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Great Leaders are great communicators. They know what they know and say what the audiences wanted to hear. Most people talk but not communicated, the thought by just saying out what they wanted to say, they are communicating with the listeners. This mark the differentiation between a great leader and a mere mediocre leader. Great communicator always watch the responses of their audience and change their message to suit the listeners and get responses. They knew to be effectively communicate with their listener they must know the  background, culture, belief and many other things that affect the responses.

On our last posting, we use a simple communication process as follow

Sender ——–> Message ——–> Receiver

However, our daily communication verbal or written is much more than this simple form. Many years ago, I have an opportunity to have a month long training in Japan, and the Japanese have a very unique way of answering question and request, they often nod their head and say “hei”. However at time, I realized that the receiver was not agreeable with the sender but he still nod and said “hei” , it is even so when the sender is his superior. I later found out from one fo them that what they did was to acknowledge that he understood the message but may not necessary agreed with it.

Another incident about understanding message received was, we received an invitation written as such, ” You are cordially invited to an INFORMAL Dinner…. time date and place. My colleague and I thought for sometime about the dress code as it was not mentioned, so we thought, since it was informal, we just dress on normal office attire. To our surprise, when we enter the hall, most men wear  suit and ladies, dress as glamorous as they could. We are two of the very few who under dressed .

This bring us to a normal communication process actually which involves the following

Sender —-(Encoding)—-> Message —-(decoding)—-> Receiver

In our daily communication, our message is encoded into some form of symbolic representation like word, facial expression, body language, tone of our voice and even our dressing. This is very much influence by our background such as knowledge, education, culture, emotion, belief, religion, environment and man  other factors. When our message is encoded, we most probably encode in a way we deemed fit to “our perception” of our receivers.

On the hand when the receivers receive the message, they do have to encode the message base on their knowledge, education, culture, emotion, belief, religion, environment and many other factors and also the perceptions of them to the sender.

Now with this complication, what seem to be a simple message can be construe as offensive without the send realizing it and it often causes mis-understanding and argument.

Are you perfectly clear that your message when deliver is well received  and understood by your listener?

Discover how you can have more effective communication

When you investigate the most powerful and influential people in the world, you will discover that they all have something in common. Effective communication. Whether they personally possess such skills or have hired a support team that did, ultimately, effective communication was one of the fundamental keys to their success. Using the principles of powerful communication, they developed the ability to influence others in a profound way, all the while winning both respect and admiration.

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