How to Better Your Team Skills

Communicating In Teams
Teamwork interactions among employees represent the essential elements of interpersonal communication.  Collaboration which is working toether to meet complex challanges has become a core job responisbility for the workforce in the U.S. IT DOESNT MATTER WHAT CARRER PATH YOU DECIDE TO CHOOSE, YOU WILL PARTICIPATE IN GROUP WORK AT LEAST ONCE ON THE JOB. If you read my blog about the Importance of Communication Skills, your communication skills that you have learned will pay off during these interactions, because the productivity and quality of collaborative efforts depend on communication skills.

One may ask what is a Team?
I'm here to answer that. A team is a group with two or more people who share the same mission and work together to achieve their goals.  Teams are often diverse, gathering people with different backgrounds, goals, and experience to work together as a unit.

Positives and Negatives of a Team
The diversity of opinions and ideas can impact the group in a positive way. A successful team can provide number of advantages. Those same ideas and thoughts from others can affect the group in a negative way when individuals try to compete with one another. Working in teams can be frustrating and a waste of time.

Positive:

•  Increased information and knowledge- Gathering the experience of several individuals which gives the group more information when making decisions. 
• Increased diversity of views- Team members can bring different viewpoints and ideas to the table that can influence the decision making.
• Increased  Acceptance of a solution- When you apply yourself in a group and participate on a regular you'r more likely to support the final decisions and encourage other team members to do so.
• Higher performance levels- Working as a team can bring more energy and creativeness out of an individual. Effective teams can be better than a top-performing individual

Negative:

• Group think- This occurs when peer pressures causes individuals to withhold contrary or an popular opinions. The result will end up worst than the choices the team members made individually.
• Hidden Agendas- Some team members may have private motives, such as the desire to take control of the group, undermine someone else on the team, or to pursue a business goal that's the opposite of the teams mission.
• Cost- Schedules, arranging meetings, and coordinating individual parts that spends up the money that is needed for the group.

Giving and Responding to Constructive Feedback

Constructive Feedback is often sometimes called constructive criticism, focuses on the process and outcomes of communication, not only the people involved. 

Destructive Feedback delivers criticism with no guidance to stimulate improvement. 

It is important to know that when you are receiving constructive feedback, resist the understandable urge to define work or deny the validity of the feedback. Remaining open to criticism isn't easy when you've poured your heart and soul into a project, but good feedback provides a valuable opportunity to learn and to improve the quality of your work. 

 How can you make Meetings more Productive?

Much of the workplace communication will occur during in-person or online meetings, so to a large degree your ability to contribute to the company and to be recognized for your contributions will depend on your meeting skills. Meetings can also be a great way to promote team building through the experience of social interactions. 

Prepare for Meetings:

• Identify your purpose- Meetings can focus on exchanging information, reaching decisions, or collaborating to solve problems or identify opportunities. 
• Select participants for the meeting- Invite those who need to be involved, and don't invite anyone who doesn't. 
• Choose the venue and the time- online meetings are often the best way and sometimes the only way to connect people in multiple locations or to reach large audiences. For onsite meetings, review the facility and seating arrangements. Pay attention to lighting, room temperature, refreshments, and details that can make or break a meeting. 
• Set the agenda- Success of a meeting depends on the preparation of the participants. Distribute a carefully written agenda to participants, giving them enough time to prepare. An agenda includes three key questions: (1) what do we need to do in this meeting to accomplish our goals. (2) What issues will be of greatest importance to all participants? (3) What information must be available in order to discuss this information. 

Conducting Efficient Meetings:

1. Keep the discussion on track.- A great leader draws the main ideas the group has to offer while maintaining progress toward achieving the meetings goals. 
2. Follow agreed upon rules- The larger the meeting the more formal you have to be to maintain order. 
3. Encourage Participation- On occasions some participants will be too quiet while others to talkative. Draw the quiet participants out by asking their input on issues. 
4. Participate actively- If your a meeting participant, look for opportunities to contribute to both the subject of the meeting and the smooth interaction of the group.
5. Close effectively- At the conclusion of the meeting, verify that the objectives have been met or arrange for follow up work, if needed. 

Improving Your Listening Skills

Listening actively means making the effort to turn off your internal filters and biases to truly hear and understand what the other person is saying. To be a good listener, adapt the way you listen to suit the situation. 

