The basis of all human interaction is communication. Unfortunately, the skills needed for good communication are often overlooked and ignored. This explains why mis-communication is the norm and why seemingly-simple communication cycles often go wrong. Sometimes very wrong. Which is why I don’t refer to these skills as soft skills, but rather essential skills and sometimes even power skills.
Many companies in London and across the nation have Communication as one of their company pillars yet are unable to explain what that means. Good communication is all about getting the thoughts from one person's head in to another person's head. Sounds like it should be easy doesn't it? Well it can be, with communication training for employees.
There are ways of increasing your success rate when it comes to communication, and they’re simple to understand and practice. That's where I come in.
Elevation Station’s personalised communication skills training workshops challenge and support and contain plenty of confidence-boosting practice for teams of employees.
Chris worked in the IT department for a large bank. He had been ‘sent’ on a two day Communication Skills training course by his HR Manager after he had called his own manager a moron. Chris was young and extremely intelligent so it wasn’t much of a surprise he found others less intelligent than him, as they probably were.
Now, it’s very important at the beginning of communication training for employees to find out who of the delegates are ‘conscripts’ and who are ‘volunteers’ as there’s no point training people who don’t want to be there. My initial approach is always to reassure them they are the client, not the person who sent them. And also, since they’re here, what would make the day useful for them. What do they want to get out of it?
Chris, despite his natural taciturn nature, was forthcoming and participated actively in every activity that was part of the communication course, and it was during one of these activities he had his ‘lightbulb’ moment. Now, I never know what people will take from the training. So at the end of two days, Chris came to thank me for ‘helping’ him, it was great to hear how.
To him, it was all about being happy with the consequences of his communication. We weren’t there to tell him how to live. We were there to help him understand that the measure of someone’s communication is how much has ‘landed’ with the other party, and are you happy with what has landed? To Chris, this was a revelation.
It was such a revelation that the following week after he attended the communication training course, we received a call from his HR manager saying that he was a changed man and therefore, the Conflict Management course he was booked on to attend was no longer needed.
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Telephone: 0203 417 3832 Email: info@elevationstation.co.uk