 Hi, my name is Dr. Laura Portales, and in this video, we're going to be talking about Unit 3 of the course Managing People. Let's first take a look at the learning objectives for this unit, and then we'll get into some of the content that you've learned. As you already know, this course is divided into eight units, and this video is going to focus on Unit 3, which is about business communication. Let's look at our unit learning objectives. I know unit learning objectives are important, because all of these are tied back to both the practice exam and the final exam that you'll be taking. So let's read those together. The first is identify the appropriate method of communication, like email and memo, based on factors such as the communicator's role, intended audience, organizational culture, and organizational goal. The second one is explain practices and daily interactions, selection of communication channels, approaches to the direction of the communication, and levels of authority that build rapport with personnel to foster leadership in organizations. The third is use communication strategies and frameworks to affect business strategy. Next is classify audience traits, such as beliefs, ethnicity, language, values, psychological attributes, and demographics to ensure effective message delivery. And finally, our last unit learning objective is determine how the audience and the communicator are affected by perception, interpretation, and the organization of communications. The slide here lists the vocabulary that we will be discussing throughout this video, and also words that you should know and be comfortable with to get yourself ready for the practice exam. Our list of topics revolve around communication, and we will be addressing some of the influences on communication. We'll be talking about communication directions and communication channels. We'll also address a little bit about audience traits, such as demographics and how you might consider developing a presentation or a message, dependent on the audience that you're going to be communicating with. And finally, we'll look at the concept of perception and how perception influences our communication with others. When we take a look at communication, it's really important to understand the communication process, and this figure describes that very well. So we have the communicator, so the person that's going to be sending a message, and we have the receiver. So within that process, we term encoding as the word for what we use when we're trying to figure out what we should put in the message to the other person. For decoding refers to how the person understands the message that you've ultimately sent. And then we can also look in between there at the mediums, and the mediums are the context of the message, the effect of the message, and can also include things like the method of communication, such as an email or a face-to-face communication. Now, when we're going through the encoding and decoding process, there's something called noise, and noise ultimately is anything that can be a distraction of the communication. So it could be someone is distracted by a lot of stress that they have that day, or they're really busy, or they could be in a really good mood. So noise is anything that could positively or negatively ultimately affect the way we encode or decode a message. Let's talk about an example for that. So let's suppose you are a manager and you're really frustrated, you've had a difficult day, and you realize that one of your employees made a really critical mistake that's going to take several days to fix. So because your mood is impacting how you encode that message, you might actually write it to the employee, the message if it were an email, very curtly and directly. Whereas maybe if you're in a good mood, you might encode that message a little bit different and take a little bit of a softer approach. So when we're encoding messages and sending messages to individuals, whether it be our employees or anyone else, we just wanna make sure that we don't have a lot of noise around us that impacts how effective that message can be. The same goes the other way, as a receiver of a message when we're decoding a message, we want to make sure that we understand the message and we're not letting these outside influences impact how we're receiving that message. So noise plays a really big factor in communication as you've guessed. Nonverbal communication is probably one of the most important types of communication. It tends to be really quick to the point where we don't even notice. So it might be a facial expression, it might be a gesture with our hands, it may be the nodding of a head, anything along those lines can be nonverbal communication as well as many other different types of nonverbal communication. But it's important to recognize how our nonverbal communication is impacting the message that we're trying to send to individuals, especially as managers. So when we looked on this table, the different types of nonverbal communication and expressions, you can see how many of these items might impact our communication whether it be negatively or positively. So if we take a look at adapters for example, that might be we have a pen in our hand and we're clicking it as we're presenting in a meeting. So that type of nonverbal communication as a manager, of course you want to avoid because you're adapting that pen to something to make you feel a little bit more comfortable in the information that you're presenting. The last one, self adapters might be someone that's playing with their hair or they pull on their shirt or some kind of other nonverbal language that sometimes can indicate nervousness or discomfort. So as you look at all of it, consider how you might effectively within a presentation or a verbal presentation to a group of people. So for example, you might want to use an illustrator to reinforce a message and that might be pointing or that might be something like I'm using my hands as you could tell that might be using your hands ultimately to make a specific point. So just being