As Africans we love to talk, we love impressing with long, ambiguous and multiple use of similar words to make our point. We want to communicate to impress hence, we begin to ramble and become confused. At the end we lose the point and end up confusing ourselves and everyone else. We are also quite sentimental and emotional as Africans. In trying to drive sentiments we keep talking and talking till we lose co-ordination, direction and purpose of our thought and point. Truth is many employees have brief attention span. They are busy and hardly have time for unnecessary, long talks that will waste their time. While still talking, many that make up your audience are already thinking of the next thing they need to attend to or even some personal issues needing urgent attention. Employee attention span is short, long talk is a total waste in most corporate environments. Keep it simple short and precise. Your intelligence is not reflected in the quantity of your words or eloquence but in the quality of your views. Talk less but make more sense.When speaking be clear, concise, direct; summarise; use fewer words by building up your vocabulary. Also, many of us don’t like asking questions. We hate to look like we don’t get it or are slow. We also don’t like to ask questions because we really don’t know how to ask or what to ask. We are not even sure of what we need to understand because most of us don’t understand the approach to inquiry. Every question should be driven by a desire to know not criticise or seek loop holes. The quality of the response you get probably reflects the quality of your question and not always the intelligence of the respondent. The simple idea in getting the right answers to your question is to be clear on what you want to know. Is it about a person, a purpose, a place, a process, a reason, or a season? All questions are derived from these six main inquiring points. An inquiry about a person should be derived from the question who? An inquiry about a purpose should be derived from the question what? An inquiry about a place should be derived from the question where? An inquiry about a process should be derived from the question how? An inquiry about a reason should be derived from the question why? An inquiry about a season should be derived from the question when? In asking your questions and to avoid ambiguity and achieve clarity, simplicity and quick understanding, your questions should be anchored around these inquiry points – what, who, where, when, why and how. Knowing this will help your co-ordination and navigation through submissions, prayers and appeals without losing the core of the communication context. To enhance your team spirit and ability to get the right things done on time, ask the right questions, know what you want to find out, avoid bias and subjectivity. Seek for facts, identify and list them, then work with them. Please learn to ask questions, it takes nothing away from you and it doesn’t mean you’re slow, it may even be the brief that is unclear, so please ask questions, don’t assume, don’t speculate or conjure. Learn to ask the right questions. by Muyiwa
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 18:56:58 +0000
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