Business Writing Midterm Review – Flashcards
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Credibility
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- your reputation for being trustworthy - the degree to which others believe or trust in you
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Three components of credibility
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- competence: skills and knowledge required to get the job done (track record of success) - caring: interest of others' wellbeing, sense of community, and establishing accountability - character: reputation of keeping your word and adhering to high moral and ethical values
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Business ethics
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- commonly accepted beliefs and principles in the business community for acceptable behavior
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Transparency
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- involves sharing all relevant information with stakeholders
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Corporate values
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- the stated and lived values of a company
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Personal values
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- those values that individuals prioritize and adhere to
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FAIR test of ethical business communication
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- Facts (how factual is your communication?) - Access (how accessible or transparent are your motives, reasoning, and information?) - Impacts (how does your communication effect stakeholders?) - Respect (how respectful is your communication?)
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Engagement
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- a measure of how much employees are connected emotionally to their work, how willing they are to expend extra effort to help their organizations meet their goals, and how much energy they have to reach those goals.
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Coach's definition of Communication
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- meaningful transfer of information
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Interpersonal communication process
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- the process of sending and receiving verbal and nonverbal messages between two or more people. - involves the exchange of simultaneous and mutual messages to share and negotiate meaning between those involved
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Shared meaning
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- goal of interpersonal communication - a situation in which people involved in interpersonal communication attain the same understanding about ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
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Filter of Life Experiences
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- an accumulation of knowledge, values, expectations, and attitudes based on prior personal experiences - bias, world view, selective perceptions, noise, field of experience, moral compass, social norms - disrupts effective interpersonal communication
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Emotional hijacking
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- a situation in which emotions control our behavior causing us to react without thinking
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Self-awareness in emotional intelligence
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- involves accurately understanding your emotions as they occur and how they affect you
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Empathy in emotional intelligence
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- the ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them
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Clarifying
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- making sure you have a clear understanding of what others mean - includes double-checking that you understand the perspectives of others and asking them to elaborate and qualify their thoughts
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Relationship management
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- the ability to use your awareness of emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully
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Introverts
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- tend to get much of their stimulation and energy from their own thoughts, feelings, and moods.
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Extroverts
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- tend to get much of their stimulation and energy from external sources such as social interaction.
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Barriers to team effectiveness
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- Ineffective communication - Lack of effective chartering and goal setting - Lack of clarity and goal setting - Low morale - Low productivity - Lack of trust
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Principles of team effectiveness
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- Teams should focus first and foremost on performance - Teams go through four natural stages to reach high performance - Effective teams build a work culture around values, norms, and goals - Effective teams meet often
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Stages in Development of High-Performance Teams
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- Forming: team members focus on gaining acceptance and avoiding conflict - Storming: team members open up with their competing ideas about how the team should approach work - Norming: the team arrives at a work plan, including the roles, goals, and accountabilities - Performing: teams operate efficiently toward accomplishing their goals
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Types of meetings
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- Coordination: primarily focus on discussing roles, goals, and accountabilities. - Problem-solving: typically involve brainstorming about how to address and solve a particular work problem
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Running an effective virtual meeting
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- Start the meeting with social chat - Start with a contentious question - Asking "what do you think about" questions - Make sure each team member is involved - Articulate views precisely - Take minutes in real-time - Focus on your teammates and avoid multitasking - Use video when possible
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Components of difficult conversations
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1. Start well/declare your intent 2. Listen to their story 3. Tell your story 4. Create a shared story
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Projected cognitive similarity
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- the tendency to assume others have the same norms and values as your own cultural group.
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Outgroup homogeneity effect
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- the tendency to think members of other groups are all the same
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Cultural dimensions
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- fairly permanent and enduring sets of related norms and values
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Egalitarian cultures
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- People tend to distribute and share power evenly, minimize status differences, and minimize special privileges and opportunities for people just because they have higher authority
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The Process for Creating Business Messages
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- Writing effective business messages involves a process—one that involves examining, developing, and refining business ideas in a way that provides value to your audience - It drives collaboration and productivity in your work relationships.
