Educational Procurement Journal - September 2007 - (Page 14) Communication and Relationship-Building – The Essence of Your Job by Karen Leland Sterling Consulting Group magine it’s a busy Monday morning at the office, and suddenly Oprah Winfrey shows up and announces she’s doing a special on “A Day in the Life of the American Worker.” She wants to follow you around with a camera for an entire day, videotaping everything you do (with the exception of a few personal moments). At the end of the day, Oprah invites you to view the tape. As you watch, you notice that you’re resourceful under pressure, productive, efficient and good-looking. That’s probably the reason they picked you. However, seeing yourself on the video confirmed your suspicions: A day at work is rather like a trip down a raging river. After you walk in, everything switches into high gear and is a crazy and fast-moving whirl of doing this, that and the other thing until you leave for the day. The tape demonstrates how surrounded and submerged you are by ringing telephones to answer, e-mails to read and write, paperwork to process, meetings to attend, problems to solve, fires to put out and so on. These incessant tasks that make up your day are the functions of your job. Thinking that all the paperwork, e-mails, I memos and meetings are the whole story is tempting, but if you look a little deeper, you find two common threads that link together the fabric of everything you do at work, regardless of whether you’re a plumber, a teacher or an IRS auditor. The first common thread is communicating with other people. Although plumbers may spend most of their day alone under a sink with only a wrench for company, their communication skills are what count when they explain to you what the problem is and what it will cost to fix it. A teacher’s ability to make a subject utterly fascinating or boring has a great deal to do with the way he or she talks about it. Even the IRS has instituted customer communication improvement programs in recent years! The bottom line is that everyone, regardless of whether they work alone or in a group, uses some form of communication to get their job done. Remember, communication isn’t just about talking. It’s also body language, writing and, in today’s world, online interaction. The second common thread of the workplace routine is establishing relationships with other people. Relationship usually refers to a personal connection, such as a friend, spouse or family member. However, in the service game, the 14 EDUCATIONAL PROCUREMENT JOURNAL September 2007
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