How to improve interpersonal skills when working on a business? Interpersonal skills mean the skills that a person use to interact with someone else. These skills have a direct impact on you if you are working on a business or managing a business. People who have excellent interpersonal skills are generally strong communicators. Also, others are seeing them as people who good with people. If we are working in an organization, we may have to spend more time with people. So it’s advantageous to improve interpersonal skills.
First of all, let’s define interpersonal skills.
What are interpersonal skills
As I said before interpersonal skills can be defined as the skills that a person performs when interacting with someone. When it comes to the business world, we can define that as the ability to work with others. Whether you are a leader or a simple worker, interpersonal skills is a must. Because every organization consist of human resource. So to work with them well, we need to have excellent interpersonal skills.
Interpersonal skills can also be defined as the ability to read others and effectively interacting with others. Interpersonal skills are also known as people skills or social skills. It’s not wrong to take interpersonal skills as an essential point of becoming successful. Because a person who has excellent people skills has the ability to shine in society and earn a reputation as a person who good with people.
What are the areas of interpersonal skills
It’s not just talking friendly, acting friendly. Interpersonal skills cover a vast area, and here are those.
Communications
This covers the areas of verbal communication, non-verbal communication and listening skills. As I said before communication is just a part of interpersonal skills.
Problem-solving
This showcase the ability to work with others in order to find, evaluate and resolve a problem or problems.
Conflict management
Whether you are a higher-level manager or a simple worker, you need the skills of managing conflicts. If you can find a way to resolve a conflict before it goes to the hand of a supervisor, you are good.
Emotional intelligence
This is about reading someone’s emotions in order to get the right signal they send to us. We can find that emotions through words, movement of eyes, face impressions etc.
Teamwork
If a person can work well with others or if a person can take his team to success, there is teamwork. Teamwork doesn’t include any individual achievements. The team is an aggregation of many efforts.
Active listening
Active listening is about listening to someone with the full focus. Here a person should be practised to get information without doing unnecessary disturbs and ask the questions actively.
Empathy
Empathy refers to feel someone emotional status as your own. Here a person should understand how others feel by visualizing the mental situation of that particular people.
How to improve interpersonal skills
Find areas for improvements.
As the first step of improving interpersonal skills, we have to identify our interpersonal skill strengths and weaknesses. For that, you can ask from others, or you can create a small survey. Here you have to acknowledge the opinions of others in order to find the areas that need improvement.
Build positive feelings
Try to face everything with a positive outlook. Even you have excellent interpersonal skills, you will get failed if you don’t have positive thoughts in your mind. The reason is that even you have good ways to interact with people, you will spread negativity among people unless you have positive thoughts.
Also, if something happened that might upset you, you have to control yourself until your work is done. After that, you can try some effective stress release methods to fix that.
Face others with a pure smile and interact with others with positive thoughts.
Practice active listening
Whether you are in the middle of a formal conversation or informal conversation, use that moment to improve your active listening skills. Here you can practise the following skills.
- Pay attention to the speaker
- Provide the speaker with feedback
- Respond well
- Don’t make unnecessary noises.
Likewise, you can follow the about key areas when you are in the middle of a conversation. It will help to improve interpersonal skills.
Learn basic communication skills
As I said before, communication and interpersonal skills are not about, just saying some nice words. Communication basically has three parts.
- Verbal communication
- Non verbal communication
- Listening skills
Usually, verbal communication is easy to handle because we all have a good practice with it since childhood. When it comes to non-verbal communication, there are so many points we have to practice.
Researchers have found that it is easy to find someone’s real feelings through non-verbal communication.
- Gestures
- Touch
- Voice
- Postures
- Eye contact
- Body orientation
- Facial expressions
If we can improve our knowledge in these areas, we gain the ability to improve our interpersonal skills. Here is an example. Suppose you are the owner of a company and one worker is asking for a half-day leave. Imagine you didn’t give the permissions. That worker might say “Its fine, Thank you”, But his non-verbal signs might tell a different story. That’s why you have to improve your knowledge of non-verbal communication in order to improve interpersonal skills.
I have discussed the listening skills under the active listening topic.
Learn to solve problems and conflicts
Problems are the first thing we met when working in an organization or handling an organization. But most of these problems are arising related to humans. So if we can learn how to solve the issues and conflicts well, we can improve our interpersonal skills.
Here is an example. Suppose you are the human resource manager of your company. Two workers are having issues with their salaries. If you can implement the right strategies to solve their problems, they will see you as a person who has excellent interpersonal skills.
That’s how problem-solving and conflict management can help you to improve your interpersonal skills.
Maintaining relationships
A person who has so many connections has the ability to improve interpersonal skills. So always try to connect with co-workers using social media, emails, face to face meeting etc. It can give you the opportunity to find out what you are capable of with regard to interpersonal skills and the weaknesses of your communication. Also, you can ask others about their opinion on your interpersonal skills when making a conversation.
Take responsibilities
If you are not a person with responsibilities, you won’t have a chance to improve your interpersonal skills. Different responsibilities can allow you to learn about different people skills. As an example, suppose, you were asked to be a leader of a marketing team. It’s a huge responsibility. What will happen if you ignore it? You will miss the chance to work with others and lead others.
But what will happen when you accept that responsibility? You will gain a chance to learn new tactics to manage people and new interpersonal skills to lead your team. You can show them that you are good with people and you can get suggestions from them to develop your personal skills.
Stop complaining about everything.
Complaining, again and again, is not a good habit. If you are good at people skills, you will find a way to resolve the problems. So there will be no need for complaints. Also, complaining can damage your image. Other workers may see you as a person with poor interpersonal skills. So try to stop complaining by understanding human nature. It will help you to improve your interpersonal skills.
Final words
Here I have mentioned a few ways on how to improve interpersonal skills. It’s not as hard as we thought. But if you are working or handling an organization, people skills are a must. So understand the importance of interpersonal skills and ways to improve interpersonal skills.
Interpersonal skills are just a small part you need to learn when managing or working in an organization. I will discuss the other topics related to the businesses soon under business hacks. Please read my other articles about business hacks, life hacks and money hacks in order to add value to your time.
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