Interpersonal Communication

Communication is key in any organization and business. This is how successful businesses are operated. Good listening skills go hand and hand with listening. When speaking or being spoken to you must listen to the important facts in any conversation. Poor listening skills will always have a negative impact. There are always going to be topics people are not interested in listening to. Many people tend to listen to important facts not the entire conversation. This is when listening skills become negative. You may drift off and think of something different while someone is speaking. What is listening? I have asked myself this many times. The correct way to listen is, the active process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages. It involves the ability to retain information, as well as to react empathically and/or appreciatively to spoken and/or nonverbal messages. I believe in order to have an effective organization you must learn to communicate effectively at all times.

At the organization I work for we have meetings on a regular basis. The meetings are broken down with in departments and sometimes with others. Once a month we have a mandatory meeting the President of the company gives. The University of Phoenix campus in Southern California is all there whether it is in person or on a conference call. Since I work for the main campus in Costa Mesa I can attend in person. You must be very quite and listen to what is going on with them company. If it is loud or very crowded in the classroom in which it is held the listening becomes difficult. With these important meeting held monthly you must pay attention because you have to be in know. Information is related to us employees in which we must use. You never know when you will be tested or asked a question pertaining to the meetings. There was a time when poor listening habits had a negative impact on my work. In our monthly meeting crucial information was relayed to everyone. We were told how to keep students enrolled during the holiday season. This is the only time of the year when students start dropping. The stress of all the work and holidays can cause a student to drop. We were told we must retain as much students as possible. If we got a phone call we were told what to say. I work in the Academic Affairs department. This means I do not have to speak to students. A negative impact occurred when one on my fellow workers received a test phone call asking questions about the student retention plan. She must have not listened well in the meeting. Therefore she failed and it caused a negative impact in my department. Empathetic listening could have improved this situation if only she had responded to others and had a mutual understanding including respecting the fact that we had to listen in this important meeting.

Since this was a test phone call to one person who did not know the answers the President looked down amongst our department. If we do not have students enrolled during the holiday season then this affects our bonuses. This is why it was so important to listen. Some factors that effected the interpersonal communication in this event were she failed to ask questions to other team members in this meeting. We all knew this was going to occur and we wanted to be prepared. If she had communicated any concerns to others we have helped out, making sure all information was understood. Within my team members and department we all have good Interpersonal communication. We have all interacted for a long period of time. I wish she had asked others therefore we would have passed this test phone call.

In this situation listening habits had a negative effective in my place of business with relationships with others for a simple reason. It was the lack of listening that had the negative effect. The person that received the test phone call could not listen to the topics of the meeting and service the call at the same time. It was her

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