Managing Communication Difficulties within a Team

Communication is an important element at the workplace, especially within a team. Someone will negotiate, provide feedback, or even delivering a bad news. It's not easy doing so.

Oftentimes, misunderstanding and unpleasant things happen when you communicate with others. Sometimes a normal conversation can escalate to a heated debate. You might find this when you talk about company budget, project timeline, resources, and many more.

What makes communication difficult?

There are many factors influencing communication dynamic within a team. Some factors like culture, language, education background, or values can be a determining factor. Conversation topic can also have a role, even more so if there are 2 opposing opinion.

Human is not as rational and logical as we think. When human becomes emotional, they usually lost the ability to think clearly and make decision rationally. In practice, our emotion often comes even before the conversation begun.

If we're unable to manage our emotion effectively, it will cause a long-lasting problem and becomes a ticking bomb.

Managing Communication Difficulties

Communication problem is quite risky in business, especially on corporation scale because it can hinder team performance and influencing business performance in general. These problems can be solved with these 4 tips to make your communication more effective.

1. Build Self Awareness

The first step to understand the communication dynamic within a team is with self awareness. Self awareness can helo pyou to identify what challenges arises when communicating with your team.

Take a brief moment to evaluate hard or emotional conversation. Identify waht makes you or the team hard to communicate. If possible, avoid topics that could trigger emotional conversation and pay attention to the end of conversation.

2. Prepare Before Initiating Conversation

Spare some minutes before starting conversation or important meeting to prepare. Use those times to think thoroughly what is the objective? How do you see the problem to discuss in this meeting? What do you expect from this conversation?

These reflective questions can be used to prepare yourself to make the conversation more managable. Also, prepare some data, facts, or concrete examples that you want to convey to your team or colleagues.

This way, you can have a better understanding of others and what do they want. These steps will makes you sensitive and focus on the content of the conversation and less likely to react emotionally. 

3. Change Mindset by Understanding First

When a person initiating conversation with objectives in mind to be understood first, the effectivity of the conversation will become very limited. Change your mindset to be more open to new things and curiosity of what others want. It can be done by ask open-ended question and actively listening to their answer.

Conversation should be 2-way and collaborative. Use this chance to discuss comprehensively about common problems, before use your own judgement to summarize. Communicate when every audience is sit down can lead to calmer environment rather than standing.

When your chance comes to give your perspective, speak honestly. Use this opportunity to speak calmly, do not accuse or undermining others, so the conversation won't be confrontational and conflictual.

4. Be Responsive, Not Reactive

Always aware to and manage your emotion when communicating with a team. Sometimes, you are unaware with what you feel. Negative emotions can take over. This can be difficult when audience try to accuse or underestimate you.

There are things that supposed to make situation uncomfortable. If that happens, try to take a moment, control your breathing to slow your heartbeat and keep connected to the rational side of your brain.

The main objective of communcation is to respond with full awareness, rather than being reactive when provoked. A little pause and silence can be a solid step, even 5 seconds can feel like 5 years.

Accomodating communcation needs in a team - a learning scope of Self-Leadership program - enable managers to build communication at work and positive relationship with others. Therefore, team communication can run positively and help company to achieve its objective.