When you communicate with partners, donors or colleagues, are you building a relationship or creating a rift? This was one of the ‘pain point’ raised during the “Communication and its challenges” session of Staff Development Programme (SDP)of Caritas India by Kushal Neogy, Sub-Regional Director of Partnership of Catholic Relief Services and the Resource Person of the programme.

How we communicate with partners, how partners communicate with us, and how we navigate, care and troubleshoot challenges in relationships is critical for long terms success in NGO. Over the years, the humanitarian sector has become more accountable and professional. With accountability comes a great deal of responsibility to carry forward its development communication with all the stakeholders.

Different types of communication styles like crucial communication, persuasive communication, and cross-cultural communication become handy in dealing with people. It teaches us as to how to interact with other cultures like classical, modern and postmodern and understand the intercultural competencies.

Participants of the two previous SDPs reflected on their key learning and how they inculcated and implemented it in their professional and day to day personal lives. They were divided into groups and asked to identify and reflect on key communication issues, analyse the paint point where the communication breakdown occurred and identify some potential causes of its breakdown.

Explaining the “seven deadly sins of speaking”, the resource person shared that one need to avoid Gossip, Judging, Negativity, Complaining, Excused, Exaggeration and Dogmatism from their speech to be more effective.

These bad habits can be controlled through ‘Pace, Prosody, Timbre, Register, Pitch and Volume control’.

Participants through role play learned the real-life communication situations and responses with various stakeholders include church, NGO’s, partners, donors, and colleagues.

A brief on ‘Relationship emergency’ was shared to recognize the red flags, when to pause and how to investigate, reflect, seek counsel and plan to re-engage, etc.

Dynamism with partners, power dynamics, soft skills to manage one’s own emotions (emotional intelligence) and how to boost it and key points to improve conversation, rules of communications was shared with the partners. The effective communication has some basics thumb rules, such as   avoiding multitasking, avoiding pontificate, using open-ended questions(5W,1H), Being slow, If you don’t know just say don’t know, equating your experiences with theirs, trying not to repeat yourself, Staying out of weeds, keeping your mouth closed for learning more and being brief.

Church in India and the history of Christianity, types of the church hierarchy, salutation, how to address church leaders were shared with the partners. The core reason to work with the church in India is to spread ‘Solidarity, subsidiarity, sustainability, and Scale’. The Session also focused on the use of social media for a Catholic institution and why an organization needs to be in social media, its importance, it’s do’s and don’ts and its strategy to attract the audience, content develop and management, participation in dialogue and communication planning in social media.

Session on E-mail etiquette, the participants learned the basic etiquette of mail communication and what are the crucial points need to take care while communicating via e-mails.

All the three days, the participants were involved in various group activities either it is a role play, group task to understand the communication dynamics, cruciality of communication to deal with partners, donors and other colleagues.

Fr. Sushil Modi, Administrator, Caritas India on behalf of all the management extended his gratitude towards Mr. Kushal Neogy for conducting the training programme on a very important topic which is very useful and essential to strengthen the organization and build a healthy relationship with Donors, partners, people, community and other stakeholders.

Few Participants also expressed their observation, feedbacks, and learning they had from the training and promised to practice it in their personal and professional ground to strengthen their communication and make it more effective.

Caritas India has organised this three days SDP for its newly joined employees to train them on Development Communication and Coordination from June 19-21, 2019 at Vishwa Yuvak Kendra, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. This was the third module in the series. First two modules covered the work ethics, culture, and relations in a development organization and social development tools and methodologies.