To be successful in today's business world, one must possess the ability to understand and communicate with people from different disciplines and functional areas within an organization. This includes being able to bridge the gap between the tech side and the business side of a company. Being multilingual and able to translate complex concepts to non-technical individuals, as well as business objectives to those in technical roles, is essential. By acting as a human API and serving as a connector and translator within the organization, one can become indispensable and achieve great success.
We’ve all been there — we think we understand something, but when it comes time to explain it to someone else, we flounder.
According to Gregory LaBlanc, a lecturer in management at Stanford GSB, attempting to communicate concepts reveals whether or not we properly grasped them in the first place. “If you think you understand something but you're incapable of communicating it, it probably means that you don't really understand it,” he says.
For communication to be effective, LaBlanc says it’s not enough to transmit a message. As he and Matt Abrahams discuss on this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, we have to be skilled translators, adept at decoding our ideas and recoding them in ways our audience will understand.
LaBlanc is the host of unSILOed.
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