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The Stages and Goals of Effective Message Creation (Stage 1: Planning - AIM)
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- Audience Analysis: understand the needs of the audience - Ideas: generate the best of ideas to address a business issue - Message: identify the primary message and key points
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The Stages and Goals of Effective Message Creation (Stage 2: Drafting - TSD)
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- Tone: Set a positive and other-oriented tone - Style: make the message easy to read - Design: make the message easy to navigate
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The Stages and Goals of Effective Message Creation (Stage 3: Reviewing - FPF)
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- FAIR test: ensure the communication is fair - Proofread: consider whether your message is effective - Feedback: remove any distractions
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The AIM Planning Process for Business Messages
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- Audience: identify benefits to others, recognize their values and priorities, and anticipate their reactions - Ideas: identify and analyze business problems at hand; display excellence in business thinking - message: identify and frame your primary message(s), choose your key points, and select your call to action
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Values
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refer to enduring beliefs and ideals that individuals hold
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Priorities
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- involve ranking or assigning importance to things, such as projects, goals and tasks
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Concern for Others
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- avoid relying too heavily on the I-Voice - respect the time and autonomy of your readers - give credit to others
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Meta messages
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- the overall but often underlying messages people take away from a communication or group of communications - encoded and decoded as a combination of content, tone, and other signals
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How to achieve completeness with three basic strategies
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- providing all relevant information - being accurate - being specific
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Accuracy
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- strongly impacts your readers' perceptions of your credibility - just one inaccurate statement can lead readers to dismiss your entire message and lower their trust in your future communications as well
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Be Specific
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- the more specific you are, the more likely your readers are to have their questions answered - if you are not specific, your readers may become impatient and begin scanning and skimming for the information they want
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Control Paragraph length
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- long paragraphs can signal disorganization and even disrespect for the reader's time - typically, paragraphs should contain 40 to 80 words - for routine messages, paragraphs as short as 20-30 words are common and appropriate
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Use short sentences in most cases
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- short sentences allow your readers to comprehend your ideas more easily - for routine messages, aim for average sentence length of 15 or fewer words
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Avoid Wordy Prepositional Phrases
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- eliminating extra words allows you to get your ideas across as efficiently as possible - you will often find that you can reduce word count by 30-40 percent simply by converting many of your prepositional phrases into single-word verbs
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Use Active voice
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- the doer-action-object allows for faster processing because most people's natural thinking occurs in this way - it also emphasizes the business orientation of action - most important, it specifies the doer
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Use Parallel Language
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- using parallel language means that you apply a consistent grammatical pattern accross a sentence or paragraph - parallelism is most important when you use series or lists
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Use Headings
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- in information-rich and complex messages, headings can help your readers identify key ideas and navigate the document to areas of interest - as you create headings and subheadings, be consistent in font style and formatting throughout your document
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Strategically Selecting Channels for Communication: Richness
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- involves two considerations: the level of immediacy and the number of cues available
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Strategically Selecting Channels for Communication: Immediacy
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- relates to how quickly someone is able to respond and give feedback
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Strategically Selecting Channels for Communication: Control
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- the degree to which communications can be planned and recorded, thus allowing strategic message development
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Strategically Selecting Channels for Communication: Planning
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- implies that the communication can be tightly drafted, edited and revised, rehearsed, and otherwise strategically developed before delivery
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Strategically Selecting Channels for Communication: Permanence
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- extent to which the message can be stored, retrieved, and distributed to others
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Strategically Selecting Channels for Communication: Constraints
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- the practical limitations of coordination and resources - coordination: deals with the effort and timing needed to allow all relevant people to participate in a communication - resources: include the financial, space, time, and other investments necessary to employ particular channels of communication
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Social Proof
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- a principle of influence whereby people determine what is right, correct, or desirable by seeing what others do
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Liking
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- a principle of influence whereby people are more likely to be persuaded by people who they like
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Scarcity
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- a principle of influence whereby people think there is limited availability of something they want or need, so they must act quickly
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Methods of Influence
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- reciprocation - consistency - Social proof - liking - authority - scarcity
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Message Structure
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- direct: begin with main idea or argument and then provide supporting reasons - explicit: nothing is implied, statements contain full and unambiguous meaning - indirect: they provide the rationale for a request before making the specific request - implicit: the request or some of the rationale for the request may be implied; the reader needs to read between the lines to grasp the entire meaning
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Composing Mass Sales Messages
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- gain attention - generate interest - build desire - call to action
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Persuasive Messages
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- potentially provide you with more professional opportunities and enhanced credibility, or they can close off future opportunities and diminish your credibility
