The New Manager Communication Skills to Avoid Big Mistakes

The New Manager Communication Skills to Avoid Big Mistakes
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New Manager Communication Skills Matter
Individual contributors, other managers and leaders tell us new manager communication skills matter.  In fact they can mean the difference between success and failure.

An Extreme Miscommunication Example
There was a report in the papers recently of a tragic consequence of miscommunication. A teenage girl who was about to bungee jump in Spain interpreted the “No jump” direction as her cue to jump — all before the rope was secured at the top. Her death was determined to have been caused by her misunderstanding of the instructor’s words.

She seemed to have heard, “Now jump.”

How Easy It Is To Miscommunicate
This tragedy is certainly an extreme example of the consequences of miscommunication. But it does illustrate how easy it is to get things wrong – especially when the stakes are high. People are apt to leap to hasty-but-incorrect conclusions, hear what they want to hear, or fill in the gaps in a faulty or incomplete message.

Performance and Relationships Can Suffer
You don’t want any of these outcomes in a complex organization that requires effective communication in order to run smoothly. When messages are mis-heard or mis-interpreted, performance and relationships suffer. That is why most of our new manager training programs emphasize foundational new manager communication skills.

Clear Communication is Getting Harder
Clear communication is an even greater challenge in today’s diverse and global workplace where people of different cultures, backgrounds, time zones and ethnicities must work well together. How easy it is to think that a nod is necessarily the signal to go ahead rather than one of simple understanding — or that a challenging question is a refusal rather than an attempt at clarification!

The Financial Costs of Poor Communication
a recent study by SIS International Research have shown that companies with only about 100 employees could lose more than $525,000 per year as a result of ineffective new manager communication skills.

The clear message here?

Make sure your new managers know what it takes to communicate clearly so their team knows exactly what is expected of them.

New Manager Communication Skills Training
We recommend new manager training for anyone who is taking on the responsibility of leading others. It takes a completely different set of skills to transition successfully from being an individual contributor to a new manager. But too many companies make the huge mistake of thrusting someone into a new supervisory role without adequately preparing them for the challenge and then they wonder why they have dysfunctional teams and under-performing employees.

Communication Skills Form the Foundation of Good Management Practices
As a new manager, you will need to know the basics of how to set expectations, manage performance, motivate, prioritize, and delegate.

But what will matter most in garnering the best performance from your team is how well you communicate all of those things. Communication is the basis for all good relationships. It is what engenders trust and is at the center for team collaboration and success.

Find a proven, interactive new manager communication skills program that will help you:

  • Understand and identify different communication styles
  • Match the right communication style to your objectives
  • Recognize and overcome the barriers that can cause misunderstandings
  • Know how to listen, ask questions, and reflect what you have heard to ensure accuracy
  • Build the kind of relationship that fosters trust, respect and loyalty

And then add a dose of humility to your interactions. You want your team members to feel free to ask questions and air concerns. If they are made to feel embarrassed for needing more clarity, their questions will go unanswered and misunderstandings can grow into big mistakes or conflict on the team.

The Bottom Line
Create an environment where there are no “wrong” questions, where everyone is a learner (including you as a new leader) and where everyone is striving to achieve common goals together.

To learn more about new manager communication skills, download Effective Communication Skills – The Essential Ingredient in Any Interaction

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