The Communication Process

The communication process

Communication can be simply defined as ‘what we do to secure understanding between ourselves and others’. The key word in definition is ‘understanding’. Unless understanding occurs, communication will not be successful. Effective communication is inter-change of thoughts, facts, emotions and information between two or more people which results in mutual understanding – the meeting of minds! When we communicate with someone, we usually have one or more as follow:
1. To be understood – to get a massage across to someone so that he or she knows exactly what we mean.
2. To gain acceptance – for ourselves and/or our ideas, this is particularly important in the selling process.
2. To produce action - to get others to take the action we want them to take (e.g. to buy our products and services).

A simple communication process starts with three components: a message (this could be an idea, concept, direction, etc.), someone to send the message (a sender) and someone to receive it (a receiver).
The deficiency of this process is that unless the communication is very simple there is no guarantee that understanding will have taken place. In a work environment this can have some interesting results for a company’s customers.

An effective communication model has a number of components that need to be clearly understood to complete the communication process, as shown in the following figure. These include:
• The roles of the sender and the receiver of the message;
• The channel of communication, that is, ‘how the message is sent’;
• The context of the message in both the sender’s and the receiver’s mind;
• Feedback;
• Barriers that can occur that stop or hinder communication.

Figure
Model of communication