Future Managers Program "Day 2" Effective Business Writing Skills and Listening Skills
Today I somehow reached on time to the program and only my friend was there before time. Effective Business Writing Skills and Listening Skills were today's programs. These programs were completely different from the previous sessions and had brought everybody to discuss and bring their views. This made the sessions different and enjoyable.
Sonali took the first session on Effective Business Writing Skills . She was a completely a formal lady with complete a diplomatic language which was completely persuasive. The way she was taking forward the program was impressive. She started her presentation with her introduction which was different. She was doing her MBA from IIM Indore but quit in between and started her consulting for different behaviourial skills. Later she did her MBA in HR and presently doing her Phd.
She started the program with a bang by asking us what are the short comings a Project engineer or Manager does in emails, documents, etc. Each of us gave good inputs for a written communication to fail. Few were Jargons, writing complex sentences for simple sentences, not having hold over the language, limited vocabulary, cliches etc. Using these points she gave us some hints and then she asked us to divide into 4 teams. Each of these teams were given scenarios for different scenarios. These scenarios could be related to the real life scenarios and one of my team member had already faced such a scenario. He gave really good input from his side on how he discussed, what he discussed and what are the points we can discuss in the mail.
I would like to put these scenarios and how various teams tackled these scenarios. My team started with the discussion on what is the problem and we discussed a lot on the problem and how to formulate the mail. The scenario was that a team member has been working in a project and inspite of his performance he didnt get a band change or a new role or an onsite. His role was changed with out any growth and for all these reasons he would like the TM to release him from the current project for a better growth. The discussion for the scenario started on a personal note and then we started discussing on various points. We came up how we could convey our frustration and also stress on how important it is to us. Parallely one more member from my team started writing his own mail and then we in the end joined both of our ideas to get a final mail which was ready to be sent and was written on the banner sheet.
The other scenarios were pretty good too and would be really tough to handle. Team three had got a scenario about an onsite co-ordinator who has screwed up the project due to his behaviour and understanding of the problem. The co-ordinator is highly experience of about 10 years. So the project manager has write a mail to point our his mistake. Team two had a scenario of project leader. His three of his good performing team members had started performing badly and he is suppose to discuss the same with them. Team one had the appraisal rating issue. The person inspite of his good performance in the project he was given a bad rating and even after his discussion he was not given good rating. All the teams formulated there own mails and then put it across in the banner sheet. All had written pretty well and of this activity we read each others mails. One of the person from other team read our mail and discussed a point during the coffee break. Why is that you are asking for the release when there is two more month to go. How would a project manager be able to release you? When I heard this I was really confused and I went back and read the mail. When I read it, I found that we had left a sentence hanging. The sentence was "I feel now is the right time for my release process when there is two more months for the project to get over". It should had a continuing sentence which would tell the manager that at the end of the project he would be released.
After the coffee break Sonali came up with all the fundas. How we could make our mails really interactive and understanding. Why and how we should have Start, body, and conclusion for our mails/documents. The grammar of our mails and documents should be really well set across. She also told us the foggy index which would give the coherence of our documents or mails. If the foggy index is between 8-12 then the document or mail would convey the meaning to the reader completely else it would be either childish or completely incoherent to the reader. She also got in lot more examples which would make us understand the problem of incorrect sentence formations, complex sentence formations etc. We watched a 26 mins video (i remember because she stressed on it) which had a hissing sound in it which was really pathetic. The video also discussed the similar concepts which gave us the clear idea by getting different people who do business writing etc.
At the end of the sessions I understood what is required in the business writing. The session would have complete had we been on the other side of the mail receipient. For example the mail from my team who wants a release from the project. How should he or she mail him back. These mails at the end would help us as we would be the Future managers.
