Effective communication, inside your company and outside with customers, can be the all the difference between struggling and thriving!

Increase Emotional Intelligence for great communication

During hiring, training and team development, you are likely  measuring your team members’ hard skills. If you overlook one important soft skill, however, your team might fail to communicate effectively causing conflict or confusion. Hard skills, such as efficiently using the company’s software programs, are easy to track through tests and are important for an employee’s overall success. Soft skills, on the other hand,  aren’t as easy to track, but they are just as important for employee and organization success.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is one of the most important soft skills and impacts every level of the organization. It is a determining factor for effective communication and building strong, interdependent relationships. EQ is so important that up to 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies are investing in  training programs to improve their employees’ soft skills.

With team building strategies in place, leaders can improve their own EQ, as well as that of their employees, which will improve overall communication and diminish conflict in the workplace.

Communicate effectively leveraging DISC profiles

Effective communication – where the listener receives the exact message you intended to send, is affected by a number of things. We all have “filters” based on our personalities, our experiences and our current mood. To be successful communicating it’s important to decipher the listener’s “filter”. Without knowing a person closely, you will rarely know about a listener’s previous experiences. It’s easier to pick up on a listener’s mood by looking at their body language, facial expression and listening to their tone of voice. Understanding someone’s personality can be greatly helped by leveraging DISC profiles. In this blog post I’ll give you an overview of the DISC behavioral styles and share how to be successful in communicating with people based on their style.

Listening

Listening is key to all effective communication. Without the ability to listen effectively, messages are easily misunderstood. As a result, communication breaks down and the sender of the message can easily become frustrated or irritated.

If there is one communication skill you should aim to master, then listening is it.

Listening is so important that many top employers provide listening skills training for their employees. This is not surprising when you consider that good listening skills can lead to better customer satisfaction, greater productivity with fewer mistakes, and increased sharing of information that in turn can lead to more creative and innovative work.

You will learn:

  • Your Emotional Intelligence quotient.  EQ-i 2.0 assessment
  • DiSC profile to understand your communication style and to detect others’ styles as well
  • Body language
  • Use of “I” statements to diffuse conflict
  • Reflective listening
  • Rapport building techniques