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What are the three advantages of a diverse workforce?

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-Obtaining More Views and Ideas -Understanding of Diverse Markets -Accessing a Broader Pool of Talent

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What do smart business leaders recognize?

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the competitive advantages of a workforce that offers a broader spectrum of viewpoints and ideas, helps companies understand diverse markets, and enables companies to benefit from a wider range of employee talents

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What are the challenges of intercultural communication?

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-Connecting with Diverse Employees -Working Closely Together in Teams -Sending and Receiving Messages

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includes an appreciation for cultural differences that affect communication and the ability to adjust one's communication style to ensure that efforts to send and receive messages across cultural boundaries are successful. In other words, it requires a combination of attitude, knowledge, and skills.

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Cultural competency

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What is there to understanding the concepts of cultuer?

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Symbols, Attitudes, expectations, beliefs, values, norms

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the tendency to judge all other groups according to your own group's standards, behaviors, and customs

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Ethnocentrism

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a fear of strangers and foreigners

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xenophobia

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ascribing a wide range of generalized attributes to an individual on the basis of his or her membership in a particular culture or social group, without considering the individual's unique characteristics

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Stereotyping

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is the practice of accepting multiple cultures on their own terms

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Cultural pluralism

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How do you go about accepting cultures on their own terms?

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Avoid assumptions- Do not assume that others will act the same way you do, operate from the same assumptions, or use language and symbols the same way you do. Avoid judgments- When people act differently, do not conclude that they are in error, that their way is invalid, or that their customs are inferior to your own Acknowledge distinctions- Do not ignore differences between another person's culture and your own.

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What are the 8 main types of cultural differences>

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contextual, legal and ethical, social, nonverbal, age, gender, religious, and ability

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When communicating across cultures, keep your messages ethical by applying four basic principles:

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-Actively seek mutual ground. -Send and receive messages without judgment. -Send messages that are honest. -Show respect for cultural differences.

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In the United States, for instance, a widespread view is that material comfort earned by individual effort is a sign of superiority, and that people who work hard are better than those who don't.

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Attitudes toward work and success

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Culture influences the roles that people play, including who communicates with whom, what they communicate, and in what way.

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Roles and status

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What is polite in one culture may be rude in another.

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Use of manners

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People in low-context cultures see time as a way to plan their business days efficiently, viewing time as a limited resource. However, executives from high-context cultures often see the efficient use of time as being less important than building a business relationship.

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Concepts of time

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Successful companies tend to have a strong future orientation, planning for and investing in the future; but national cultures around the world vary widely in this viewpoint.

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Future orientation

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Cultures vary on how open they are to accepting people from other cultures or those who don't fit the prevailing norms within the culture. An unwillingness to accommodate others can range from outright exclusion to subtle pressures to conform to majority expectations.

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Openness and inclusiveness

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Don't assume that colleagues and customers around the world use the same communication tools that you use.

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Use of communication technologies

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What are the nonverbal differences between how people communicate in different cultures?

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Greetings, Personal Space, Touching, Posture, Eye Contacts, Formality, Facial Expressions

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Successful intercultural communication requires more than just an understanding of the other party's culture; you need to understand your own culture and the way it shapes your communication habits.

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Become aware of your own biases

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You probably heard this growing up: "Treat people the way you want to be treated." The problem with the Golden Rule is that it assumes other people want to be treated the same way you want to be treated. This is not always the case, particularly across cultural boundaries. The best approach: treat people the way they want to be treated

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Ignore the "Golden Rule

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As IBM's Ron Glover puts it, "To the greatest extent possible we try to manage our people and our practices in ways that are respectful of the core principles of any given country, organization, or culture."

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Exercise tolerance, flexibility, and respect

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Even the most committed and attuned business professionals can make mistakes during intercultural communication, so it is vital for all parties to be patient with one another. A sense of humor is a helpful asset as well, allowing people to move past awkward and embarrassing moments.

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Practice patience and maintain a sense of humo

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U.S. culture expects individuals to succeed by their own efforts, and it rewards individual success. Even though teamwork is emphasized in many companies, competition between individuals is expected.

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Individualism

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The concept of equality is considered a core American value. To a greater degree than many other cultures, Americans believe that every person should be given the opportunity to pursue whatever dreams and goals he or she may have in life

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Equality

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People in this country are accustomed to a fair amount of privacy, and this includes their "personal space" at work.