aware of your nonverbal communication and how you use things like pens and different parts of your body, you just may want to consider how that is impacting your message, whether that be negative or positive. As a manager, it's really likely that we are going to use just about every communication direction within our organization. So when we look at communication directions, there may be different methods that we use in order to communicate and that a lot will depend on a company culture, for example. But when we look at the different types of communication, oftentimes we'll find that we communicate laterally to a coworker. Sometimes we communicate down to our subordinates. Sometimes we communicate up to our supervisors that may be in the form of a report or a status meeting or anything along those lines. We also communicate externally outside of the organization, such as with customers. And often we communicate diagonally with a different department. So for example, let's suppose I work for the accounting department and I have a question as I'm looking at the financial statements about some expenditure that the marketing department made. Well, in that case, I would reach out to that department manager and that would be diagonal communication to a different department. So again, it's just important to recognize when you look at these different directions of communication that you may use a different form of communication, whether that be more verbal, more email, more reporting, that type of, is going to depend greatly on, of course, the type of communication, whether it's a quick little bit of information or a big concept that you need to explain. But understanding the communication directions and the very many people that you'll be communicating with as a manager is really important topic in this unit. When we think of interpersonal communication, I would like you to think about it as you see this drawing, which is an onion where there are many different layers, two different types of communication. So when you are first start working with someone or a first met someone, you tend to have superficial communication. So that's the outer, that's the outer communication. So you don't know them well, you don't know their likes and dislikes or maybe their personality. So the communication tends to be superficial in the way that it doesn't go into a whole lot of depth, especially from a personal perspective. Our next layer is the process of building trust. So we get to know that person a little bit, we know their likes, dislikes, we know their working style, and this allows us to build trust with that person as we get to know them a little bit better and also know their skills and abilities. So once we get down that building trust is the center of the onion, which ultimately is our ability to build strong working relationships. So as managers, it's ultimately our job to get past that superficial interaction and build trust by getting to know our employees, which then of course, will build a strong working relationship. Now I'd like us to address some of the frameworks for communication and the linear model, kind of the type of communication that we started to describe at the beginning of this video. It's a sender of a message, basically sending a message to a receiver in coding and decoding happens, and of course, noise happens as we discussed earlier. This is the very basic model of communication and is fairly straightforward as you can see. So let's look at some other models for communication that we might want to apply in different situations. As you can see from this model, which is called the interactive model, it is a lot more interactive. So rather than just in the linear model that we just looked at where it's just someone telling someone something else, and that's it, in interaction we see that there's ultimately a feedback loop there at the bottom where we send a message, there's still noise, but the receiver decodes the message and then they formulate a response and send that back to you as the sender of the message. So this type of communication is important because we want to make sure that our employees have understood the message that we're trying to get across. And of course, this example is very simplified with a how are you message, but when we're explaining really complicated concepts or treating someone on how to do something in a company, we want to make sure that we are being interactive and getting that continual feedback just to make sure that the person understands ultimately what we're trying to tell them. The model that we just looked at, we want to also look at the transaction model. So while feedback is always important in communication as we looked at in the last slide, we also have some other considerations, especially as managers that we want to consider. So we have social context, we have relational context, and also we have cultural context. So as we're sending a message to someone else, we want to make sure that all of these are within line and meeting expectations. So the best way to think of this is, let's suppose you're communicating with a close friend of yours that you've known for a very long time. You already know the social context, you already know the relationship that you have or the relational context and the cultural context. So you may be able to speak a little bit more freely with this individual because you've known them for a long time and they've known you for a long time. But in the workplace, we want to consider these elements of the social context, the relational context, and the cultural context before we formulate a message because we may want those messages to be a little bit more formal and also understood by the individual. So many organizations that have, for example, people that work across different time zones and different cities and different countries, they have to be really careful about the communication to make sure that it's within all of the correct contexts so that the message is understood and is clear to individuals that are involved. And then I also want to mention the physical