1.1 Getting Started
Introductory Exercises
Write five words that express what you want to do and where you want to be a year from now. Take those five words and write a paragraph that clearly articulates your responses to both “what” and “where.”
Think of five words that express what you want to do and where you want to be five years from now. Share your five words with your classmates and listen to their responses. What patterns do you observe in the responses? Write a paragraph that addresses at least one observation.
Define "effective business communication" in your own words.
Find a (poor/excellent) example of business communication and discuss how it impacts and influences brand identity and customer relationships.
Find an example of a business, organization, or company's representation of themselves in a social media network and discuss why you "like" it or not.
Selfie Exercise: Take a photo of yourself for your LinkedIn.com page, for example, that portrays a professional (or creative, or your choice of focus) image of yourself. Write a few sentences on the nonverbal cues that communicate your message goal(s).
Communication is an activity, skill, and art that incorporates lessons learned across a wide spectrum of human knowledge. It’s what we use to represent ourselves, our ideas, our hopes, dreams, and experiences, and it is often how we are evaluated and judged. You may have heard the expression, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” and it holds true, but let’s consider what comprises a first impression.
When someone checks out your LinkedIn.com profile, what do they see? A photo? Words? Images and video? In each case what they see isn’t you, but a representation of you that speaks for you in your absence. Your choice of words and phrases impacts and influences that first impression.
When you go to a job interview what do they see? They may have reviewed your resume—a written representation of you—and found you met the qualifications and offered something of interest, but now they get to meet you. What will you say, and how will you say it? Will your communication make a good first impression?
Effective communication is a learned skill. You learned what to say and when to say it by the people who surrounded you from early on, from family and friends to the television and the Internet. Words that became popular may have become your words, or not. Communication habits that others expressed may have become your habits, or not. For example, you didn’t learn to text in a day and didn’t learn all the codes—from LOL (laugh out loud) to BRB (be right back)—right away. In the same way, learning to communicate well requires you to read and study how others have expressed themselves, then adapt what you have learned to your present task—whether it is texting a brief message to a friend, presenting your qualifications in a job interview, or writing a business report. You come to this text with skills and an understanding that will provide a valuable foundation as we explore the communication process.
Effective communication takes preparation, practice, and persistence. There are many ways to learn communication skills; the school of experience, or “hard knocks,” is one of them. But in the business environment, a “knock” (or lesson learned) may come at the expense of your credibility through a blown presentation to a client. The classroom environment, with a compilation of information and resources such as a text, can offer you a trial run where you get to try out new ideas and skills before you have to use them to communicate effectively to make a sale or form a new partnership. Listening to yourself, or perhaps the comments of others, may help you reflect on new ways to present, or perceive, thoughts, ideas, and concepts. The net result is your growth—ultimately your ability to communicate in business—will improve, opening more doors than you might anticipate.
As you learn the material in this text, each part will contribute to the whole. The degree to which you attend to each part will ultimately help give you the skills, confidence, and preparation to use communication in furthering your career.