Written by Bev Jenkin Tuesday, 26 October 2010 00:00

In business, how you communicate can make or break the deal, not just with your clients or physicians, but also with your staff or with your superiors.

Psychologists constantly print articles about how failure to communicate can make or break a relationship.  Emailing and texting can be interpreted incorrectly and our “tone” can be mistaken as brusque or rude.  Never consider typing in all capital letters – you’ll be accused of screaming at the recipient.

PowerPoint is a very popular presentation tool, but all slide shows can start to look alike after you’ve sat through the first two or three at an eight-hour conference.  A web page can fail to hold the audience’s attention, so you need to choose your colors and pictures carefully.  The material a speaker is presenting can be brilliant, but if their voice is mundane and monotone they can simply lull you into a state of drowsiness or comatose in some cases. Communication is important, but effective communication is critical.  Effective communication is a skill and using the following seven steps, despite the media you choose, can help to “make it happen.”

Do you remember being in first grade and learning about the parts of a letter?  Even in our technological age, that hasn’t changed. 

The first step to effectively communicating is structure, which has three main components:

• The opening
• The body
• The closing

Time is something we cannot get back, and most people never seem to have enough of.  Just talk to any working mom for confirmation.   If you want to get someone’s attention, always keep the opening short, concise, and on point.  A good opening makes people want to hear what you have to say.  First impressions can be made in as little as 15 seconds from the time your first word is uttered or your first presentation point in seen – make each second count.

The body of your message or presentation is where you can list your facts, figures, graphs, or charts (if these things apply).  Be careful to avoid irrelevant or difficult to understand materials.  Be cautious of illegible numbers.  Follow the rule of thumb many newspapers have utilized for years and keep your message or presentation on an 8th grade level so it can be understood by a majority of your audience and KISS (keep it simple, stupid). 

Your closing should be a summation of your key points.  The more powerful your ending is, the more readily your audience will remember the points you intended to convey and what you want them to do next.

Your second step is clarity.  The message you want to deliver must be clear.  Do not cause confusion by jumbling messages or presentation points together.  Stay on track.  Have you ever sat through a staff meeting where the presenter is “all over the place?”  The only thing you be assured to take away from the meeting is frustration.  How can you expect people to produce what you’ve asked for when no one can even remember the key focus points were?

Consistency is the third step.  If your message or presentation contains inconsistencies it will cause distrust on the part of your recipient(s).  Distrust is one of the fastest means of assuring your audience will not carry out the action you are asking them to perform. 

The medium you choose to deliver your message or presentation is where many people fall short. The choice is your fourth step.  There are many effective methods you can use to deliver your message. What’s important is that the media you choose:

• Shows great accuracy
• Offers the best shot at audience comprehension
• Has the shortest time for delivery, and
• Does not require a high fiscal cost

Always keep your ROI (return on investment) in mind when choosing your media and think about the age and learning style of your target audience.  Can you imagine how non-effective and costly it would be to mail out invitations to teenagers who spend their days using techie toys, compared to forwarding them an email that can automatically be put in their calendar on their phone or computer?

Relevancy, the fifth step, involves making sure your audience is truly interested in the subject of your message.  Forcing people to suffer through presentations they have no interest in can only cause them to lose interest in you, and pay even less attention to what you present in the future.  A prime example of this would be using your web page to list in-depth State statutes rather than just providing a brief synopsis of the State of Affairs with a link for those interested in a more in-depth explanation.

Primary Effect/Final Effect combine to form the sixth step.  Primary effect is having your target audience remember the first few items of information presented in your opening.  Final Effect is when your target audience remembers the last few items of information, which were presented in the closing.  It is necessary for the opening and closing to be powerful and memorable because some people function under a primary effect while others retain from the final effect.

Speakers/writers sometimes “open” with a quote, a joke, a loud noise or a catchy statement.  This can work to their advantage if the opening is consistent with the subject of the communication.  Likewise, the closing may often contain humor, which is perfectly acceptable, if it relates to the main body of the communication.  A punch line is only funny if the audience is not expecting it and understands it.

The seventh and final step is the 7+2 Rule.  Psychology studies have shown that the brain is capable of retaining information in “clusters.”  Clusters have a maximum of between five and nine pieces of information at a time in the short term memory.  Basically, any information after the first nine key points is………  I’m sorry, what was I saying again?

 

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