Mastering Team and Interpersonal Communication

Whether in the workplace or on the football field, or even amongst members of a community, effective teamwork can produce incredible results. However,working successfully as a team is not as easy as it may seem. Effective teamwork certainly does not just happen automatically; it takes a great deal of hard work and compromise. There are a number of factors that must be in place to cohere together as a team and work seamlessly. Team communication skills are critical for ensuring the success of the team effort, whether the team is charged with creating a new product, making a process improvement, or planning the summer picnic. Strong team communication skills can help build relationships, ensure the sharing of new ideas and best practices, and benefit team members through coaching and counseling.Teams are a major part of a company. A team is defined as a unit of two or more people who share a mission and the responsibility for working to achieve a common goal. A committee is form of team, but is more formal and usually last longer than a normal team.There are many advantages and disadvantages of working with a team. Some advantages include increased information and knowledge, increased diversity of views, increased acceptance of a solution, and higher performance levels. Some disadvantages include groupthink, hidden agendas, and cost. Groupthink happens when peer pressure cause individuals not state their opinions because of the fear of being the only one to be the odd ball out. Each member of the team has to bring their knowledge and their skills to the team, in order for the team to be strong. Many teams goes through  many different phases. The first phase is orientation. Orientation allows teams to socialize, establish their roles, and begin to define their task and purpose. The second phase is conflict. In this phase members begin to state their positions, disagreements occur in this phase. The third phase is brainstorming, member discuss all their options and discuss all the pros and cons.The fourth phase is emergence. In this phase a solution is reached. The last and final step is reinforcement. Reinforcement is when the team summarizes the agree upon agreement. This phase may also be known as forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Conflicts might occur in teams, but there are steps members can take so that the conflict doesn't get over blown. Pro action is one of the steps, which is dealing with the problem before it gets taken over board. Some of the other steps include communication, openness, research, flexibility, fair play, and alliance.

Finding, Evaluating, and Processing Information

Understanding where you are getting your information and to what degree it is credible information should be your first priority when researching for your project. Know that sometimes you must first research where the information is coming from. Research is a cycle and once the cycle is complete you will end up with a excellent paper or project. When researching information for your company, you need to take five crucial steps. The first step in researching is planning. Researching without planning in advance wastes time and usually produces disappointing results. In planning your research you must familiarize yourself with the subject, identify information gaps, prioritize research needs and maintaining an ethical attitude. Familiarizing yourself with the subject involves reading, visiting websites, and interviewing experts in the field. Maintaining an ethical attitude includes not forcing a specific outcome by skewing your research, respecting the privacy of your research participants, documenting sources and giving appropriate credit, respecting the intellectual property and digital rights of your resources, not extracting more from your sources than they actually provide, and not misrepresenting who you are or what you intend to do with the research. The second step in researching is locating data and information. Locating data and information includes evaluating sources, collecting secondary information at the library, online, or elsewhere, document your sources, and collecting primary information through surveys and interviews. You can find valuable information thru newspapers and periodicals, business books, directories, almanacs and statistical resources, government publications, and electron databases. Search engines are also a good way of finding information. Search engines identify individual WebPages that contain specific words or phrases you’ve asked for. After collecting data the next step in your research is processing the data and information, and converting it into usable information. Processing the data and the information you gathered involves quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing textual information, and analyzing numerical information. Applying your findings is the fourth step in this process and involves summarizing your findings, drawing conclusions, and making recommendations. The final step is managing the information, and that involves making your research available to others. 

Writing Negative Messages

Negative messages should not necessarily be considered bad. Negative messages, if expressed correctly could do positive changes in a business. For example, you are aware that production in the past month was decreasing due to uncommon mistakes; obviously you want to pick up production toward the increasing direction, so you must notify the employees of the bad news of the previous month. 

When sending a negative message, the three step writing process applies here also. There are five goals when writing a negative message. The goals are (1) give the bad news, (2) ensure acceptance of the bad news, (3) maintain readers good will, (4) maintain the company’s good image, and (5) eliminate future correspondence on the matter. There are three important aspects to keep in mind when writing a negative message. The first, one is to determine if you want to take a direct approach or an indirect approach. Second, you should be sensitive to different cultures and different audiences. Third, maintain a high ethical standard. There are six questions to ask when deciding whether to use a direct or in direct approach to convey a message. They are (1) will the bad news come as a shock? (2) does the audience prefer short messages that get to the point? (3) how important is this news to the audience (4) do you need to maintain a close working relationship with the audience? (5) do u need to get the audience attention? And (6) what is the organization’s preferred style? You should use the direct approach when your negative answer or information will have a minimal personal impact, and use the indirect approach when some preparation will help your audience accept your bad news. A direct message has three steps, bad news, reasons, and a positive close. An indirect message has four steps, buffering, reason, bad news, and a positive close. Either approach you use, make sure you end on a positive note. By avoiding a negative or uncertain conclusion, limiting future correspondence, being optimistic about the future, and by being sincere, are all ways in ending a negative message in a positive note.

Intro to Communication

The key role of communication is to provide data, information and insights in an exchange that benefits both yourself and the other parties in which you are communicating with. Several of the benefits include a stronger decision making process that is based on timely and more dependable information, faster problem solving, earlier interception of potential problems that may arise from circumstances such as business costs and critical safety issues. Increased productivity, lower costs, and stronger business relationships are also born from communication. Stronger workplace communication is key in achieving common goals.

Understanding the communication “language” is important so that you can create much more effect messages, limiting communication to only sending messages out of necessity and avoiding redundant communication. You should also try focusing on the needs of the audience that you are working with so that you can ensure a successful transfer of your message from sender to recipient. Giving constructive criticism and being receptive to it simultaneously is key so that you can refine your own skills while at the same time you can help others to improve their own. Finally, being conscious and adherent to business etiquette is vital so that you can reduce interpersonal mishaps that may jeopardize communication.