Good communication fosters…
By: Miguel Pinto
Tags: Communication, Teamwork, UX, Celfocus, Strategy

Different professionals will give you many answers to this question, based on their view of the world.

A business analysis will tell you it fosters good context acquisition. A project manager will tell you it fosters good client engagement. A developer will say to you it encourages good, easy to understand requirements.

for me, the real question is:

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Why good communication have such a positive impact? And how does it happen?

Humans are, by nature, social animals.[0] We crave interaction and acceptance by peers.

IT teams and Design teams draw their strength not by the individual’s strength but by the synergies between individuals that empower the group as a unit.

As a professional, fostering good communication empowers your team to be more efficient and more in sync.

Techniques such as Agile [1] and Lean UX [2] rely heavily on good communication as their base stone. An agile team that does not have good communication transforms the agile method into a kind of agile half-breed waterfall.

Good communication and explicit content help the team have a common understanding of the sprint and have issues shared early on, making the team more efficient and improving teamwork.

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There is no straightforward answer (one key fits all) on good communication within the team and with the client.

Nevertheless, some key ideas help you improve your communication. Let’s explore some of them:

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Active Listening

“Today, everyone is talking, and all of us forgot how to have a conversation.”

All of us once in our life heard this expression or a variant of it. Albeit some would say it is an expression of the old way of communicating; for me, it expresses something that in a way or the other professional tend to forget. Listen first, then reply!

David Levithan states

“As humans, we all have an urge, a need to be heard” [4]. We need to communicate, to relate with others. AS UX professionals, we need to foster this need from the clients and the users. A+Having a hearing posture allows giving the communication initiative to the others and ear the most about a specific context on the voice of those who experienced it. Having this posture enables us to gain more information and direct the interview/test plan to the context of the one we are communicating.

Active listening provides a framework that supports the listening posture, be suggesting the next five steps:

Pay attention to others say

show that you are listening

provide feedback

defer judgment

respond appropriately

For more on active listening, please refer to [3].

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Engagement

Engagement in a context is critical to keep a team together and cooperating in an efficient fashion, and the same is valid when interacting with clients.

So why Engagement is it so important?

Humans have a craving to belong to a group, team, and live in a context of like-minded individuals. [5]

If you have this in mind, it starts to get clearer that if you have your team engaged in solving a problem or your client cooperating with your team, both will have a better emotional engagement to the project.

Consider that an engaged client and team members are more likely to go above and beyond to help achieve the solution.

So how does this relate to communication? It’s easy if you are engaged in a context; it is most likely for you to use the context dialect to communicate, which in the end, helps the communication.

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Know your audience

One of the steps to engage your audience is knowing your audience.

If you take the time to understand to whom you are talking. What is the other interlocutor’s context of work? What is their vocabulary? Answering these questions prepares you to learn the tools to connect to them, spark innovation, and make your point across in a way they can understand.

In essence, knowing your audience allows you to connect with it, so you pass from making a presentation they might not understand having a conversation they feel connected to.

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Repeat what you have heard

When having a conversation, it is very satisfying as a communicator, at least for me, when others acknowledge the message you are conveying.

So how can you make others feel the same way when communicating with them?

Structure your dialog, so you always have the opportunity to start your reply by acknowledging what the other person said and creating your argument from that. By doing this, you will make others feel heard and bases your idea on what they communicated.

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Defuse the fire, don’t fuel it

Everyone can have a bad day!

It is a truth that you need to acknowledge because it is straightforward to be contaminated by someone’s bad mood, and it will influence the conversation.

For me, it works by trying to acknowledge the situation and let the other person decompress and share his/her problem. By earing the person, you are helping that person to cope with it. Help that person look at it thru your eyes and share your feedback on it. Remember to share your insights and not be judgemental; you are trying to defuse the fire, not fuel it.

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Expect the unexpected

One reality you need to acknowledge is that unexpected things will always happen in any communication, the conversation you don’t control.

Knowing this will prepare you to expect the unexpected and to deal with the situations accordingly.

For instance, during a presentation, someone important makes an unexpected question that you don’t know the answer to. So what do you do? Breath in, don’t get nervous, explore the problem to narrow it down to a specific context and then if you don’t have the answer, give the honest reply you will follow up on it and provide a solution later.

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let’s hope this article clues to explore further the advantages of fostering good communication because doing this was a life-changer.

References

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/39a015c6-6bc7-11e3-85b 1–00144feabdc0

[1]https://www.guru99.com/agile-scrum-extreme-testing.html

[2]https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/a-simple-introduction-to-lean-ux

[3]https://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/ActiveListening.htm

[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201109/the-urge-be-heard-your-core

[5] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-need-to-belong-2795393