Recognize Four Types of Listening

1. Content Listening- Understanding and retaining the information in the speakers message. 

2. Critical Listening- Understand and evaluate the speakers message on several levels: the logic of the argument, the strength of the evidence, the validity of the conclusions, the implications of the message, the speakers intentions and motives. 

3. Empathic Listening- To understand the speakers feelings, needs, and wants so that you can appreciate his or hers viewpoints. 

4. Active Listening- making a conscious effort to turn off internal filters and biases to truly hear and understand what the other person is saying.

Click here to watch:  How to become a good listener

The Listening Process

Listening is a far more complex process than most people think and most of us aren't good at it. People typically listen at no better than a 25 percent efficiency rate, remembering only about half what's said during a 10 minute conversation, and forget half of that within 48 hours. Listening follows the same sequence as the general communication process. The listening process involves five steps:

1. Receiving- you start by physically hearing the message and acknowledging it.

2. Decoding-  Next step is to assign meaning to sounds, which you do according to your own values, beliefs, ideas, roles, and needs. 

3. Remembering- Before you can act on information you need to restore it for future processing. 

4. Evaluating- Evaluate the message by applying critical thinking skills to separate facts from opinions. 

5. Responding- After you evaluated speaker's message, you react. 

After carefully reading the tips I have listed above, I encourage you to take the Listening skills test that will help overcome barriers to effective listening. Listening Skills Quiz

Remember that good listeners try to over come these barriers to successful listening. 

The Importance of Communication

What is Communication?
Communication is the transfer between people, entities, and ect.


1. Importance: 

• Provides information
• Gives facts and opinions
• Presents important information effectively
• Clarifies ground rules

Communication is Important to your company

Communication should be important to you because it is important to your company. Effective communication can help business in numerous ways. Communication provides:

•          Closer ties with important communities
•          Opportunities to influence perceptions and trends
•          Increased productivity and faster problem solving
•          Better finical results and higher return for investors
•          Stronger decision making
•          Clearer and more persuasive marketing messages
•          Greater employee engagement and their work, leading to higher employee satisfaction

What Makes Business Communication Effective?

Effective communication strengthens the connections between a company and all its stakeholders, those groups affected in some way by the company’s actions

To make your communication effective as possible, focus on the strategies below:

•        Provide practical information-give recipients useful information
•         Give acts rather than vague impressions- Use concrete language, specific details, and information that are clear and convincing.
•         Clarify Expectations and Responsibilities- Craft messages to generate a specific response from a specific audience.
•          Offer compelling, persuasive arguments and recommendations- show your readers precisely how they still benefit from responding to your message the way you want them to.
•     Understanding the Unique Challenges of Business Communication

Business communication is often more complicated and demanding than the social communication you typically engage in with family and friends.

·         You will need to adjust your communication habits to the more formal demands of business and the unique environment of your company.

Communicating in An Organizational Context

In addition to having the proper skills, you need to learn how to apply those skills in the business environment, which can be quite different the social environment you are accustomed to.

·         Formal Communication Network- this is where ideas and information flow along the lines of command in the company’s organization structure.

·         Informal Communication Network- this encompasses all communication that occurs outside the formal network. Some of this informal communication takes place naturally as a result of employee interaction both on job and social in social settings.

The Basic Communication Model

This model helps you identify and improve the skills you need to be more successful. These eight steps provide a practical overview:

1.       The sender has an idea. Whether a communication effort will ultimately be effective starts here

2.       The sender encodes the idea as a message- When someone puts an idea into a message. He or she is encoding an idea or expressing it in words or images

3.       The sender produces the message in a transmittable medium- with the appropriate message to express an idea; the sender now needs a communication medium to present that message to the intended audience.

4.       The sender transmits the message through channel- Just as technology continues to increase the number of media options at your disposal, it continues to provide new communication channels.

5.       The audience receives the message. If the channel functions properly the messages reaches its intended audience

6.       The audience decodes the message. After a message is received, the receiver needs to extract the idea from the message, a step known as decoding.

7.       The audience responds to the message. By crafting messages in ways that the show benefits of responding, senders can increase the chances that recipients will respond in positive ways.

8.       The audience provides feedback to sender. In addition to responding to the message, audience members may give feedback that helps the sender evaluate the effectiveness communication effort. 

Considering the the complexity of this process and the distractions that often stand between sender and receiver- it should come as no surprise that communication efforts often fail to achieve the sender's objective. 

Click Here to watch a video to further your knowledge on the Importance of Business Communication:

http://www.maximumadvantage.com/