The second session on Listening Skills was taken by Chandra Shekar. A french beard guy with lot of experience in plethora of domains. He had already created a nice impact on the other FMP batch and I had got a nice feed back about him. He did meet upto his expectation. The very first talk itself made the change. He asked us all to join all the chairs and tables like a 'U' such that he could see all of us and vice versa. Then he started with his introduction which was too exorbitant and people could really get impressed a lot. He was bringing in humour such that nobody can avoid laughing. Either the humor would be through sarcasm or direct joke but it would be at right time. Somebody in the break also told that at the end of the session will we be only taking only the jokes or will we also take the concept of active listening. He had an experience in sales, then in training and in the end he joined TT in wipro
One instance which I really remember is his experience as a sales person in HP. He was suppose to sell the HP PCs to some business guy and he asked him why should I buy your PCs if others are selling at really lesser price and you people are cheating the customer. The PCs which you give and other branded ones provide, do the same job but still you charge very high for the PCs. This guy told him we have mobile technicians and if there is any problem they would be coming to the location withing 15minutes time and fix the system for them. The work wouldnt stop!! The business man showed an expression such that he was impressed, so shekar got his order book and asked how much would he like to order. To his surprise the business man was not going to order the systems instead he asked him something different. He asked him he would order PCs from other brand and take the anual maintainance from HP. This answer was one of its kind.
We also were told about various scenarios of active listening and how we could grow. For e.g. he told how we can grow in career. One is through impressing your client. If your client is impressed and your boss is impressed rest is history, you are successful in your career. All you need to do is listen and given positive feedback, you would always grow. We also went through the video where in the passive listening or not listening at would lead to. That was a pretty good video which would happen at the real life scenario. The office would be in a trouble of meeting the dead lines and unfortunately the idea given by the junior is ignored. But later when they start listening to each other everything falls into place.
Then he also discussed about how a team work would help in solving an issue. For that he asked one question, where would each of us have the third eye given a chance of having one. Each of us gave diferent answers. One gave behind his head, one person on his hand and others a way of putting the eye in others mind so that they can see what they are seeing. If we see this scenario each of us had given different answers for the same question. This way we could all get a better anwer. In this progamm there was an instance where one of them asked what if a person keeps pinging you what the problem is and how should the person deal with it. Behind this particular question I could easily see that, that the person is actually had experienced it and wanted to get rid of it.
At the end of the day we learnt a lot about the business writing and Listening. These skills would come to our present day needs but in the future we would always be on the other side of the table where in we would be dealing with problems which our managers are dealing with. This also should be incorporated which would be really make us future managers.
Sonali took the first session on Effective Business Writing Skills . She was a completely a formal lady with complete a diplomatic language which was completely persuasive. The way she was taking forward the program was impressive. She started her presentation with her introduction which was different. She was doing her MBA from IIM Indore but quit in between and started her consulting for different behaviourial skills. Later she did her MBA in HR and presently doing her Phd.
She started the program with a bang by asking us what are the short comings a Project engineer or Manager does in emails, documents, etc. Each of us gave good inputs for a written communication to fail. Few were Jargons, writing complex sentences for simple sentences, not having hold over the language, limited vocabulary, cliches etc. Using these points she gave us some hints and then she asked us to divide into 4 teams. Each of these teams were given scenarios for different scenarios. These scenarios could be related to the real life scenarios and one of my team member had already faced such a scenario. He gave really good input from his side on how he discussed, what he discussed and what are the points we can discuss in the mail.
I would like to put these scenarios and how various teams tackled these scenarios. My team started with the discussion on what is the problem and we discussed a lot on the problem and how to formulate the mail. The scenario was that a team member has been working in a project and inspite of his performance he didnt get a band change or a new role or an onsite. His role was changed with out any growth and for all these reasons he would like the TM to release him from the current project for a better growth. The discussion for the scenario started on a personal note and then we started discussing on various points. We came up how we could convey our frustration and also stress on how important it is to us. Parallely one more member from my team started writing his own mail and then we in the end joined both of our ideas to get a final mail which was ready to be sent and was written on the banner sheet.
