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There are many cultural
differences in how people
express themselves. Different
cultures have different ways of
being courteous, offering
praise, showing acceptance,
initiating dialogue, and
receiving criticism. Don’t
neglect the opportunity to
learn things from the variety of
people you work with.
Respectful curiosity is never
offensive.
PD 6 Online - Fall 2012 - @import url("/content/enforced/43042-
PD6_koa_cel_1129/CSS/table_of_contents.css"); Week 03 - Problems with Processes I:
Communication - @import url("/content/enforced/43042-
PD6_koa_cel_1129/CSS/table_of_contents.css"); Content and Activities - a. Introduction
Introduction
Problems with Communication
You’ve just started a new co-op job and you’re
confused. Messages are flying back and forth all around
you. You scramble to keep up with the voice mail on
your cell phone and your work phone, emails to two
different addresses, telephone calls, and text messages.
You find yourself missing meetings and deadlines,
disappointing your team mates and bosses, and losing
sleep over your performance.
To make matters worse, you’re not sure you understand
what people want from you. The workplace is like a
mini-UN: people from all over the world work there, and
the products are marketed internationally. Almost no one has English as a first language, but
it’s the language of communication in the workplace. As a consequence, the people who work
there have developed a kind of “esperanto” to talk to each other, drawing in and adapting
vocabulary from dozens of different languages, and strapping it all together with abbreviated
forms of English grammar and connecting words. Guess what: you’ve got communication
problems, and sorting them out is a top priority for you and for the organization you work for.
In this course we deal with three different kinds of
problems: problems with things, problems with processes,
and problems with relationships. A communication problem
is a problem with processes. A process is an ordered
series of events intended to lead to a specific outcome.
What you experience as a problem with communication
can usually be analyzed in terms of the series of events
that is intended to lead to a specific outcome. For
instance, a phone message may be intended to confirm
your commitment to a meeting the week after. If you
aren’t able to collect the message (for instance, if you
don’t have a password to the voice mail system, or you
don’t have remote access and are working out of the
office) or if you aren’t aware of how the process is
designed and what its outcomes are supposed to be (for
instance, if you expect email messages to confirm meeting
times), then you will have a problem.
Communication problems can be solved through the process of analysis and innovation that
we’ve described in the model outlined in Week 1:
Describe the problem
Propose solutions
Implement solutions
Problems with processes are usually more complex than problems with things, and they often
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- Fall '12
- KatherineAcheson
- Ion, Kiva, /C SS/t ab
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