Interpersonal Communications - Essay Example

(Guffey, 2006; Bonnet, 2000) The incident that I am going to cite here is actually observed by one of my friends in his internship at a software house last summer. My friend was there at the business analysis department and the incident took place in the same department. The incident shows that how the poor listening can lead to negative consequences. It was Friday morning, the weekend was about to start in few hours and was a signal of relaxation after the week long tiresome efforts of business analysis.

The last task for the week that Ms. Jenifer Mitchells, the supervisor of my friend, had to make the last visit of the day to New Star and Company for the purpose of requirement analysis for the decision support system the Soft Tech, the company to which Ms. Jenifer belonged, was developing. This project meant a lot to the Soft Tech because New Start Company was a very big client for them. This was the first time Soft Tech was given any information system development project by New Star and Company, an organization dealing in logistics.

On that day my friend also accompanied her. My friend told that he got a feeling that on one hand Ms. Jenifer is a bit in hurry for one of his personal commitments few hours later (she herself told this to my friend) that's why she wanted to end the meeting soon. Moreover, Ms. Jenifer was a fresh graduate of a renowned technical university with the gold medal. This, according to my friend, made Ms. Jenifer a bit arrogant. After reaching there, the formal introduction and greeting was done. Then the discussion moved to the main point that was business requirements.

Since the new system that was supposed to be designed was the decision support system that would help the strategic managers and decision makers in resource optimization and the supervisor of my friend Ms. Jenifer had done her final year project on decision support system that is why she was not at all interested in listening what the customers want, rather time and again she used to start telling about her project and praising about it, trying to let the clients know that she is a gold medalist.

According to my friend, when the customers were telling to her about their requirements, she was repeatedly looking at her wrist watch, probably that was giving a gesture that she is running out of time. Moreover she was not noting down their requirements on paper as much. When the reason for it was asked by friend, she said that she had done such project earlier too, so now doing such project again is not an issue for her, thus she did not need to note each and everything down on paper. It was suggested by the person briefing to us that we should conduct interviews from people involved in decision making who would be using the system that they develop so as to have the better understanding of what they exactly want. Ms. Jenifer was not interested in even that too.

Finally the meeting ended with all 'hearing' but no 'listening'.On Monday when Ms. Jenifer came to work again, she presented the meeting report to her manager. Her