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Privacy and personal space

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In the U.S., businessmen and businesswomen value punctuality and the efficient use of time. For instance, meetings are expected to start and end at designated times.

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Time and schedules

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The U.S. does not have an official religion. Many different religions are practiced throughout the country, and people are expected to respect each other's beliefs.

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Religion

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Communication tends to be direct and focused on content and transactions, not relationships or group harmony.

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Communication style

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How can you improve your intercultural communication skills?

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Communicating successfully from one culture to another requires a variety of skills. You can improve your intercultural skills throughout your career. Begin now by studying other cultures and languages, respecting preferences for communication styles, learning to write and speak clearly, listening carefully, knowing when to use interpreters and translators, and helping others adapt to your culture

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How do you go about studying other peoples culture?

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Effectively adapting your communication efforts to another culture requires not only knowledge about the culture but also the ability and the motivation to change your personal habits as needed. Fortunately, you do not need to learn about the whole world all at once. Even a small amount of research and practice will help you get through many business situations. Most people respond positively to honest effort and good intentions, and many business associates will help you along if you show an interest in learning more about their cultures. You will gradually accumulate knowledge, which will help you feel comfortable and be effective in a wide range of business situations. Numerous websites and books offer advice on traveling to and working in specific cultures. Also, try to sample newspapers, magazines, and the music and movies of another country.

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Respecting communication styles and preferences

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Communication style—including the level of directness, the degree of formality, media preferences, and other factors—varies widely from culture to culture. Knowing what your communication partners expect can help you adapt to their particular styles. Once again, watching and learning are the best ways to improve your skills.

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What are the 4 steps of writing clearly?

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-Choose words carefully. -Be brief, using simple sentences and short paragraphs. -Use plenty of transitions. -Address international correspondence properly

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Understanding the three- step writing process

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By following the process introduced in this chapter, you can learn to create successful messages that meet audience needs and highlight your skills as a perceptive business professional. The three-step writing process helps ensure that your messages are both effective (meeting your audience's needs and getting your points across) and efficient (making the best use of your time and your audience's time).

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Planning business messages

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To plan any message, first analyze the situation by defining your purpose and developing a profile of your audience. With that in mind, you can gather information that will meet your audience's needs. Next, select the right combination of media and channels (oral, written, visual, or electronic) to deliver your message. Then, organize the information by defining your main idea, limiting your scope, selecting an approach, and outlining your content. Planning messages is the focus this chapter.

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Writing business messages

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Once you've planned your message, adapt to your audience with sensitivity, relationship skills, and style. Then you're ready to compose your message by choosing strong words, creating effective sentences, and developing coherent paragraphs. Writing business messages is discussed in Chapter 5.

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Completing business messages

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. After writing your first draft, revise your message to make sure it is clear, concise, and correct. Next, produce your message, giving it an attractive, professional appearance. Proofread the final product for typos, spelling errors, and other mechanical problems. Finally, distribute your message using the best combination of personal and technological tools. Completing business messages is discussed in Chapter 6. Throughout this book, you'll see this three-step process applied to a wide variety of business messages.

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Planning effectively

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As soon as the need to create a message appears, inexperienced writers often dive directly into writing. However, skipping or shortchanging the planning stage often creates extra work and stress later in the process. First, thoughtful planning is necessary to make sure you provide the right information in the right format to the right people. Second, with careful planning, the writing stage is faster, easier, and a lot less stressful. Third, planning can save you from embarrassing blunders that could hurt your company or your career.

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Analyzing the situation

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Every communication effort takes place in a particular situation, meaning you have a specific message to send to a specific audience under a specific set of circumstances. Making the right choices starts with defining your purpose clearly and understanding your audience's needs.

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general purpose

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to inform, to persuade, or to collaborate with your audience

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Specific purpose

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To help you define the specific purpose, ask yourself what you hope to accomplish with your message and what your audience should do or think after receiving your message.

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Consider the audience's perspective

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Put yourself in the audience's position; what are they thinking, feeling, or planning? What information do they need?

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Listen to the community

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For almost any subject related to business, there is a community of customers, product enthusiasts, or other people who engage in online discussions. Find them and listen to what they have to say.

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Read reports and other company documents

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Annual reports, news releases, blogs, marketing reports, and customer surveys are just a few of the many potential sources. Find out whether your company has a knowledge-management system: a centralized database that collects the experiences and insights of employees throughout the organization.

