Every day, people engage in interpersonal communication without even knowing it.
Each time someone engages in a conversation with another interdependent person, whether it be a friend or fellow coworker, they are practicing that particular form of communication.
What is interpersonal communication you might be wondering, well according to chapter 1 of the Interpersonal Communication Book by Joseph DeVito, it is the verbal and nonverbal interaction between two or more interdependent people.
Here at the Northwestern News, we practice this form of communication on the weekly basis. The people on staff here, for the most part, are quite driven on building and maintaining interpersonal relationships between one another by engaging in interpersonal communication.
With this form of communication in the work environment at the Northwestern News we are providing the same opportunities of success that the Interpersonal Communication Book speaks about.
In the chapter, it so conveniently asks the question, “why study interpersonal communication” and the answer it gives is two major forms of success; personal/social success and professional success.
Looking first at personal/social success, the way in which engaging in interpersonal communication helps one achieve those type of success is by what the books describes as simply doing it effectively. How someone can become a more effective interpersonal communicator is by listening more carefully when having a conversation with another person, being respectful to who is talking and acting thoughtfully and carefully, according to Guidelines for Effective Interpersonal Communication by Linda Wilcox at Harvard University.
Next with gaining success in a professional sense, the Interpersonal Communications Book suggests that a person should engage in more conversations in the workplace to better help them find success in this area. It also suggests that a person’s interpersonal communication skills will play a vital role in anything from the first initial interview at a college job fair to interning, from participating in to even leading meetings.
A few more ways a person can improve their interpersonal communication skills that Wilcox listed in her article is by practicing using silence within the conversation so that you can absorb the information that is being presented to you, and to avoid practicing the following list of items:
- Jumping to conclusions
- Giving unwanted advice
- Moving prematurely to problem solving
- Changing the subject
- Talking about yourself
At the Northwestern News, we don’t always hit all these points but that is where skills in conflict management come into play. Those however, will be discussed at a later date.
With this article, we at the Northwestern News have only scratched the surface of interpersonal communication, and in the coming weeks we want to provide a deeper look at this form of communication so that one interested in improving their own could indeed do just that.
Week two of Interpersonal Communication: A deeper look will run following spring break and will focus on the basic elements of interpersonal communication.