Managing For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Communicating Your Message

In This Chapter

• Valuing informal communication over formal communication

• Discovering new ways to communicate

• Listening to others

• Communicating your thoughts in writing

• Making effective presentations

• Identifying the real side of communication

Getting your message across to your employees, peers, boss, clients, vendors, and customers is very important in the business world. Conveying that message means you have to be a good communicator — and it's extremely difficult to be an effective manager if you don't communicate well.

The twist is that you have more ways to communicate today than at any other point in the long history of business, and many more avenues are on the way. Just a couple decades ago, managers had only a few different communications skills to master; telephones, letters, face-to-face conversations, and the occasional speech or presentation were about it. Now, however, you have all kinds of exciting and new ways to tell your counterpart on the other side of the world to take a hike. You have e-mail — both on local networks within companies and on the Internet — voice mail, voice pagers, conference calls, teleconferencing, faxes, mobile phones, satellite uplinks, satellite downlinks, and on and on. Certain airlines even offer in-flight Wi-Fi, so you can access the Internet and send and receive e-mail messages from 40,000 feet above Earth.

This chapter is about communicating with others and, in particular, mastering the way in which you do ...