Communication Style Matching
Understanding your personal style of communicating will go a long way toward helping you create good and lasting impressions on others. By becoming more aware of how others perceive you, you can adapt more readily to their styles of communicating. Communication style is not only important in our personal lives, but also an essential quality every employee and manager must have as part of their standard tool set.
Individuals have various preferences for both communicating with others and interpreting the communications from others. Numerous models have been developed which describe how to recognize an individual's preferred style of communicating and what strategy to use in communicating most effectively with them. The DiSC profile assessment is a great model for testing communication skills and discovering individual preferences and communication style elements. Testing is an effective way to help organizations discover communication styles and help employees work together in a more productive manner. It also enables people to develop interpersonal skills and self-awareness, improves team performance, creates a more positive and productive cultural environment, and helps increase awareness of their style and how it directly impacts others.
Many of us are poor communicators. We don not know how to talk and listen effectively. Communication is one of the most important qualities for success. To communicate effectively is not simple task. Testing your communication style is the first step in understanding how we communicate and are perceived by others. We also learn others communication style and how to better correspond with them. Knowing your communication style will strengthen your conversations and help you to develop the rapport that is essential in work and in life. The added bonus of knowing your style is that it gives you a new perspective that can help you to reinforce your strengths and build upon your weaknesses.
We all have aspects of each of style within us. Some of us can easily move from one style to another and adapt our style to the needs of the situation. For others, our dominant style is very evident and it is more challenging to see the situation from the perspective of another style. Some people use one style at work and another at home. The good news about communication styles is that we all have the ability to develop flexibility in our styles. The greater the flexibility we have, the more skilled we usually are at handling possible and actual conflicts. It is important to understand how your communication style is interpreted by others to avoid miscommunication and misunderstandings.
