Communication and Interpersonal Skills: Books & Reading Lists

The Art & Science of Communication teaches readers how to increase their communication effectiveness. Perkins uses applicable techniques, analogies and models that creatively and clearly explain the formulas of successful communication.

The number one challenge with today's young talent is a problem hiding in plain sight: the ever-widening soft skills gap. Today's new, young workforce has so much to offer—new technical skills, new ideas, new perspective, new energy. Yet too many of them are held back because of their weak soft skills. Soft skills may be harder to define and measure than hard skills, but they are just as critical. People get hired because of their hard skills but get fired because of their soft skills.

Business Communication for Managers: An Advanced Approach presents balanced treatment of both the theory and applications of managerial communication. Content includes strong coverage of ethics, cross-cultural communication, and the newest technological influences in communication. Unique, practical chapters on visual support of written and oral presentations are provided in addition to coverage on how to write and deliver a case analysis, meeting management, and report writing. The integrated coverage of technology continues throughout this edition. While communication concepts remain largely the same, the technology used to communicate has changed significantly and these changes are reflected in the fifth edition.

This practical book gives students the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary to communicate more effectively and interact more productively in the small group setting. With the help of this book, any group member can learn the skills necessary to participate in and lead a task group in an effective, productive, and healthy manner.

For technical professionals in all fields, a practical guide to enhancing communication, interpersonal, and managerial skills. In this highly accessible and practical book, Harry Chambers offers a wealth of strategies and tactics for building these skills, to the benefit of individuals, teams, and companies. In his trademark shoot-from-the-hip style, Chambers identifies specific real-world challenges that technical professionals face in the workplace, and offers definitive guidelines for enhancing their communication skills-from making presentations to giving and receiving criticism to navigating office politics.

Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research, Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors, which include self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy, add up to a different way of being smart—and they aren’t fixed at birth. Although shaped by childhood experiences, emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened throughout our adulthood—with immediate benefits to our health, our relationships, and our work.

Whether you work group stretches from here to Dubai or can easily meet in a conference room down the hall, anger and frustration are easy to come by when others don't do things your way, follow directions, or respond the way you think they should. But when emotions manage workplace relationships, the result is conflict, disengagement, and low morale. Emotional Intelligence for Managing Results in a Diverse World delivers a novel prescription for managing effectively in today's workplace: Use the dynamic principles of EQ plus insights from the author's pioneering diversity work to increase your competence in managing emotions and enhance your effectiveness in work, relationships, and life. The book also gives you the know-how to use this approach in coaching and developing others to help them be more successful on the job.

This book is a definitive guide to professional behavior whether you are eating lunch with a client, Skyping with your boss, or meeting a business partner for the first time. It is all about how you present yourself. The book contains 101 critical tips for improving behavior in any business situation, all delivered in a quick, no-nonsense format.

Provides advice from author John C. Maxwell on ways to communicate and connect with people, detailing five principles and practices that explain how to find common ground, simplify communication styles, capture a person's interest, inspire, and maintain authenticity in relationships.

Business people who work internationally or work with people who are international need toknow how to act before they can get the business and keep it. Proper business communication includes everything from email to eye contact, and the rules of what is "right" in other countries can be daunting to navigate.

Customize your delivery for maximum persuasive power. If you need the best practices and ideas for communicating effectively--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are 10 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: pitch your brilliant idea successfully, connect with your audience, establish credibility, inspire others to realize your vision, adapt to your listeners' decision-making styles, frame goals around common interests, build consensus and win concessions, and neutralize stressful conversations

Author and conductor Roger Nierenberg shares leadership lessons gleaned from years of working with complex orchestras in an inspirational parable for business executives that covers such topics as empowering teammates, listening, and creative solution development.

In Mastering Communication at Work, leadership communication experts Ethan F. Becker and Jon Wortmann describe easy-to-implement techniques for communicating in ways that empower teams, serve clients, and develop stronger relationships. You'll learn the secrets to making trust-building an innate part of your life - and use your new talent to reduce your stress and improve your organization on every level.

The author explains how established attitudes affect all aspects of one's life, the differences between fixed and growth mindsets, and the need to be open to change in order to achieve fulfillment and success. She introduces a phenomenon she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations.

The best leaders know how to communicate clearly and persuasively. How do you stack up? If you read nothing else on communicating effectively, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you express your ideas with clarity and impact―no matter what the situation.

We are all in the people business because we deal with other people all the time. But do you sometimes reach out to others only to find your efforts misunderstood or rejected? Do you wish your relationships with people close to you were more harmonious and fulfilling? PeopleSmart is a practical guide for anyone who asks these questions, which means most of us at some time or other. It reveals a powerful plan for making your relationships more productive and rewarding-whether they are with a supervisor and coworkers or a spouse, relatives, and friends-by developing your interpersonal intelligence.

Listening is harder than it looks- but it's the difference between business success and failure. Nothing causes bad decisions in organizations as often as poor listening. The author offers a step-by-step process that will help readers become active listeners, able to shape and focus any conversation, which could be the difference between business success and failure.

Communication is an absolutely indispensable leadership discipline. But, too often, leaders and professional communicators get mired in tactics, and fail to influence public attitudes in the ways that would help them the most. This book builds on the U.S. Marine Corps' legendary publication Warfighting, showing how to apply the Corps' proven leadership and strategy doctrine to all forms of public communication. The author reveals how to orient on audiences, recognizing their centers of gravity and most critical concerns. He also teaches how to integrate and succeed with all three levels of communication: strategic, operational, and tactical. He shows how to take the initiative and control the agenda, respond to events with speed and focus, use the power of maneuver, prepare and plan, and put it all together, in order to become a "habitually strategic" communicator.

Find your voice, speak your truth, listen deeply—a guide to having more meaningful and mindful conversations through nonviolent communication. We spend so much of our lives talking to each other, but how much are we simply running on automatic—relying on old habits and hoping for the best? Are we able to truly hear others and speak our mind in a clear and kind way, without needing to get defensive or go on the attack? In this groundbreaking synthesis of mindfulness, somatics, and Nonviolent Communication, Oren Jay Sofer offers simple yet powerful practices to develop healthy, effective, and satisfying ways of communicating.

To succeed at work and in life, people need to know how to have great encounters--in person, online, and on the phone with customers, colleagues, and clients. Kevin McCarney shows how readers can create positive results in every communication every day when they understand the secrets of the Big Brain and the Little Brain--the two communication brains we all use. The book not only helps readers build their own communication skills but also gives them simple, easy-to-remember ways to explain the art of communication to anyone, including managers and front-line employees.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky's extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis's own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Author John X. Wang demonstrates how to integrate marketing strategy into various facets of engineering communication from presentations, visual aids, proposals and technical reports to e-mail and phone calls. This book also provides situational examples, which demonstrate how to use computers, graphics, and other engineering tools to communicate with engineers.

From the Internet and e-commerce to contract work and globalization, the way we work and communicate is drastically changing. But keeping up with high-tech advances doesn't relieve any of us from paying attention to the little things-- the details that demonstrate our ability to communicate and interact with others on a professional level regardless of our position or occupation. Now, Barbara Pachter offers 601 essential ways to approach every business situation and relationship with confidence and ease.