Administrative communication is a function through which administrative processes are prepared, controlled, enforced and justified. In general, this includes all communication services within the area of responsibility of the public administration. Each business has a communication infrastructure that not only allows the transmission of e-mails, and access to the internal network,. The communication activities of the business administration convey information in a society, together with the media,build trust, secure the legitimacy of organization and promote both the formation of opinions and political participation.
The administration of any organization can be accomplished only through communication. The effectiveness of administrative communication within an organization is, therefore, the best measure of the effectiveness of the administration of that organization. Poor communication, poor administration. Effective and efficient communication, effective and efficient administration.
The Importance of Communication In Administration And Business.
- Most administrators in most business and industrial organizations spend at least 75 per cent of their time communicating, and not infrequently as much as 95 per cent of their time communicating to others and being communicated to.1 We may safely infer from these figures that any improvement in the administrators ability to communicate would in fact be an improvement in his ability to administrate. The ability to communicate is the most used, and the most usable — hence the most valuable — ability any administrator may exercise in his job.
- Clearly, success as an administrator depends upon one’s ability to communicate successfully with oneself and with others. This fact does not mean that an administrator must be a polished writer or a polished speaker. We may take it to mean only that he be able to understand other people, and they him. Jacques Barzun has said that “to communicate can only mean to transmit thought or feeling with reasonable accuracy.” It is this general concept of communication that we shall use in this book. The problem, then, is: How can an administrator transmit his thoughts or his feelings with reasonable accuracy?.
- Investigators have indeed reported that the ability to communicate effectively with others is the single ability most important to success in any endeavor that involves other people. Without this ability to communicate effectively with others in our world today, one’s chances of success as an administrator are extremely limited. Here are what some noted practitioners have had to say about this relationship: The one basic skill … is the ability to organize and express ideas in writing and speaking. Your success depends on reaching others via the spoken or written word.
- As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends upon your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word. This ability to express oneself is perhaps the most important of all the skills a man can possess.Communication is the way management gets its job done. There is little risk of oversimplification in saying that good managers are good communicators; poor managers are usually the opposition matter how varied the activities or how special some of the skills involved, in the final analysis the job of every executive or supervisor is communication.
- Certainly, one of the most important limitations, as well as one of the pre-eminently important difficulties of the modem executive, is the inability adequately in writing or in conference to express intelligibly the facts with respect to complex situations of which he alone may have an understanding. The administrator’s ability to function effectively — to think and to reason and to pass judgment, to perceive and discern and evaluate — are all limited or facilitated by what he knows, by what has been communicated to him. At the same time, people know him only by what he communicates to them.
- The ability of his subordinates to function effectively depends to a great extent upon what and how he communicates with them. Friends, associates, customers, suppliers, bosses, subordinates, all know him and judge him on the basis of what he communicates, and how he communicates. Each of us communicates every day to other people, and these exchanges are usually of some concern to us. We must sell something, convince someone of something, express our feelings, persuade someone to do something, exchange ideas or notions about things, convey meanings, impress someone, or achieve any one of thousands of personal and professional goals with our communications.
- No matter why we communicate, the outcome of our communications is usually important to us. This fact is as true for the administrator as it is for the baby fussing for his bode: we must be heard and understood, and our communications must be appropriately acted upon. In order to be successful at this, we must listen, understand, and act effectively upon communications directed to us. Where it is for the hungry baby a matter of biological survival, it may well be for the administrator a matter of professional or business survival.
- Much of the administrator’s communicating time takes the form of talking with others; much is spent in listening to others. Some of his communicating time is spent in reading what others have to say. More and more of the administrator’s communication with others must be written.
Today’s administrator must communicate his ideas, his requirements, his decisions, his suggestions, his appraisals, and his questions to his superiors, to his subordinates, to customers, and to business associates. To do so effectively, he must also receive from these same people information of a thousand kinds. He must be able to evaluate what he receives and to evaluate what he transmits.
An administrator is, then, in a sense, a data handler. He absorbs certain kinds and quantities of data (information) from many sources, operates on these data in his own mind, and sends out certain other kinds of data to many receivers. Communication is a remarkably complex subject. And in its practical aspects, which we are interested in, it is one of remarkable magnitude.
