Communicator Strategy

Managers who set goals and objectives before communicating are more competent and more successful. Setting objectives in this circumstance means putting yourself in the shoes of your spectators and determining their response.

For example, in its place of saying that you want to write a memo requesting financial support for a business trip to meet with the sales force, you would set your communication objective as follows: "As a result of reading this memo, my boss will agree that I need to travel to meet with the sales force." This delicate shift makes all the variation in how you organize your message, what information to contain, and what tone you use.

In accumulation, the talker must think about what communication approach to use. Tannenbaum and Schmidt wrote about communication style in a landmark Harvard Business Review article. Their advance breaks down style into four categories: sell, consult, tell, and join. If you want merely to teach or clarify something, use a "tell" style. If, as a substitute, you want to convince your audience to do something, use a "sell" style. If you need to confer with your audience and necessitate more information from them use a "consult" style. If you need collaboration use a "join" style of communication.

Lastly, the communicator must also think about what kind of reliability he or she has with the audience. This can be based on rank, goodwill, proficiency, image, or even shared standards. Communicating strategically means thinking about what kind of reliability you have going into the communication  and what you strength do to obtain such reliability over time.

To get back to our previous example, if the conversationalist has asked for travel backing quite a few times over the last year and skillful little as a result, chances are that the boss will not grant the demand because the communicator has misplaced goodwill reliability.