As a future executive, explain what you think are the most important communicati

Question

As a future executive, explain what you think are the most important communication issues you will have to face as you embark upon your career.

Discuss whether communication will become more complex, or less complex, and why.

Address what role technology will play in the communication of thoughts and ideas.

Discuss how the information gap between generations, cultures, income levels, and education can be resolved.

Include a statement of your personal philosophy on the future of integrated business communication.

Explanation / Answer

Communication is an essential part of daily interaction and work activities. Without effective communication, the message to be passed to the other members will not be clearly understood. Such issues can cause high tension, lack of clarity in sharing information and delay in action that needs to be taken. Miscommunication is a problem that can be avoided if the teams and personnel are willing to put adequate efforts. The most important issue that one can come across is miscommunication.

I can think back to an occasion where I reacted differently from how I should have. The incident occurred when my manager asked me to prepare a report and share it to consultants. The consultants had created a format for tracking project status. The fields of tracking were – Concept stage, functional stage, technical stage, build stage and deployed stage. This is a typical SDLC mechanism. They mistook all projects as software projects while we had few projects where the end output were whitepapers. When my manager asked me to fill the details, I checked with consultant on what they actually wanted. I understood and prepared the report accordingly. They had explained to me since whitepaper projects are basically study projects only concept stage would be present, since there is no deployment or development attached to it. We also mentioned it clearly in the status column. But someone in their team overlooked it and did the analysis considering all projects. Ideally the study projects should have been left out of deployment projects but it did not happen. The reports were shared to higher leadership but before the issue could escalate the problem was identified and solved.

The major cause of the problem was communication barriers. The person who prepared the report format did not communicate effectively in regards to what was actually required. Then we could not understand the format and there was miscommunication in regards to the filled report. There was again miscommunication between us and the consultants where we could not effectively communicate that study projects were also part of the list. All this could have been easily avoided if the entire team was present in one single room or call to discuss what was needed and how the data can be analyzed.

In future, with the advent of technology communication will become simple as compared to what we are using in the current age. Instant messaging and video conferencing have revolutionized the way individuals communicate with each other. For ensuring the message is passed properly, the technological inputs and support is very high. The data has to be accurately and authentically passed on to the end users. The data has to be protected too to ensure they are not shared to outsiders. But there are information which needs to be shared freely to all. To ensure the information organizations are working towards building a boundary less knowledge center where people share the ideas and knowledge and everyone can access them. They may be in the form of online platforms or road shows. But effort is being put out to ensure information sharing is proper in the community.

From a business perspective, integrated business communication will play a very crucial role in promoting the products and services in the coming years and decade. The role of integrated communication is well known to marketers who put extra effort to ensure all the communication and information out in the community are closely linked to a particular concept. I believe that in future all the keywords we use in our daily communication will be linked to IMC and systems will be in place to personalize certain experiences for us.

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