What Is Your Communication Style?

Everyone’s been there. You’re presenting in an important meeting, and you can tell the message isn’t getting across.

What’s going on?

It could be that you and your team members have different styles of communicating. The first step to better communication is identifying your own communication style. By understanding how you prefer to communicate, you’ll be better able to adapt to other communication styles.

To begin, ask yourself these two questions:

• When you interact with others, do you tend to askor tell them to do an activity?
• When you interact with others, do you tend to displayyour feelings and emotions, or do you tend to keep your feelings and emotions inside?

The first question identifies your level of “Assertiveness,” and the second, your level of “Responsiveness.” Where you fall in terms of assertiveness and responsiveness can help you determine which communication style you prefer. The four main communication styles are: Analytic, Driver, Amiable, and Expressive. For example, if you tend to tell and display, then you prefer an Expressive style.

Understanding Your Style

As you read about your style, remember that your style is simply the way you prefer to interact with others, but you may use all of these styles at different times. Also, keep in mind that no single style is better than any other. You may prefer a certain style because of your own values or preferences, but each style has positives and negatives.

Finally, be sure to pay attention to the possible strengths and challenges of your style – these could contribute to miscommunication between you and someone with a different style.

Now that you know your communication style, learn how to better communicate by adapting your style to others.  Read the full MyCareer@VA article here.