A couple weeks ago I attended Jim Fortin's Persuasion Equation class, a class that increases your communication and persuasion skills. This is one of those seminars where just sitting through the class helps to transform your skills.
In the class I learned language patterns and that people have different thinking modalities: Auditory, Visual, Kinesthetic, Gustatory, Olfactory. The training leans toward the sales side, but the information can also be used by managers or change agents.
Fact is, the Project Management Institute tells us that management is 90% communication. And yet, the only thing I remember from my PMI training is that there's a sender, a receiver, a message. I'm sure there's more. Perhaps I dozed off during one of the key 44 processes.
Because the only tool we have to persuade people is our words, it's important that we master advanced communication skills. Now, the concepts I learned from Jim aren't new age, they are based on how people learn. In How to Learn Anything Quickly, author Ricki Linksman describes four learning styles based on our senses. When the material is presented in our dominate learning style, we are able to learn quickly. I'm not sure if schools are identifying the student's preferred learning style at an early age and then providing it to teachers, but that would be a smart approach.
Likewise, in business, it would be helpful to identify the preferred communication model of executives so their subordinates can provide information in an optimal fashion.