Effective Listening and Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication

Communication is the act of giving, receiving, and sharing information -- in other words, talking or writing, and listening or reading. Good communicators listen carefully, speak or write clearly, and respect different opinions. In "Communication: Shannon-Weaver Model Essay" we will research one of the communication models.

Model and its barriers in communication

The Shannon-Weaver theory of communication was created for the fastest and most effective way of communication between one point to another which contains eight variables that play on a communication, which is the source, encoder, message, channel, decoder, receiver, noise and feedback (CommunicationTheory.org, 2010). According to Shannon-Weaver’s Model of Communication (as seen above), the communication process begins with the source that is where the origin of the communication stands. The source can be an individual or a group that has a reason to communicate something to another individual or a group. The encoder’s role comes in after the source of communication has been decided, that will transform a concept that the source wants to send into a format that will reach the audience who needs to interpret it. The message is the information that is being communicated from the transmitter to the receiver.

The channel is a means to transmit the message from the transmitter to the receiver. For a message to be transmitted, it is essential that a proper mean of transmission be selected. It is a route that the message takes to reach the receiver, which can be verbal, written, electronic, audio, video, et cetera. As the message travels in a channel, the noise comes into play which is an interference or a distortion that can modify the message being sent by the transmitter or the sender in such a way that it is misconstrued.

Moreover, noise can be physical, semantic, pragmatic or rhetoric. Before the message reaches its receiver, it has to be decoded in a form that the receiver understands. This is the other side of the sequence, as when the transmitter encodes the concept he or she wants to transmit. The receiver is the recipient of the message that was sent out by the sender. Feedback is when the receiver tells the transmitter that he or she received a message and interpreted it accurately.

Emotional intelligence and its four competencies

Emotional intelligence also called emotional quotient (EQ) is the capacity of individuals to recognize and manage their own and other people’s emotions to discriminate between different feelings and label them appropriately.

The four emotional intelligence competencies are defined below:

1. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize one’s emotions, internal states, preferences, strengths and weaknesses and intuition, and to understand the difference between me and other. It is able to objectively watch what’s happening inside of ourselves and how others perceive, that allows us to observe at a deeper level of what we think, what we feel, what we say and what we do.
2. Self-control is the ability to control and manage our impulses and disruptive emotions, and to recover the emotions from distress.
3. Achievement drive is the self-motivation of people to perform a strong drive to achieve personally meaningful goals that they want to accomplish and are energized by the stimulus of pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone to take on new challenges.
4. Understanding others is a type of social awareness, also called empathy rather than sympathy. It is the ability to connect with others in real deep feelings and understand their perspectives, which is the foundation of building the trusting relationship.

Personally, I highly demand self-awareness as the most important part of EI for me to be developed. Being self-aware is vital to help me with my productivity and to improve my performance and relationships in the workplace. Self-awareness is not only understanding my strengths, it is accepting all my shortcoming. For that, frequently ask my friends and colleagues about my negative aspects for them, knowing what is most annoying to them, and then try not to defend these negative feedbacks and figure out what are the reasons for my shortcomings and what could I have done better. When I accept and overcome the shortcomings, I can be more confident and have better relationships in the workplace.

Effective listening and the barriers to it

Different to hearing, listening is a vital part of the effective communicating skills necessarily used in the workplace. Effective listening is more than just receiving and understanding the accurate message from a sender, it is also a deliberate and psychological process that you show and prove your respect by paying attention and responding on speakers with verbal and nonverbal feedback, which requires concentrated effort of receiver with attending skills of listening.

However, the barriers may exist and affect the effective listening in a negative way. The three of most common barriers as described below:

1. Distraction: noise, background activities, uncomfortable environment and even the emotional noise (anger or sadness) may negatively affect and distract listener’s attention of listening to receive accurate information from speaker.
2. Lack of interest: if the listener has no interest in the topic communicated, no matter how much effort is put, listener is not able to concentrate for longer time.
3. Language difficulty: listener’s lack of language competence and narrow range of vocabulary may cause difficulty in listening. For example, listener may not be able to decode the meaning of some words used by the speaker.

There are some common attending skills adopted to improve communication competence:

• Non-verbal feedback: when listening, make eye contact, nodding and other appropriate facial expressions and body language to provide feedback to speaker and showing you are paying attention
• Verbal feedback: some short verbal utterance as feedback can also show speaker that you are listening, that could be ‘that’s right’, ‘make sense’, ‘uh-huh’
• Non-distraction environment: It is necessary to move away from distracted environment and get the meeting into a place where actually provides a good environment for the conversation. For instance, if meeting in a coffee shop, make sure to sit away from the coffee machine or away from the entrance to avoid or minimise the external distraction.