Manual 2: Establishing Partnerships on the Local Level
The key part is the conclusion of the model - the objective of effective communication is to expand the space of open window. There are several ways to assist us in these efforts. Open window expands mainly with increased trust in others. Maintaining standards for provision and reception of feedback supports this type of information and trust exchange. That is related to a very important skill of providing and receiving feed-back, knowing how to analyse and evaluate it, the skill of identifying and learning how to get rid of communication barriers while preventing building of new ones. Feed-back will let us know how the others perceive us. And on the other hand, based on our feed-back others will learn more about the way we perceive them. This is the very contents of the Chapter on effective communication as a basic managerial skill. II.4.Communication Barriers There are may different obstacles to effective communication. We shall only name some of them: •
people who we are communicating with, may have other, different aims, values and opinions than we have;
• our experience differ from experience of other people who we are communicating with and we might not be able to identify these differences; • our position in community might frighten those who we are communicating with or they have had negative experience with institution which we are representing; and • the place where communication is held may create obstacles to communication without us actually realising it. II.5. Communication strategies In fact, communication strategy may be included in any part contained in this Manual, since correct communication strategy is an important strategy within strategic planning, it is a part of communication, it is also important for partnership building as well as for management of change. We have included it in the part on communication. Correct communication is an important prerequisite of success in any organisation. Well-developed communication strategy is especially important for organisations and projects dealing with social exclusion and mainly communication with groups of socially excluded people. Successful work tackling issues of social exclusion always entails establishment of relationship of trust and understanding based on continuous communication. 10
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Graham Alen, material k workshopu na Slovensku, marec 2002, s.1 13