You're in an ERP career and want to succeed. How can you improve your communication skills?

The first step about communication is to listen attentively to the audience and understand their requirements and expectations. Empathy helps to better understand their requests from their perspective before preparing and providing them the relevant recommendations or solution proposals.

Your communication should always be direct, clear and transparent, but depending on who you are talking to, the message and the way you convey what you want can or should change. It will be different when you talk to your boss or your customer or a supplier. Then you have to identify the message and the receiver.

After carefully listening to and understanding the audience's requirements, a proposal is worked out and presented to them. This must be communicated in such a way that the audience can easily understand even relatively complex matters. For example, a redesigned and improved sales or procurement process can be explained with the help of BPMN 2.0 process and collaboration diagrams which are intuitive and understandable by both technical and business people.

The message should be conveyed as clearly as possible, without a lot of make-up or noise that distorts the communication. By identifying the audience we will modulate the way we transmit the message, it is possible that in some scenarios we should be more technical and detailed and in others we should be more practical and use a more casual and everyday language.

The art of listening has to be practiced, sometimes we miss some things because we do not know how to listen, and in the ERP world it is necessary to listen very well in many stages of a project for example, and above all to rescue the message of what they are talking about.

In such a dynamic and volatile world, we must be prepared to face many situations, and we must have the ability to speak clearly, to listen attentively and to adequately convey what we want. In the consulting world you will find yourself in many situations that require you to talk to your boss, your colleagues, users, suppliers and more agents on the same day. So you must enhance your capacity for adaptability.

Requesting comments after a communication is a good practice, there are different means to collect this data. You can also request it directly and personally with your colleagues, your bosses or subordinates, it is important that the message you wanted to give has been received in the same way. If the communication has arrived distorted, we must find where we were not clear or were confusing.