Communication/Interpersonal Skills

How important are communication skills and interpersonal skills within the workforce? 

Interpersonal skills relates to the ability to work in teams, negotiate effectively and serve clients.  It also includes active listening, delegating information and demonstrating leadership qualities among many other skills.  Many top business personnel believe that leadership is directly related to interpersonal skills because it focuses to strengthen business relationships through increasing trust. I believe this is really important because effective leaders need the trust and support of their employees to conduct business efficiently.  Workers that believe in their management generally tend to have positive morale which results in them being more passionate towards their duties.

I have worked for individual’s that have had very poor people skills. These leaders lacked communication skills, the ability to delegate jobs, and were very sloppy when serving customers. This portrayed unprofessional conduct in the workplace and to clients. For instance, I worked for a construction company and my superior asked me to build footing for a framing project.  I started the footing process and later discovered that I did not line up the dimensions with the pins.  The boss did not clearly communicate how to do the job properly, which ended up costing us money to redo it.

If my boss had utilized the communication model below, the message would have been sent and decoded by myself correctly.  My boss is the sender, his message was for me to build footing for the framing process, the communication medium was correct as we conversed in person; however, I failed to decode his message because no feedback was sent to make sure I was on the same page as him.  

(Image provided by: home.ubalt.edu)

Oral communication is a critical skill to possess as it is needed to land a job during the interview process as well as in general life.  In order to communicate correctly and effectively one must try to deter noise and utilize the correct medium to communicate.  Many organizations look for individuals with strong communication and interpersonal skills when recruiting individuals into their companies.