Communication

The third dimension of communication ...

All this while i thought there were only two dimensions to communication. One Verbal and the other non-verbal. I think these two needs no introduction. I have come across people who are good at both verbal and non-verbal. If there is a good co-ordination between verbal and non-verbal that shows the confidence of the person and his/her command/clarity over what they are talking about.
I have learnt a great deal by watching those people.

Command over verbal comes from ability to express oneself in the vocabulary one has or the vocabulary the audience has. For the communication to be effective, the confidence of the person should be reasonably good and the co-ordination between verbal and non-verbal should be excellent.

There is a person in my office who has exceptional communication skills. He is part of the top management. He chooses his words carefully and when he completes a sentence there is hardly any ambiguity or misinterpretation in whatever he says. He is very particular about communication and he has consciously made efforts to reach that pinnacle in communication. He has lot of energy and pumps in huge amount of passion in whatever he does. His speeches are always captivating.

The third dimension of communication that i talked about came through noticing him. There is an organizational wide process we have to do and this person is driving it. He is very passionate about that. As with most of the organizations and organizational initiatives, most of the people do not feel that the new process is going to do any good and few of them feel that it is a waste of their time and energy.

Time and again he speaks to these people with the same passion and drive i was talking about in the earlier part of the blog. It is very captivating. He takes you through a journey and expresses his vision with crystal clear clarity and lays down his plan of how to get there. Usually people get convinced then and there, but over a period of time they get back to their original state. It is not a one-off case, but most of them oscillate from no-opinion to complete buy-in and then back to no-opinion.

This person has lot of respect in the organization and no single soul doubts his abilities or leadership qualities. Still i didn't understand why the people didn't have a complete buy-in to the cause. After some thought, i think i figured out the reason behind it. This person's communication is good, he is expressing himself very well, he has clarity, he has confidence and he has the power equation towards him but what i think he is failing to achieve is, he is not able to rub-off the passion and the drive he has for the initiative to other people. People listen, understand the words, but not the passion or the emotion behind it. So the third dimension to communication really communicating these emotions to the listener or the audience. If one masters that one can move the crowd in which ever way they want to.

I think history has people like Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr. , Lincoln who could do that. King Khan does it in many of his movies, rather to think of it, i think it is his most significant USP. You remove Khan and put some1 else there and ask them to deliver the same dialogue i think mose of the audience will not be moved at all. King Khan ensures that most of them walk out of the cinema hall with tears in their eyes. He communicates the emotions too. Agreed there is the dialogue, background score but one cannot ignore the Khan element in them .

In everyday life too there are people who do that or instances where people rub-off the emotions, may be due to the nature of the emotion itself. If one is in a very good jovial mood and someone works with this person for sometime the other person will (might) also get into a good mood but the same may not be true if the first person was in a bad mood. There is some rub-off of the good mood across individuals.

So this communication of emotions, is what i refer to as the next dimension in communication following verbal and non-verbal.