ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how vital strong communication skills are to collaborative working relationships. It focuses on all communication elements and barriers that can lead to problems and misunderstandings. The chapter explains the elements of good communication in meetings. Idea formation is the first step in the communication process. This step takes place inside your mind and involves nobody else. Idea encoding is the process by which the idea is put into language that is appropriate for conveying the intended message. The method by which an individual communicates an idea is referred to as the communication channel. The final step in the communication process is called receiver decoding. Communicating effectively would be so much easier if communication problems were limited to the ideas we have and the words we choose to transmit our idea. Language barriers to communication were far less significant a few decades ago than they are today.