The other scenarios were pretty good too and would be really tough to handle. Team three had got a scenario about an onsite co-ordinator who has screwed up the project due to his behaviour and understanding of the problem. The co-ordinator is highly experience of about 10 years. So the project manager has write a mail to point our his mistake. Team two had a scenario of project leader. His three of his good performing team members had started performing badly and he is suppose to discuss the same with them. Team one had the appraisal rating issue. The person inspite of his good performance in the project he was given a bad rating and even after his discussion he was not given good rating. All the teams formulated there own mails and then put it across in the banner sheet. All had written pretty well and of this activity we read each others mails. One of the person from other team read our mail and discussed a point during the coffee break. Why is that you are asking for the release when there is two more month to go. How would a project manager be able to release you? When I heard this I was really confused and I went back and read the mail. When I read it, I found that we had left a sentence hanging. The sentence was "I feel now is the right time for my release process when there is two more months for the project to get over". It should had a continuing sentence which would tell the manager that at the end of the project he would be released.
After the coffee break Sonali came up with all the fundas. How we could make our mails really interactive and understanding. Why and how we should have Start, body, and conclusion for our mails/documents. The grammar of our mails and documents should be really well set across. She also told us the foggy index which would give the coherence of our documents or mails. If the foggy index is between 8-12 then the document or mail would convey the meaning to the reader completely else it would be either childish or completely incoherent to the reader. She also got in lot more examples which would make us understand the problem of incorrect sentence formations, complex sentence formations etc. We watched a 26 mins video (i remember because she stressed on it) which had a hissing sound in it which was really pathetic. The video also discussed the similar concepts which gave us the clear idea by getting different people who do business writing etc.
At the end of the sessions I understood what is required in the business writing. The session would have complete had we been on the other side of the mail receipient. For example the mail from my team who wants a release from the project. How should he or she mail him back. These mails at the end would help us as we would be the Future managers.
The second session on Listening Skills was taken by Chandra Shekar. A french beard guy with lot of experience in plethora of domains. He had already created a nice impact on the other FMP batch and I had got a nice feed back about him. He did meet upto his expectation. The very first talk itself made the change. He asked us all to join all the chairs and tables like a 'U' such that he could see all of us and vice versa. Then he started with his introduction which was too exorbitant and people could really get impressed a lot. He was bringing in humour such that nobody can avoid laughing. Either the humor would be through sarcasm or direct joke but it would be at right time. Somebody in the break also told that at the end of the session will we be only taking only the jokes or will we also take the concept of active listening. He had an experience in sales, then in training and in the end he joined TT in wipro
One instance which I really remember is his experience as a sales person in HP. He was suppose to sell the HP PCs to some business guy and he asked him why should I buy your PCs if others are selling at really lesser price and you people are cheating the customer. The PCs which you give and other branded ones provide, do the same job but still you charge very high for the PCs. This guy told him we have mobile technicians and if there is any problem they would be coming to the location withing 15minutes time and fix the system for them. The work wouldnt stop!! The business man showed an expression such that he was impressed, so shekar got his order book and asked how much would he like to order. To his surprise the business man was not going to order the systems instead he asked him something different. He asked him he would order PCs from other brand and take the anual maintainance from HP. This answer was one of its kind.
We also were told about various scenarios of active listening and how we could grow. For e.g. he told how we can grow in career. One is through impressing your client. If your client is impressed and your boss is impressed rest is history, you are successful in your career. All you need to do is listen and given positive feedback, you would always grow. We also went through the video where in the passive listening or not listening at would lead to. That was a pretty good video which would happen at the real life scenario. The office would be in a trouble of meeting the dead lines and unfortunately the idea given by the junior is ignored. But later when they start listening to each other everything falls into place.
Then he also discussed about how a team work would help in solving an issue. For that he asked one question, where would each of us have the third eye given a chance of having one. Each of us gave diferent answers. One gave behind his head, one person on his hand and others a way of putting the eye in others mind so that they can see what they are seeing. If we see this scenario each of us had given different answers for the same question. This way we could all get a better anwer. In this progamm there was an instance where one of them asked what if a person keeps pinging you what the problem is and how should the person deal with it. Behind this particular question I could easily see that, that the person is actually had experienced it and wanted to get rid of it.
At the end of the day we learnt a lot about the business writing and Listening. These skills would come to our present day needs but in the future we would always be on the other side of the table where in we would be dealing with problems which our managers are dealing with. This also should be incorporated which would be really make us future managers.
posted by Chaitanya Prabhu @ 10:19 PM
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