Peter Murphy asked:
Do you need communications training? Everyone needs to know how to communicate well. Whether you are an employee or an organization leader, there will inevitably come a time when you need some form of communications training. Even people who feel that they are already quite good at communication can benefit from additional training. If you feel that you need communication training, do not worry – there is hope for you yet.
Why is communications training important for organizations? It is because organizations are usually broken down into sub-groups which may experience difficulty communicating with one another since:
1) Each sub-group has its own sub-culture and way of communicating with its members.
2) The different sub-cultures and individual ways of communicating may clash when members who belong to one sub-group have to relate with members of another sub-group.
3) The leader of the organization may lack the knack for understanding how to get sub-groups to relate well with one another.
There are different areas in the life of an organization in which communications training could focus on:
1) Presentation Skills Training – everyone in an
organization will inevitably have to conduct a presentation at some point. Additional training will turn average speakers into better speakers.
2) Assertiveness Training – the right kind of assertiveness is required when you have to deal with difficult customers or contacts. Employees need to learn the right way to be assertive and unlearn bad assertiveness habits.
3) Business Networking Skills – If you are a point man for the organization, there will be occasions when you have to walk up to strangers who work in the same field and create long-term contacts. This is where training in Business Networking comes in, to improve your ability at forming business relationships with other people.
4) Business Relationship Management – if you already have business relationships with various contacts, you may need guidance in how to maintain your relationships with these people and organizations over time.
5) Change Management Training – all organizations face impending change nowadays so everyone in the organization would benefit from training in how to manage change at all levels of the organization.
6) Communication Skills Training – everyone will have to learn how to communicate the right message at the right time to the right audience. Even the most confident member of the organization should possess the right communication skills.
7) Conflict Management – accept it, conflict is an unavoidable part of life for all organizations. So people have to learn how to manage incidents of conflict so that they can arrive at mutually beneficial resolutions.
8) Corporate Events Communication – the way you communicate on a daily basis may be alright in the confines of the office but when you are attending a corporate event, there is a right and a wrong way of communicating with corporate event participants.
9) Customer Service Training – if you find that sales are down, you may have to submit your customer service crew to a seminar on proper customer service communication.
10) Facilitation Skills – believe it or not, many executives dread having to conduct a meeting. That’s because they may lack the proper facilitation skills to open, manage, and close a meeting. Such executives could benefit from training in facilitation skills.
11) Interview Skills Training – who has not had to go through a nerve-wracking interview? But it is okay to be a little bit nervous, so long as you keep your head during the interview and use the right interview skills.
12) Management Training – one trademark of a great manager is competent communication skills. If you lack this, your management capacity could be questioned.
These are just some of the fields under communications training. If you see a field or fields in which you could hone your skills, make an effort to get the right kind of communications training that you need.