BUSINESS ENGLISH communication: 3 mistakes to avoid!

Have you ever embarrassed yourself in a business setting?

In my last video,

you learned about making your international team great with better business

communication skills, but you know,

I wouldn't be doing my job as your English coach if I didn't tell

you about three big business communication mistakes

that you really want to avoid if you want your team to thrive,

you ready? Let's go. And before we get started,

if you would like other business English lessons that can change

the way that you communicate in English and therefore change your career,

go ahead and subscribe to this channel so that you get all of the future

lessons so that you can improve regularly, consistently,

and step by step and have fun doing it.

Now,

here's a big mistake that you probably don't even know that you're making,

focusing too much on the problems when you communicate.

Now, this is something that I often see with my clients,

and it's a cultural thing really. I mean,

if you are in a culture or country or culture,

they kind of go together generally where the approach is to really

look critically at projects or at situations.

You know, those cultures, for example, in France where I live, uh,

they do place a high value on looking critically at problems,

which means talking a lot about the problems and about what's going

wrong. And this is important in order to solve the problem. You know,

you can't solve the problem if you don't talk about it,

but you don't want to be too negative. You know,

if you focus too much on the problem about what's not working well,

that can actually like stop the communication because people are like,

okay, it's all negative, it's all a problem. We can't find a solution.

I give up, whatever. Um,

but if you're too negative and it stops the communication,

it means that you can't talk about it and then you can't find a solution.

I mean, here is an example of what I mean.

So let's say that your team is working on like

a big project.

Like let's say they have to create a series of videos to promote a new product,

and they see that the problem is there is just no way

that all of those videos are gonna be done before the release date of the new

product. These videos will never be done on time.

Yes, you may be telling the truth, but you're not helping to solve the problem.

You're not helping to find a solution. So try this instead,

state the problem objectively without too much emotion.

Like don't get, you know, upset or angry or,

or any of those things. Just kind of be very neutral. For example,

our video team thinks that we won't be able to complete all of the videos before

the product is released and then add like, what if,

or would it be possible?

Or we could plus a possible solution.

For example,

what if we released the instructional videos over the next two weeks and not all

at once? Mm.

Would it be possible to postpone the release of the product maybe for a couple

of days?

We could bring on some people from another team so that we could get these

things done sooner?

Focusing on the problem can create a lot of resistance, a lot of tension,

and it can make people not want to help if you're,

especially if you're like shooting down all of their suggestions and then it

feels like there are just no solutions and we can't do anything.

And so focusing on the solutions puts your

team into problem solving mode.

It helps them to start searching for solutions to,

you know, try to find maybe not the perfect outcome,

but something that works.

And I think you can clearly see which one is gonna be better for

you and your business and your team.

All right, here's mistake number two that I often see.

Are you being too direct or trying to have too much

authority when you're speaking?

Because this is another big mistake that I often see with clients and the worst

part is you may not even realize that you're doing it.

Maybe you think because you're the boss or the manager and you're giving

instructions to your team that you have to have a very authoritative way of

speaking to them, but it with good communication skills. In fact,

often you want to be more collaborative and to speak to them in a

maybe more indirect way, uh, or more, I don't wanna say polite,

it's not a question of politeness,

but it's a question of how do you position yourself, you know,

when you're faced with maybe your team clients, et cetera.

And you don't want to put yourself in a position of direct authority,

cuz I mean, nobody likes authority, right? For example,

I've heard someone ask a member of their team to submit a report

by the end of the week and they said something like this,

and you will turn this report into me by the end of the week. Now,

if your English speaking colleagues hear you say something like that,

they are going to feel uncomfortable,

maybe a little resentful of you.

And if they realize that English is not your native language,

they might feel a little embarrassed for you because they know that they,

they'll probably just assume that you meant well that you had good

intentions,

but you've just got a little problem in the way that you're

communicating in English. It's, hey, it's your foreign language,

it's normal to have problems. Um, but hey,

you're watching this video so you can fix those problems.

So you don't want your team to get offended because of your communication

skills in English, because that is not going to motivate your team.

So we could use softeners to make requests sound more polite like

this. Could you have this report into me by the end of the week?

Please do an English speaker. This sounds more polite.

It makes us want to cooperate more. And just remember,

the more authority that you have in your position,

the more important it is to speak indirectly and collaboratively.

Here's.

Another place where we often see people making business communication mistakes,

emails. Now why,

why are there so many problems with emails when you know,

if you're writing an email in English, you can sit down,

you can take the time to think about your phrases, you can use Google Translate,

it's okay,

but emails are still a very problematic

thing when you're communicating in English as a foreign language.

Now why is that? Because when you're speaking to someone,

you have intonation, body language, facial,

facial expressions. That's a hard expression to say. Um,

to help you understand the intention with email,

none of that, you just have the words.

So here are a few little tips to help you make sure that your

emails are not offending anyone. Let's say, um,

first thing after you write the email, I know that you're super excited,

it's done. It's,

you wanna hit send and you wanna move on to the next thing. But please just take

two minutes to just read your email through again and see how it

sounds. Second,

use templates or models of the emails that you send the

most frequently. This way, you know,

every time you are asking for some information,

you don't have to start writing the email from zero,

but you can use a template, it can make your life easier,

can save you time on emails,

and it can also make your emails better.

And actually that's why I would like to give you some email templates to help

you with this.

There is a link below this video where you can go and get

eight email templates for entrepreneurs and other professionals of the most

commonly used email types in the business world.

Um, go ahead, get them, download them. They're free. You can them,

you can put them in your email system, um,

as a saved response. And then you just have to, you know,

adapt them to your situation.

But it will save you a lot of time and make your emails a lot better. Now,

if you don't use it, you lose it.

So here's a way that you can use what you learned today.

Can you think of a business situation where you noticed someone who had

great communication skills? Tell us about that in the comments.

I would love to know what was the situation,

why did they impress you?

And it can be in English or your own language, um, for the situation,

but just share it with us and we can see what are some good things

happening out there in terms of business communication skills.

And if this lesson was helpful for you,

there are three ways that you can tell me and I would love to know,

you can give this lesson a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel so that

you get future business English lessons.

You can go over of course and get that template,

those templates because there are eight of them templates for business English

emails. And then go ahead and watch this next video,

which is all about the importance of business communication and

three skills that your team needs for success. All right,

thank you so much for watching Business English with Christina and I

look forward to seeing you next time.