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Remember that Symposium of ours? Below is a summary of the afternoon discussions as reported by participants at each table during the plenary session. Take a look too at the summary of the morning discussions. To watch a video of the plenary, click here and then click “Launch Media” and select “Part V: Afternoon Discussion and Report Back” on the following screen.

The 6th Annual Symposium Afternoon Discussion: Challenges and Proposed Solutions* (By Table)

Table 1: Reported by Ruth-Ellen Simmonds, Executive Director, One Stop Senior Services

Challenge: How can we teach students the kind of flexibility needed to communicate effectively in business?

Recommendation: Create a coaching culture–either through an experience mentor from another division or a team of people with whom they can practice and learn and grow. In terms of some of the activities that might engage students we suggest client-based projects. E.g., a sample activity where students have to learn to sell their ideas.

Table 2: Reported by Jody Rosen, Communication Fellow, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College

Challenge: How do you diagnose yourself as a communicator?

Recommendation: Ask ourselves, our colleagues, and our students the following questions as we communicate:

(1) Am I clear, concise? complete? correct?
(2) What decisions do I need to make in communicating?
(3) How do I get the data?
(4) Is the person that I’m communicating with receptive to my communication?
(5) How can I better engage my audience?
(6) Why should someone take the time to listen to the message that I’m giving?
(7) How is time a factor in communication? If I’m sending an email at 3 a.m. does the time of sending have as much effect on how it’s received as what I say?

After communicating, ask yourself the following questions:

(1) What worked?
(2) Where did I get stuck?
(3) What can I take away from this that can be applied next time?

Table 3: Reported by Deborah Bosley, Director, Center for Writing, Language, and Literacy, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Challenge: Money to support education. Business should value communication enough to underwrite CAC the same way they underwrite math and science. The College Board did a report showing that over $2 billion is spent by companies to train people in communication skills that they don’t already have out of college.

Recommendation: Seek funding from companies and other private sources for better communication training and curricular support. The BLSCI is a perfect model. How do we replicate it across the country?

Table 4: Reported by Diane DeFilippo, Assistant Vice President of Distribution and Service, AXA Financial, Inc.

Challenge: What are the conditions that make communication more likely to be successful or effective?

Conclusions:
(1) The first thing we decided is that communication is not a one at a time thing. It’s a continuum. Even when you think it’s over, it’s not over.
(2) You have to have communication strategy. And a key component to most strategies is that we are not all the same. I am visual; some are auditory. What works for one does not necessarily work for others.
(3) You need a clearly defined purpose for communicating. You have to know WHY you’re creating a communication.
(4) Your audience is not just someone on the other side. This works whether it’s email or a meeting. Ongoing dialogue is needed. Collaboration is needed. You want to be able to adjust and inspire communication.
(5) After you think you’ve been successful, you need confirmation. Ask if you explained your message clearly. Have people paraphrase. Have them play back the information.

Table 5: Reported by Bob Garland, National Managing Director, Assurance and Advisory Services, Deloitte & Touche LLP

Challenge: Educators must develop the whole person in order to train good communicators.

Recommendations:
(1) Practice, practice, practice. Students should start with small, less formal, low-stakes presentations and build over a four-year academic career to give several much higher stakes presentations. A key thing is overcoming fear. If you can’t overcome that in a low stakes situation, you won’t be able to overcome it. Students also need the opportunity to fail. College is more forgiving than a business environment.
(2) Develop students’ listening skills.
(3) Enhanced, continuous feedback for students from professors as well as outside visitors to the classroom, including career center staff.
(4) More mentoring; for instance, expansion of Baruch’s Executives on Campus program.

Table 6: Reported by Norm Brust, Vice President, Corporate Communications (retired), Contel Corporation

Challenge: Measuring the effectiveness of communication in a timeframe early enough in the process so students and employees can change their course and maximize their effectiveness.

Recommendation: Preview all types of communication. Get some representative member of your audience (who you trust to give honest feedback) to sit with you before your presentation–before you write the memo, before you write the talk–and in effect preview your communication.

Table 7: Reported by Wendy Ryden, Assistant Professor of English, Coordinator of Writing Across the Curriculum, Long Island University, CW Post Campus

Challenge: How can communication be reconfigured as a relationship–a more holistic model that includes visual and ethical dimensions of the situation?

Recommendations:
(1) Teach and practice communication as story telling. Use role-playing for problem solving. Be more attuned to what’s going on visually, how you’re presenting yourself. It is important that there be a meta-cognitive dimension to this. Participants should move from speaker to spectator, asking “Why do I make the choices that I’m making?”
(2) Use PowerPoint in a better, more narrative way.
(3) When we’re teaching communication we’ve been focusing on what the communicator can do. But we can’t forget that the audience also has an obligation. What can we teach audience members to do in a responsible communication? Why do we react the way we do? What obligation do we have to teach the audience to understand what’s trying to be communicated?

Table 8: Reported by Virginia Malone, President, ILM, Inc.

Challenge: What’s the standard for evaluation of communication?

Recommendations:
(1) Peer evaluation, e.g., using a questionnaire.
(2) Self-evaluation: Have students look at a performance review from a company so they can see what employers use to evaluate them. 70% of the evaluation is about communication. Let them see that in their future pay raises will be affected by this.

*Many thanks to Elizabeth Busch for transcribing the discussion and to Tom Harbison for creating this summary.