Guest Post: Junyong Suh

Junyong is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College. Here he writes about communicating on the job.

I cannot imagine even a single day without communication in my life. No matter what you do, you have to communicate with others, especially if you’re in your work place. Almost everyone agrees that communication plays a huge part in work but most of them also agree that they’ve seen someone just talk but never communicate. What is their problem? Why don’t they listen to others and repeat their opinions? But the thing is, you could be such person to them and the most important thing is we can’t avoid them in our work places. We still need to talk and to work with these types of people.

When I think of difficult conversations, I recall my terrible experience in my previous work place that I had such person as my boss. He was the classic example of a difficult person who doesn’t listen but talks in a way he likes—and I was the only one working on his team. I was having a hard time and I realized that I was not the only one who thought he was difficult. I found other colleagues even from other departments knew him as a difficult person and even a janitor told me about him. So to speak, he was notorious.

During the year-and-half I worked with him, I summarized what my boss said right after any meeting or talking and sent it to him to confirm. If I didn’t, he would say something else later and blame me. I had to keep those reports simple and direct, not to make my boss complain about wasting his time reading them. I also had to include every point that might be misunderstood. Although he complained most of the time that I didn’t get it at once, I could get what he wanted at the end. Based on the reports, I got through the time until he moved to another department.

After that time, I had two bosses and they both pointed out that my reports were very good for preventing miscommunication. I feel good that I acquired a good skill but at the same time I feel some irony that I learned how to communicate with my bosses from the notorious difficult person. I paid a year-and-half of harsh time to get this communication skill.