1.3: Communication Competence

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Understand the dimensions of competent communication and how they can vary.
• Identify your own standpoint, and how it affects your communication habits.
• Assess your communication skills to find areas where you can improve your own communication competence.

COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE

Communication is only meaningful if the message we are sending is received and decoded as we intend. Getting a message across is much more complicated than just saying something however we want, and having it understood. Communication competence is defined as the ability to craft and send a message in a manner that ensures it will be received as it was intended. According to Spitzberg and Cupach (1984; 2011), competent communication involves a number of key components.

Clarity and Intent

Achieving competent communication begins with the intent behind our message. Every communication has some intended response by others, even when we intend others to ignore us. Being conscious of the intent of our messages- particularly those messages we send to more than one person at a time- can go a long way to helping us craft the message in a successful way.

Crafting a message in as clear a manner as possible is the most common route to having it received successfully. In academic terms, clarity means adjusting our verbal or nonverbal signals to suit the channel that we choose, and with consideration to the possible noise that could confuse the recipient. In many cases, our decisions about clarity are guided by what we view to be appropriate ways of communicating in the context. This involves suiting our language and behavior to the expectations of others.

Adaptability

We have all experienced miscommunications when our intended meaning was misunderstood by someone else. To communicate competently means to avoid misunderstandings by purposefully suiting the message in both content and delivery. To do this requires that we constantly adapt our communication depending on who we are communicating with, what the message is that we have to convey, and what channel we are using to convey it.

The ability to adapt our communication is perhaps the most important skill for good communication. Adaptability is crucial to achieving communication competency because not all people interpret the same messages in the same way. Adapting our communication can mean many things- we may need to adapt our tone, the vocabulary we use, the way we behave physically, even the amount we communicate is prone to adaptation. This is because communication is always interpreted based on its context, and these contexts can change depending on a number of factors, not the least of which is culture.

Was there a time recently when you had to adapt your communication style, or approach in order to get your message across? What kind of adaptations did you make? Did you change your tone, choose new words, or even a different channel? Once you begin to think about specific exchanges and how you manage them it may be easier to realize that we are constantly adapting our communication in big and small ways in order to be understood.

Self-Monitoring

One way to improve our ability to adapt our communication is to begin by improving our own self-monitoring. Self-monitoring is the ability to understand one’s own behaviors at both the macro and micro levels, and to understand how they may be interpreted by others. The key to strong self-monitoring is to be empathetic to others on a continual basis. This means being attentive to other’s feelings, and trying to see things from their point of view. If you can develop your empathy for others it is likely you will be better able to accurately anticipate how your own behaviors may affect them, making it easier for you to self-monitor, and to thereby adapt your communication.

Competent communicators usually monitor their behaviors in order to convey to their conversation partners the same qualities in a listener that they too are seeking when they communicate. This is called conversational involvement, and it requires that we maintain eye contact, use verbal and non-verbal cues that signal interest and/or understanding, and focus our attention adequately. Ask yourself- do you practice conversational involvement when you’re listening to people speak? If so, what types of things do you do to illustrate that you’re involved?

In order to behave appropriately, a competent communicator will also use conversational management as a way of regulating the conversation. Regulating conversations is almost intuitive to most of us, but competent communicators make it a point to do things like take turns without interrupting, respond when responses are expected, and to include everyone present. This can be complicated because in most circumstances no one person is assigned the manager of a conversation, but we all play our part in the management of conversations if we want to be seen as polite. Perhaps you have had an experience with someone who did not manage conversations very well. Can you recall a time when you were confused or annoyed by someone who interrupted you consistently, or didn’t reply when a response was indicated? How did you handle it?

Cognitive Complexity

People who are skilled in competent communication demonstrate what is known as cognitive complexity. Cognitive complexity is a measure of one’s ability to see things from multiple viewpoints. A person with well-developed cognitive complexity is likely to consider a range of factors when analyzing an interaction between two people, and to make a point of contextualizing each message sent with regard to the viewpoint of the person of the sender, and then to contextualize its reception from the viewpoint of the receiver. Because communication takes place across cultural, subcultural, and even co-cultural lines it is helpful to consider that each individual person sees the world from their own particular standpoint (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984; 2011).

