Jiri’s Notepad

Are excellent communicators born or bred? To communicate well you need probably a bit of both, but it turns out that a large part can be learnt.

Genie Laborde, the author Influencing With Integrity, comes from the school of thought that looks at an effective communication process, breaks it down into smaller elements that can be learnt bit by bit. It does not come as a surprise then that the book does an excellent job of describing and illustrating these small pieces underlying effective communication, including identification of outcomes, paying notice to other people verbal and non-verbal signals, their preferred communication style, building rapport, clarification of what others meant to say rather than what they said and few others. It then brings all these together illustrating their application on few areas, such as negotiation, meetings management and sales.

Reading alone has rarely turned anyone into a master and so the chances are that you will find that the few exercises that are included in each chapter useful (not talking about the surprise that some of its results may cause). As there is never enough practice you may also want to get hold of the accompanying exercise work book called Ninety Days to Communication Excellence. Be careful, this out of print book(let) can be either ridiculously cheap or ridiculously expensive and so it is worth shopping around!

With other books on the subject of influencing and persuasion, one sometimes cannot shake off the aftertaste of manipulation and machiavelism. One of the great thing about this book is that it not only helps you to learn the basic communication skills but also covers how to them in an honest and ethical manner.