Lack of Communication Skills Stopping You From Being Successful?
5 key factors to become an impactful communicator at work
You communicate every day for personal and professional reasons. You’ve been communicating even before starting to speak as a baby. Communication then, an inherent ability; but when it comes to the professional arena, it needs to be honed into a skill.
“If you just communicate, you will get by. But if you communicate skillfully, you can work miracles.” — Jim Rohn
A common misconception is that if someone is articulate, they are great at communicating. If that was true, every time someone spoke well and used fantastic words, they would be getting the desired results. But that’s not the case because you could be most articulate person and completely miss the mark on other aspects of communication. What that means is, factors besides words play a critical part in making communication impactful.
Becoming skilled at communicating takes you closer to fulfilling the purpose of any communication — getting results, i.e., getting someone to take the action you want.
For those who just thought: …but I don’t always communicate to get a result, sometimes I just want to convey my feelings, thank a co-worker for their support; appreciate my boss for having my back.
Yes, even in these instances you are communicating to get a result. The objective of your communication is for your colleague and manager to realize you value them. And while it may not be your conscious intention, they will be encouraged to continue repeat their behavior and reciprocate through action and/or words in the future.
When it comes to personal communications with friends and family it is alright to be free and casual. But when it comes to professional communication, you want to be more thoughtful, at least for matters you would consider critical.
Here are five factors to think through if you want to communicate skillfully in a professional setting to get the outcome you want:
1Intent: Start with the ‘why’. Ask yourself, “What result do I want to get from this communication? Why is this communication taking place?” This is crucial because your reason for communication has a cascading effect on everything else, such as, what method you choose, what words you say, and how you say them.
This doesn’t necessarily apply only to big ticket items. Being thoughtful about your intention for everyday tasks goes a long way and sometimes creates long-term results that you were not anticipating.
I received an email from a client, let’s call her Mary, asking my team to clarify certain design choices for a presentation we created for her. This was Mary’s second such email and although the questions were not a big deal, it is unusual for Mary to send two emails of this type.
Typically, I’d let my team handle tactical tasks, but in this case, instead of having them reply and clarify, I picked up the phone and called Mary only to find out that she had a new VP, John, who is very detailed oriented. We set up a Zoom call to walk John through all the details of the design and answer his questions in real time. Once John understood our reasons and approach to the design, he got onboard. The project has been going smoothly and we’ve been receiving quick approvals.
The intent of my communication after seeing the email was to address concerns, so I chose to speak with Mary on the phone, a method that would best facilitate this intention. While for John, I choose to set up a Zoom call to allow for the ability to not only address concerns but also answer all follow up questions. This has gone a long way in building credibility with John.
2 Audience: Once your intent is clear, you have to consider who the different stakeholders in your communication are. Who are you communicating with and why is this person important? In a professional setting, the designation/role matters. Not because someone in a position of authority is high and mighty (although sometimes that may be the case), but because someone in that position will have little time and patience for lengthy emails or may not be available for multiple phone calls or meetings. So it becomes critical to put some thought into who is your ‘primary’ vs. ‘secondary’ target audience is. This will help tailor your communication to hit home for key decision makers.
In the case of Mary and John, while Mary was always my primary client, that changed when I realized that in the future John was going to be the decision maker. So while Mary is still an important stakeholder, John is the ‘primary’ now and our team will have to tailor our communication (email, phone, Zoom) to ensure we keep his detail-orientation in mind.
3 Message and Words: Once the intent and audience of your communication is clear, the rest becomes a little easier. Knowing what results you want to get and from whom, helps decide what you should be saying — your message. This is about choosing the words that will be best resonate with your stakeholders and communicate your message clearly.
If pay close attention to your stakeholders’ style of communication and the words they use most often, you will get a good idea of what they prefer — picture-oriented, sound-oriented, or feeling-oriented.
During the first interaction with John, I noticed that him using a lot of ‘sound words’. He used, for example: “that resonates”, “sounds good” and “that rings a bell”; while Mary is more picture-oriented and used to saying things like: “that looks good” and “I see what you mean”. I am certainly be more mindful of these preferences when communicating with them.
You will, of course, not go about wordsmithing each email and force fitting words to tailor to the communication style of your stakeholder, because then the communication won’t come across as authentic. But you can certainly be mindful enough to drop those phrases here and there and that’ll do the trick.
4 Tone: If you have a good understanding of your intent, audience, message, and words, then the tone that goes with it will flow naturally. You might think that tone is something to be careful of only when speaking but you’ll be surprised by how clearly tone comes through in your written communication. It may be subtle, but it definitely comes through.
A simple trick to identify the tone of an email is to read it aloud.
Knowing John’s preference for detail orientation, one of my team members got quite carried away with simplifying technical details for John. He had made the assumption that John would not know the nitty-gritty of the latest software and boy, was he wrong! John found the tone of the team member condescending and I received a rather sarcastic email from John after.
5 Listen and Read Between the Lines: The importance of listening to the other person, literally and figuratively, cannot be stressed enough in communication.
Steven Covey and Peter Drucker are so on point about this.
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.’ — Steven Covey
“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker
In oral communication, listening to reply is almost a habit for most people who think that if they don’t ‘come back’ quickly with an answer or repartee, they will appear dumb. Listening (not just hearing) the other person is the only way to understand what result they are seeking from the communication and then formulating your response to address their need.
In written communication, reading between the lines is a skill and not an easy one at that. But it does help in anticipating risks, recognizing opportunities and expectations and staying on top of things.
Being aware of your intention and understanding the intent behind the communication of the other person and is the key to getting desired results and having a mutually fulfilling and successful professional relationship.
If you look closely, all the five factors to consider — intent, audience, message, tone, listening — are interconnected. You might already be taking care of few, being mindful of others will take your communication from ‘ability’ to ‘skill’. As you apply this more frequently, it will become a subconscious process you follow when communicating.
It could be the difference between making an impression to making an impact. Because only when you see impact, that is action, you know communication has taken place, otherwise you are up against the single biggest problem in communication, as G.B. Shaw puts it:
“…the illusion that it has taken place.”
