How to be a better communicator

The importance of communication

Are you looking to have more impact at work or elsewhere?

Do you feel underappreciated at times or that people do not listen to you?

The first culprit in such circumstances can be the effectiveness of your communication.

Communication is the primary tool used by humans for sharing knowledge, influencing others and facilitating groups of people to execute actions together. This is why communication is so critical to human society, and therefore a key skill to have and improve.

I am sure you know of smart, hard-working people who are let down because they cannot communicate well. If you have the ability to communicate clearly, concisely and with impact, then it is far more likely that others will listen to your message and be influenced to take action.

The good news is that this is a skill you can develop and here I want to share some advice that has worked well for me over the years, particularly in a business setting.

Communication methods

Let’s start with the way that you communicate with others. The first step is to choose a format and style and there are three main categories to this:

Verbal
Written
Visual

To choose the appropriate method for a particular situation, you should think about the type of information you are conveying but more importantly, you need to understand the way your recipient(s) like to receive information.

A common mistake people often make, is to choose based upon their personal preference but remember, communication is about making others understand.

One tip for analysing your audience is to look at the way they actually communicate themselves. For someone who writes long e-mails or uses memos, you can choose a written format, whereas, if they write two-line e-mails and call people then don’t send a 20-page essay.

A great tool that I have tried in the past is called Crystal. They describe their system as a personality AI (Artificial Intelligence). This tool searches online for examples of writing from the individual you specify and then completes a character profile and provides an analysis of how this person likes to be communicated with. This can be particularly powerful if you are going for an interview or you are pitching a business idea to someone. I have used it in the past and it has been very accurate in its characterisations. It can be fun to run this search on yourself and see how accurately it describes you.

In the case where you are presenting to a group of people, you should try to use all three methods to effectively engage the entire audience:

Practice your verbal storytelling and stage presence.
Prepare written handouts
Visualise the key messages on slides

Verbal communications – Delivering clear and concise messages

When delivering information verbally, you need to break it down into bite-sized, 5-minute pieces. This will allow the recipient to process each part individually. You should also try to validate their understanding of each part in-between if possible.

Make sure that the recipient can understand the context of the story and the outcomes. Depending on their familiarity with the topic, you might need to structure the message differently. For example: for someone not familiar with a topic, more background and less detail is needed, whereas for an expert in the field, the inverse would be true. Furthermore, any topic you want to communicate should be relevant and of interest to the recipient.

In particular for each 5 minute chunk, it helps if the message is structured into 3 parts:

Background – set the scene:
- Give context to the listener and paint a mental picture of the scenario to put them into the right frame of mind.
Action:
- Describe the action taken or what happened and the more you can personalise this the more the recipient will be able to engage with it.
Consequence or conclusion:
- Describe the impact or change resulting from the action. Why was this important and what should the listener take-away from this story?

This technique can be particularly useful when answering questions in an interview.

Written

For some great writing advice, I recommend the following video by Scott Adams, the author of the Dilbert comic series, ‘The day you became a better writer – Scott Adams’:

Within the work setting, writing is a powerful, highly effective form of communication, particularly when describing or presenting strategy. With long-form writing, you are forced to fully think through the topic and the message you wish to communicate. It drives another level of detail which you can miss with slides. It also requires that you include conclusions for each section, chart or graphic, which is important and often skipped in a PowerPoint presentation.

Additionally, a written memo tends to provide a greater level of coherence in the document compared too slide. As a result, you can drive far more insightful conversations and questions. A good way of incorporating written memos into the work environment is to prepare a memo and provide it to the recipients in advance of a specific meeting. At the start of the meeting, ask everyone to re-read it for 5 mins in silence, then start the discussion on the content. This method of using 6-page whitepapers is explained well in the book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon.

Visual

This type of communication is amongst the most prevalent in business, especially with the use of PowerPoint. The visual medium is advantageous when communicating with large groups, visualising large data sets or conveying a mood. Visual communication can also be very effective when using pictures: it allows the recipients to mentally put themselves in the scene.

In general, when approaching a new presentation, I would advise you to use the following structure:

Title – Make a snappy relevant title, use subtitles for additional flavour and don’t forget to add the names of the presenters or contributors.

Agenda- Tell the audience what you will be covering, it sets them up to engage and understand each piece of the presentation and its flow.

Introduction – give the background and put the presentation into context to explain why they should be interested to pay attention. Keep it snappy.

Body – break each visual or slide into logical bite-sized pieces to help the recipients follow the flow. Keep the amount of text to the bare minimum here. You don’t want your audience to be reading the entire time you are talking. Remember this is a visual medium used to supplement your presentation.

Re-cap – explain what you explained

Conclusions and key takeaways – pick out a few of the key messages and highlight them again. What do you want the recipient to remember most?

Editing visual presentations for impact

Once each slide is laid out, take a look at where the recipient’s eyes will be drawn to, where will they look first? Does this align with your message?

REMEMBER: Charts need axis labels and titles! If you don’t include them, you are far more likely to lose the audience as they try to guess what the chart means.

Use colours to highlight messages, green for good or positive and red bad or negative. Colours are also useful for sparking emotion so be aware of this. Vibrant colours show energy, muted colours indicate calm or professionalism.

General Tips

Finally, I have put together a list of general tips which apply to all of the communication forms listed above.

Use the word “you” in the message. This makes the recipient feel they are being personally addressed and this will allow them to engage better. This blog post has over 60 “yous” in it!
People often link conciseness to brilliance. Long explanations don’t show brilliance even if correct.
While editing written work or slides, imagine you will get $100 for every word you can take out without impacting the meaning. For example in the sentence “Tomorrow will be a ~~very~~ hot day”, the word “very” does not change the message to the reader, you can remove it without impacting the message and recipients don’t remember adverbs like this.
Avoid jargon and cliches, these make the recipient cautious or mistrusting of the message. It can seem like you are showing off or trying to use business speak to cover up a lack of knowledge.
Acronyms are the ultimate sin! They have the same effect as jargons but are 100x worse in my opinion. A great anecdote from Elon Musk (the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla) is a time when he sent an e-mail to all his employees banning acronyms. He declared that they create confusion and are a barrier to communication. If anyone wanted to use or create an acronym it would require his express approval as CEO to do so. I think this should be the rule in every company.
Try to avoid too many numbers when communicating because these lose people. If you are communicating large amounts of numbers, convert them to a chart or other visualisation.
Talk about people and not technology, this is more engaging.

Conclusion

Communication is a critical life skill. It needs regular practise and study and can be learned and improved upon. Be creative, try out new techniques and remember to choose your messaging style and methods based on the recipient(s), not on your preference.

If you want to have an impact, others need to understand you and see what you are doing. This can only be achieved through clear communication. Good luck in your communication and please share any thoughts or comments on the advice and tips in this article, below.

Charles Haworth