Good communication skills in the world of business is an essential part of being a professional. Corporates run their business through skillful communication. Be it face to face communication or through email; one has to communicate with their clients in order to get business up and running; not only clients you have to communicate with your team members in order to get things done for business to succeed. Colleagues have to communicate effectively amongst themselves and work together as a team in order to meet deadlines. Hence good communication skills are an imperative in professional life.

People have character strength but they lack communication skills and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationship as well – Stephen Covey

Good communication skillsis an art. The first step in achieving it is that we should learn to listen, butthe biggest communication problem is that we fail to listen to understand. Instead we listen to reply; to get our point/s of view across. Listening to understand doesn’t mean we agree and in fact we can only respond effectively if we truly understand what is being said both in terms of the words and the body language. We have to learn to be emphatic listeners. Being an empathic listener simply means looking at things from the perspective of the person you are having the conversation with. This will help you in gaining a better understanding of what has been said. The essence of empathic listening is not to agree with someone, but it is more of fully, deeply, understanding the person emotionally as well as intellectually.

When we say ‘communication’ the first thing that we relate to is the spoken word i.e. the way we speak to people. While talking to people we have to make sure that our communication is clear and we talk straight.It is rightly said that most of the problems occur due to the tone/pitch of voice. It is not what you said; it is more of how you say it. It requires lot of practice in order to master the verbal form of communication. Verbal communication involves presenting your thoughts in such a manner that it is assertive but at the same time it doesn’t sound aggressive, it should be gentle but not too gentle that people take it leniently.

Nowadays business involves lot of sending and receiving of mails be it in the physical form in form of contracts or important documents or in the form of electronic mails.The rule that will always support you is to keep the mail as formal as possible. Address the person as Sir or Ma’am even though the client has a first name basis culture. Avoid making spelling or grammatical mistakes. If you are not sure then run down the mail through your seniors who will guide you with the drafting of the emails.

There is another form of communication which doesn’t involve words at all ieNon Verbal communication. Experts say that only 10 percent of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30 percent is represented by our tone/pitch/intonation and 60 percent by our body language.Body language such as maintaining eye contact while speaking, your hand gestures, and the expression on your face while speaking helps to create an impression in front of the person you are having a conversation with.

Effective communication helps in building long standing relationships not only professionally but also personally. Irrespective of any form of communication it is imperative thatyourespect the individual you are communicating with and build long lasting mutually beneficial relationships.