will happen. The role of a creative leader is not ‘command and control’, it’s more like ‘climate control’. You create a culture.”
• The big shift is about recognising that human communities
• at their best are organic, and organisms are highly dynamic and evolutionary,
• ‘great work often comes from working within formal constraints.’
• Creativity is most powerful when it has a purpose
• Changing how we think about innovation isn’t a luxury, says Robinson, but an economic imperative:
• It’s only when we start to appreciate the complex nature of cultural change that we begin to understand why creativity – the ability to react, adapt and recreate – is absolutely critical, especially as bigger challenges come hurtling into view. Because with every obstacle comes the opportunity for renewal:
• I spend so much of my time encouraging people to believe in their own creative powers.

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