Expanding Your Communication Style

FountainBlue's February 2 Leadership Workshop was on Expanding Your Communication Style, featuring Kimberly Wiefling, from Wiefling Consulting.

Although one doesn't have to lead in order to communicate one does need to communicate well in order to lead effectively. Understanding and then expanding your communication style will positively impact how you are received and enlarge the range of people to whom you can meaningfully connect to in your network.

Communication skills are among the most powerful tools available to leaders today. Great communicators listen more than they talk, and ask more questions rather than advocating for their particular point of view, and have clear goals for their communication. They are aware of their own communication challenges and strengths, alert to different communication styles, know how to communicate effectively with these various styles, and can continue to communicate effectively even in stressful or challenging situations.

In this action-packed and fun-filled workshop, Kimberly Wiefling enabled us to understand and be effective with different communication styles, raise our awareness of how our communications are being received by others, and inspire us to take action to more effectively communicate with a broader range of audiences. We'll not only learn, but practice, listen generously, be a "thinking partner", and creating a "thinking environment" to rapidly create a meaningful connection and positive rapport with people from widely varying backgrounds. You will leave this workshop with a fresh perspective on the power of your communication and a commitment to implement some of the practical ideas immediately in order to achieve your goals with others.Below are also notes and comments from all of you, our active participants.

Communication Strengths:

• Identify and empathize with others
• genuine and authentic
• focused on interests of others
• Open-minded
• Generous Listening
  

Communication Challenges:

• Infer, make assumptions
• Interrupt
• too shy or self-conscious to network
• too pressured to 'fill the silence' when networking
• highjack conversations - turn them to talk about yourself rather than listening to what someone else is communicating

Communication Insights:

• It's easier to speak if you've listened first
• It's hard to do generous listening, it takes practice
• It's hard to break the habit of interrupting
• It's hard to avoid "helping" speaking with your ideas
• We need to find ways to push conversation forward as a listener
• It's hard not to use 'why' questions, rather than 'help me to understand' phrasing
• It's hard not to use 'how' and jump to action too quickly. Ask 'what would make that possible' instead
• It's hard to communicate when others don't share your perspective - speak about touchy-feely things to engineers for example