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Talk with supervisors, colleagues, or customers

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They may have information you need, or they may know your audience's interests.

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Ask your audience for input.

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Admitting that you don't know exactly what they expect but that you want to meet their needs will impress your audience.

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journalistic approach

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check to see whether your message answers who, what, when, where, why, and how. Using this method, you can quickly tell whether a message fails to deliver.

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Selecting the best combination of media and channels

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With the necessary information in hand, your next decision involves the best combination of media and channels to reach your target audience. The medium is the form a message takes and the channel is the system used to deliver the message. The distinction between the two isn't always crystal clear, and some people use the terms in different ways, but these definitions are a good way to think about the possibilities for business communication. Most media can be distributed through more than one channel, so whenever you have a choice, think through your options to select the optimum combination.

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The most common medium and channel combinations

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The simplest way to categorize media choices is to divide them into oral (spoken), written, and visual. Each of these media can be delivered through digital and non-digital channels, which creates six basic combinations discussed in the following sections.

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Screen size and resolution

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The limited size of screens on mobile devices presents a challenge because many messages are significantly larger than the screens they will be viewed on. The result is a dilemma that pits clarity again context.

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Input technologies

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Even for accomplished texters, typing on mobile keyboards can be a challenge. Voice recognition can overcome keyboard limitations, but using it in public areas presents privacy risks. If your website content or other messages and materials require a significant amount of input activity from recipients, try to make it as easy as possible for them.

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Bandwidth, speed, and connectivity limitations

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The speed and quality of mobile connectivity varies widely by device, carrier, service plan, and geographic location. Don't assume that your mobile recipients will be able to satisfactorily consume the content that you might be creating on a fast, reliable, in-office network.

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Data usage and operational costs

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Data consumption is a key concern for mobile carriers and customers alike. Many mobile users do not have unlimited data-usage plans, and some carriers restrict bandwidth. Given these factors, be careful about expecting or requiring mobile users to consume a lot of video or other data-intensive content.

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Media richness

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Richness is a medium's ability to (1) convey a message via more than one informational cue, (2) facilitate feedback, and (3) establish personal focus. The richest medium is face-to-face communication. Lean media restrict audience feedback and aren't personalized.

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Message Formality

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Your choice of media is a nonverbal signal that governs the style and tone of your message.

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Media and Channel limitations

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Every medium and channel has limitations, so choose carefully according to the situation and the audience.

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Urgency.

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Choose the medium wisely, if a message is urgent. However, be sure to respect the time and workloads of audience members.

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Cost

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The expense involved in using various media is not only a real financial factor but also a perceived nonverbal signal

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Audience preferences

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. Make sure that you consider the media your audience expects or prefers.

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Security Privacy

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Never imagine that your digital communications are private. Many companies monitor employees' communication. Moreover, hackers can infiltrate networks and messages can be forwarded to unintended recipients.

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Organizing your information

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(1) It helps your audience understand your message. (2) It helps your audience accept your message. (3) It saves your audience time.

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Topic

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the overall subject, such as employee insurance claims

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Main Idea

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is a specific statement about the topic of your message, such as your belief that a new online system for filing claims would reduce costs for the company and expedite reimbursements for employees

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Brainstormings

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. Generate as many ideas and questions as you can, without stopping to criticize or organize. Then, look for the main idea and groups of supporting ideas

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Journalistic approach

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Introduced earlier in the chapter, this approach asks who, what, when, where, why, and how questions in order to distill major ideas from piles of unorganized information.

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Question-and-answer chain

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. Start with a key question from the audience's perspective and work back toward your message. In most cases, you'll find that each answer generates new questions, until you identify the information that needs to be in your message.

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Storytellers tour

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Pretend you're giving a colleague a guided tour of your message and capture it on a tape recorder. Then listen to your talk, identify ways to tighten and clarify the message, and repeat the process. Working through this recording several times will help you distill the main idea to a single, concise message.

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Mind Mapping

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When using this graphic method, start with the main idea and then branch out to connect every other related idea that comes to mind.

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Scope

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the range of information you present, the overall length, and the level of detail—all of which need to correspond to your main idea.

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Two key efforts help you address your own needs while building positive relationships with your audience

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establishing your credibility and projecting your company's image.

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Understand the difference between texting and writing.

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The casual, acronym-filled style of text messaging, IM, and social networking is not professional business writing. If you want to be taken seriously in business, you simply cannot write like that on the job.