Standpoint Theory

Standpoint Theory argues that each of us occupies a specific social location (or standpoint) in the societies where we live, and it is from this standpoint that we experience the world, and thereby understand it. Different standpoints can occasionally be shared by people, but more often than not we are communicating with people who see the world from a different standpoint than our own (Wood, 2005). Recognizing the variety of different standpoints that people occupy is easier to understand when we first acknowledge that each of us sees the world through the framework of our own intersectional identity. The concept of intersectionality states that no one identity factor- age, race, gender, religion- accounts entirely for our identity. Therefore, when we aim to adopt the viewpoints of other people we must do so by recognizing that they too enjoy an intersectional identity (hooks, 2014).

Using standpoint theory as a way of framing our communication with others shows that we are seeking to communicate in an ethical manner that provides respect for others. Ethics in communication include concerns over the ability of people to exploit, harass, or harm others by abusing their power over them. An old maxim claims that the measure of a person is how they treat those least among them, meaning that the only ethical way to conduct one’s self is to treat everyone with equal respect. This can be harder than sounds because we may not always recognize the power dynamics that exist in a situation, or else we may take it for granted that our perception of equality in a situation is valid.

Consider for a moment your interaction with your teachers. You may consider them to have more power than you do because of their position, but if their goal is for you to learn the material, your teacher may feel that you ultimately have the most power in the equation. After all, teachers can’t read the textbooks for you (Cupach & Spitzberg, 2011).

Conclusion

As the three modules above show us, even the most basic communicative acts are far more nuanced and complex than we might realize when we perform them. Communication is not only contextual, but it demands that processes of encoding and decoding that can be complicated by the way that messages are relayed, and/or received. In order to enhance our communication, we must become more thoughtful about other people, more attentive to our own communication behaviors, and how they need to be adapted to the unique circumstances of our varied interactions with other people.

LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Activity 1: Giving Directions

Pair up the students together and instruct them to provide one another with clear accurate driving directions from the classroom to their own home (or any location they know well). They must do this without using any digital devices or visual aids, and they cannot get help with street names, landmarks, etc. except from their partner. Once the directions have been provided, the pairs of students must be merged so that there are two pairs in a group. Then each person must go around in turn and provide the directions they just learned to the others.

Through this exercise the students will have a chance to see how other people perceive the environment around them, and to try and find a shared vocabulary in how to describe streets, landmarks, turning directions, and distances without the aid of the now ubiquitous Siri.

Activity 2: Reflection

Allow the students a few moments to reflect in writing on a miscommunication they have had recently, and to rethink how the miscommunication occurred. In what respect was the interaction lacking one of the conditions for competent communication? Once the students have identified how the miscommunication may have occurred, give them another few minutes to reflect in writing on how they could have approached the same scenario differently in order to have achieved competent communication.

REFERENCES

Hooks, B. (2014). Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. Routledge.

Spitzberg, B.H. & Cupach, W.R. (1984). Interpersonal communication competence. Sage.

Spitzberg, B.H. & Cupach, W.R. (2011). “Interpersonal Skills” In Knapp, M., & Daly J.A. (Eds.)., SAGE handbook of interpersonal communication (4^th ed., pp. 481-526). Sage

Wood, J. T. (2005). Feminist standpoint theory and muted group theory: Commonalities and divergences. Women and Language, 28(2), 61.

GLOSSARY

• Adaptability: The willingness to change your approach according to the situation.
• Appropriateness: Choosing the best possible channel and encoding for a specific situation.
• Clarity: Encoding a message in a form that will make it easy to decode accurately.
• Cognitive Complexity: A worldview that includes multiple perspectives and cultural understandings that may influence how a message is decoded.
• Communication Competence: An individual’s aptitude for relaying messages to others and having them received as intended.
• Conversational Involvement: Illustrating your interest in a conversation through verbal and non-verbal cues.
• Conversational Management: Consciously working to make a conversation equitable and enjoyable for both people involved.
• Empathy: The ability to consider someone else’s perspective or feelings.
• Ethics: Any issue that needs to be considered as a violation of ethics or what is seen as morally correct.
• Intent: The purpose a person has in sending a specific message.
• Power Dynamics: The structural or personal dynamics that afford power to one party or another in a given interaction.
• Self Monitoring: The ability is to understand one’s own behaviors at both the macro and micro levels, and to understand how they may be interpreted by others.

MEDIA

Multimedia 1: Communication Competence

This video provides an audio-visual recapitulation of the content that we discuss in this module by discussing the numerous aspects of communication competence. What areas can you improve?

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIdb7GPvSl4

Multimedia 2: "No Soup For You!"

This video illustrates an unusual communication climate that requires prompt adaptation in order to succeed. Take a look and describe all the ways you see our competence concepts playing out in the scene.

Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xqkpP59UgM