Welcome to my communication and business blog!  I’m starting a discussion here about all the things that interest me in this communication consulting business I’ve been building since the summer of 2002… 

I have always had a passionate interest in communication.  One of the things that I find interesting is the fact that most of us never actually study it.  We DO communication (a great deal of it, every day) but most of us have never formally studied communication.  We (mostly) do what we’ve seen modeled in our lives, and we do what has (more or less) worked for us so far. 

But then we’re suddenly a manager, and we’re supposed to delegate work to a former colleague, now staff person.  Or we’re supposed to tell a fellow manager that his or her directions are not clear to you.  Or you have to mediate a dispute between two fellow employees.  And now we’re unsure what to do, or we just do what we’ve always done.  And when it doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well, we just try it over again, and get frustrated when we don’t communicate effectively.  We might blame the employee or the fellow manager, we might throw our hands up and do the thing ourselves – but we don’t often ask ourselves if we’re missing some needed skills.

It is with this thinking in mind that I intend to discuss a variety of topics around communication skills, how people think and communicate that thinking, and what can be done about both.  That discussion will also include one of the most useful pieces of technology I’ve ever seen, a thinking tool called Emergenetics.  I’ve been using it in my training work since 2003, mostly for the good information it can provide individuals and groups.  Here are some of the other topics you’ll see in this blog:

• Listening skills (and how you get them)
• The Standard Model of business communication (and what’s wrong with it)
• Fear and work
• Thinking styles/preferences and how to communicate with them
• Manager-employee conflict
• Communicating “up”
• Listening to your clients/customers
• Effective delegating
• Effective employee review
• Hurrying up to slow down
• Assertiveness
• Flexibility
• Why people don’t listen

And a whole lot more!  Welcome to the blog -