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Avoid stale, pompous language

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Avoid using dated phrases, obscure words, stale or clichéd expressions, and complicated sentences to impress others.

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Avoid preaching and bragging

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Few things are more irritating than know-it-alls who like to preach or brag. However, if you need to remind your audience of something that should be obvious, try to work the information in casually, so it will sound like a secondary comment rather than a major revelation.

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Be careful with intimacy

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Business messages should avoid intimacy. Yet, if you have a close relationship with audience members (such as on a close-knit team) a more intimate tone is expected

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Be careful with humor

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If you don't know your audience well, or if you're not skilled at using humor in a business setting, don't use it at all. Avoid humor in formal messages and when you're communicating across cultural boundaries.

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Plain language

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Easy to read, understand, and take action

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active voice

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the subject ("actor") comes before the verb, and the object ("acted upon") comes after the verb

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Passiv voice

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when the subject follows the verb and the object precedes it (e.g., "The car was rented by Joe.") As you can see, the passive voice combines the helping verb to be with the past participle of a verb. The passive voice is not wrong grammatically, but it is often vague and makes sentences longer.

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Choose strong, precise words

answer

Choose words that express your thoughts most clearly, specifically, and dynamically. Nouns and verbs are the most concrete, so use them as much as you can. Adjectives and adverbs have obvious roles, but they often evoke subjective judgments. Verbs are powerful because they tell what's happening in the sentence, so make them dynamic and specific.

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Choose familiar words

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You'll communicate best with words that are familiar to your readers. However, keep in mind that words that are familiar to one reader might be unfamiliar to another.

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Avoid clichés and buzzwords

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. Although familiar words are generally the best choice, avoid clichés—terms and phrases so common that they have lost some of their power to communicate. Buzzwords are newly coined terms often associated with technology, business, or cultural changes. The careful use of a buzzword can signal that you're an insider, someone in the know. However, using them too late in their "life cycle" can mark you as an outsider desperately trying to look like an insider.

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Use jargon carefully

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Jargon is the specialized language of a particular profession or industry; its use can help you communicate within the specific groups that understand it. When deciding whether to use jargon, let your audience's knowledge guide you.

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Composing your message

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Arranging carefully chosen words in effective sentences is the next step in creating successful messages. Start by selecting the best type of sentence to communicate each point you want to make.

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Heading

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is a brief title that tells readers about the content of the section that follows. Subheadings indicate subsections within a major section; complex documents may have several levels of subheadings.

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Descriptive heading

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such as "Cost Considerations," identify a topic but do little more

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Information headings

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such as "Redesigning Material Flow to Cut Production Costs," put your reader right into the context of your message.

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Editing for clarity and Conciseness

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After you've reviewed and revised your message for readability, your next step is to make sure your message is as clear and concise as possible.

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Delete unnecessary words and phrases

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Some combinations of words have more efficient, one-word equivalents. Avoid the clutter of too many or poorly placed relative pronouns (who, that, which). Even articles can be excessive (mostly too many the's).

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Shorten long words and phrases

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Short words are generally more vivid and easier to read than long words. The idea is to use short, simple words, not simple concepts. Plus, by using infinitives in place of some phrases, you not only shorten your sentences but also make them clearer.

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Eliminate redundancies

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In some word combinations, the words tend to say the same thing. For instance, "visible to the eye" is redundant because visible is enough.

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Recast "It is/There are" starters

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If you start a sentence with an indefinite pronoun (an expletive) such as it or there, odds are that the sentence could be shorter.

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Producing your message

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Now it's time to display your work. The production quality of your message—the total effect of page design, graphical elements, typography, screen presence, and so on—plays an important role in its effectiveness. A polished, inviting design not only makes your document easier to read but also conveys a sense of professionalism and importance.

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Consistency.

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Throughout a message, be consistent in your use of margins, typeface, type size, and spacing. Also be consistent when using recurring design elements, such as vertical lines, columns, and borders.

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Balance

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To create a pleasing design, balance all visual elements; that is text, artwork, and white space.

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Restraint

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Don't clutter your message with too many design elements, too much highlighting, or too many decorative touches.

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Detail

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Pay attention to details that affect your design and thus your message. For instance, headings and subheadings that appear at the bottom of a column or a page can confuse readers when the promised information doesn't appear until the next column or page.

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