Guest Post: Deepak Rangarajan

Deepak is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College. Here he writes about real-world oral communication.

I strongly believe in the quote “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people” by William Butler Yeats. Yes, it is true that in real world, most of us fail to communicate information in simple terms. The reality is the more succinct the information, the easier it is to understand. In the current competitive world, the majority of companies have started emphasizing communication skills and as a result lots of job opportunities are available for those people who can articulate their thoughts effectively.

Effective communication must follow some basic rules : The topic must be concise; it must cater to the needs of the audience; it must be attractive enough to make the audience listen; it must be presented with positive body language; the speaker must be relaxed and try to connect with the audience. There is enough evidence to suggest that any information communicated visually will reach the audience faster than those communicated verbally. The reason is that people get attracted to what they see and hence it is highly recommended that one should incorporate efficient oral communications with visual representation. In addition, there are circumstances when we had to face difficult conversation, such as negotiating salary with Human Resources. In such scenarios, we must first try to engage with the people by sharing feelings or exchanging pleasantries and inquiring questions such as how is he/she doing or talk about something that is of mutual interest to both of us. This will make the audience like our conversation and they will gradually connect with us.

I had a personal experience in my previous organization when our CEO presented a session about our quarter performance. Most of us had already experienced similar presentations from other top management people and felt uninterested. To the surprise of all, the session was very interactive as our CEO articulated his thoughts clearly, the slides were very succinct, and he emphasized more on the visual part rather than text in his presentation. For instance, he conveyed the quarter performance and his message for the future through an attractive picture. The message he conveyed was “You are only looking at the trees, but I am looking at the forest;” it had an image of a person looking at the entire forest and a person looking at a single tree. The actual meaning was that each of the employees was only looking at the task that was assigned to him/her rather than focusing on the holistic picture, i.e., the company goal, which was to empower the world to learn. The employees were very attentive throughout the session and understood what their levels of responsibilities were. Hence, this was one such case where an effective oral communication with visual representation made people realize their responsibilities.