and psychological context of physical that might refer to a virtual meeting, for example. So we want to take that into consideration. If we're talking to someone in person, that might look a little bit different than if we're talking with someone on them. Likewise, video might be different than if we're writing someone an email. So we want to consider that and those factor, getting ready to send a message to people. And then we also want to consider physiological context, which refers to physiological needs. How are you feeling at the moment? Are you hungry? If you're hungry, then maybe you want to wait before sending a very important message and these types. So communication seems like it's pretty simple and should be straight, but as you've learned and as you're learning from this unit, there are a lot of things, especially to be a good leader and a good manager in your organization that you want to consider before sending a message. We are now going to shift our attention a little bit and talk about audiences and the different types of messages and what we may want to consider before we develop messages for certain types of audiences. So when we look at the audience, there may be differences in demographics so that could be age differences, that could be location differences from a geographical perspective for instance. So we want to take those into consideration because those could have culture, different cultures, different ways of thinking before we formulate our message to an audience. And we also want to consider the psychographic differences which might include things like someone's level of interest in a particular topic. So as we think about preparing messages for different audiences, we want to make sure that we've gathered information on their traits so that we can better meet the needs and the wants that they have as well as the desires and expectations for a particular message that we're sending. While this content is focused on more of a formal speech, you can really think about using audience traits and this type of information for any type of message that you might be sending, whether that be an email or a video conference or anything along those lines. So just being aware of our audience traits are really important in order to get our message across. Finally, I'd like us to talk a little bit about perception and how our own individual perceptions can affect our communication. So perception ultimately is how we organize information that's around us. If you think about everything that's around you right at this moment as you're watching the O, that's important context to how someone will understand and how they will perceive a message. So the organization of data as it relates to perception can be the sights, the sounds, the smells and other stimuli around us. So if a baby is crying in the background or a dog barking, these types of things can impact perception, which of course impacts the communication we have with others. We also want to think about perception in terms of interpretation and how we think about what we're seeing or how do we interpret that information? So for example, let's suppose in this video that you're watching of me, I had stacks of paper all around me. You might interpret me to be disordered. Luckily that's not the case, but when we look at things, we look at everything around us and then ultimately we interpret that to make sense of what we are. So whether it be true or not, we all make those inferences based on our perception. So when you think about nonverbal communication, which we talked about a few slides ago, nonverbal communication can be things like that as well. Stacks of paper around or the way someone is dressed or the way that they sit. So definitely something to consider when you think about nonverbal language and how perception ultimately relates to that. When we look at our own passion of things, there are five main things ultimately that can influence that. That includes our fives. So what we see, what we smell and so forth, things like hunger can impact our perception. If we're really hungry, we may be different, things differently than if people's age definitely impacts perception. Of course, the older you are, the more experiences you've had. So you may tie different meanings to the perceptions that you have. Your mood, of course, whether you're in a positive upbeat mood is going to impact reception versus a negative mood. Your self-concept, so how you yourself and your level of self-confidence can impact your perception. And then of course, social influence like your friends and the people that you tend to spend time with, your family, those types of social influences can impact our perception as well. So when we think about communication as a whole, there's probably no more important aspect to managing people than communicating effectively. And in this unit, we've talked a lot about how to consider your communication and how you might communicate more effectively. So I encourage you to think about that and think about your own personal style for communication. And maybe some things that you would like to improve upon in terms of your communication from the management perspective. Now for our conclusion for this unit, we talked about the different methods of communication and how the communicator's role impacts the communication. We also talked about different practices and communication channels that you may consider using. We talked about frameworks and strategies that can be used for communication. We also talked about how we can classify audience traits such as beliefs and language and values in order to better communicate with them. And we also talked about perception and how our communications with others are oftentimes influenced by perception. Let's take a look now at what's next to prepare you for the practice exam. I definitely recommend that you do another review of the material, maybe especially some of the material that you had some challenges with. Once you review that material, you should be all set to take the practice exam and I wish you the best of luck on it.