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Manipulation
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- involves attempting to influence others by some level of deception so you can achieve your own interests - by applying the FAIR test, you can avoid sending persuasive messages that manipulate others
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Advantages to delivering bad news in writing
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- able to control the message more carefully and ensure that you state the bad news precisely and accurately
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Severity
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- how serious or detrimental the bad news is
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Controllability
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- the degree to which the bad-news message receiver can alter the outcome
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Likelihood
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- the probability of the bad event occuring
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Indirect Bad-News Messages
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- ease in with a buffer - provide a rationale - deliver the bad news - explain impacts - focus on the future as appropriate) - show goodwill
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Direct Bad-News Messages
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- ease in with a buffer - deliver the bad news - provides rationale - explain impacts - focus on the future (as appropriate) - show goodwill
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Buffer
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- a statement to establish common ground, show appreciation, state your sympathy, or otherwise express goodwill
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Teaser message
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- signal to recipients that an upcoming conversation or other communication may involve unpleasant news - prepares recipients emotionally yet does not reveal specific information - often written
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Mum effect: Delivering bad news within the company
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- occurs when the chain of messages within an organization is filtered at each level to leave out or inaccurately state the bad news - the message that top executives often hear ends up being unrealistically rosy
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Delivering bad news in writing to external partners
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- better off breaking bad news to them in a rich communication channel - in person or by phone
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Delivering Negative Feedback
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- adopt a team-centered orientation - avoid sugarcoating the bad news - explain the impacts of the individual's poor performance on organizational performance - link to consequences - probe for reasons performance is not higher - emphasize problem solving rather than blaming - be firm
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Receiving Negative Feedback
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- seeking and receiving feedback, even when it's negative, will help you develop the skills you need to make an impact in the workplace and move into new positions
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Analyzing Your Audience for Business Reports
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- the first step is identifying what decisions makers want to accomplish - spend time with your target audience of decision makers to carefully consider their primary business goals, research objectives, and expectations
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Primary research
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- the analysis of data that you, people from your org, or others under your direction have collected
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Secondary research
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- the analysis of data collected by others with no direction from you or members of your organization
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Closed questions
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- restrict respondents to certain answers (rating scales, multiple choice, etc)
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Open-ended questions
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- allow respondents to answer in any way they choose
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Survey questions should be
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- simple to answer - non-leading - exhaustive and unambiguous - limited to a single idea
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Effective Charts
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- line: useful for depicting events and trends over time - pie: useful for illustrating the pieces within a whole - bar: useful to compare amounts or quantities
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Evaluating Data Quality
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- reliability: relates to how dependable the data is - how current and representative - relevance: relates to how well the data apply to your specific business problem - adaptability: relates to how well the research can be altered or revised to meet your specific business problem - expertise: relates to the skill and background of the researchers to address your business problem - biases: tendencies to see issues from particular perspectives - white papers: reports or guides that generally describe research about solving a particular issue - industry publications: written to cater to the specific interests of members in particular industries
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Visual learners
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- learn best from illustrations and simple diagrams to show relationships and key ideas - make up about 40% of the population
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Auditory learners
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- like loud, clear voices and believe emotion is best conveyed through voice - comprise roughly 40% of the population
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Kinesthetic learners
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- need to participate to focus their attention on your message and learn best - make up about 20% of the population
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Positioning statement
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- frames your message in appealing terms to your audience and demonstrates clear and valuable benefits to them
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Overview statement
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- one to three sentences in simple, conversational language - segments the presentation in terms of three key benefits or takeaway messages
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PREP method
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- state your position - provide the reasons - give an example - restate your position
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Conclude with an Effective Review
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- make sure to have a strong finish - recap your message in just a few sentences - provide a call to action
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Applying the story line approach to your presentation
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- story line allows your listeners to engage on a deeper level emotionally and intellectually - people remember stories more easily than they do abstract information, and they are more likely to act on what they hear via stories
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Communicate nonverbally
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- smile - open stance - forward lean - tone - eye contact - nod
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Field questions
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- pause before answering - be honest - show appreciation - be concise - reframe he question to match your agenda
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Present effectively in teams
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- be clear with one another about your objectives and key messages - decide on your presentation roles - stand together and present a united front - refer to one another's points - transition effectively
