Improve Your Communication Skills at Work

a Step-by-Step Guide

Now you know what communication skills are. How will improving them make you more effective at work?

This part covers:

• when you should improve your skills
• which workplace situations you can change
• top techniques to learn
• pitfalls to avoid
• what results you can expect

…and more.

When should I improve my communication skills?

You can work on your skills whenever you want to. (Expert communicators learn all the time.) But sometimes, events bring these issues into focus.

You know you need to improve your communication when you:

• …get a new job. For example, the new company may have a different culture. Or you’ve become a team leader.
• …receive feedback. Like when a colleague suggests that you speak up more in meetings. (Or speak less, with more focus.)
• …stop progressing in your career. Better communication can unblock career progression. Or lead to promotion.
• …realise it’s holding you back. Many people develop strong technical skills at work. Later, they realise that their “soft skills” are lagging behind.
• …keep putting it off. It’s normal to feel discomfort at the idea of improving these skills. Many people avoid working on communication for as long as they can.

Whatever the reason, there’s good news. It’s easy to get started.

Which workplace situations can I change?

These skills can transform workplace situations like:

• Speaking “off the cuff”. Do you find it hard to share your ideas when you haven’t had time to prepare? Stanford School of Business found that “spontaneous speaking” was MBA students’ top fear. The cause: anxiety. These skills show you how to stay focused on your audience even when nerves hit.
• Public speaking. Whether in a conference hall or a team meeting. Learn how to adapt your ideas to the people you’re talking to. So they’re enthralled by what you have to say. Find a way to enjoy Q&A and get energy from audience feedback.
• Leadership and management. You need specific skills to lead people or manage their work. It’s not enough to know your stuff—you need to show others why it matters. Leaders need to project confidence, share clear ideas and listen.
• One-to-one meetings. Whether it’s coaching a junior colleague or interviewing a stakeholder. Do you know how to get inside the head of another person? Understand what they need? Or find out what’s blocking their next step?

Top techniques to learn

There are five core communication techniques to master:

1. Storytelling. To capture people’s attention, you need to tell stories. At root, stories are about how events have changed people. Structure your arguments in this way and they’ll become relevant to your audience. Whether you’re talking to one person or a thousand.
2. Active listening. This is the Swiss Army Knife of communication. Use it to understand another person’s point of view. You don’t need any background knowledge—just time and attention. This is how you build empathy, the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else.
3. Leadership styles. The way you come across when you present your ideas in the workplace. Do you seem powerful and confident, or apologetic and afraid? Are you generous, or do you try to maintain control? Includes nonverbal communication: body language and eye contact.
4. Collaboration. When you work with others, do you say, ”yes!” to their ideas? Most people say, “yes, but…”, an indirect version of, “no”. This blocks collaboration. Unless you accept other people’s ideas, you won’t create anything new.
5. Effective feedback. Most people need to offer feedback as part of their job. But few know how to make it useful. This technique rests on a simple distinction. Learning the difference between observations and evaluations will transform your feedback.

How do I decide what to focus on?

You know you want to improve your communication, but you’re not sure where to start. Try this self-assessment exercise.

1. Write down the parts of your job that call for communication skills. List as many contexts, activities and people as you can.
2. Score each item in two ways. First, how important is this activity to your success? Second, how difficult do you find it?
3. Look for areas that you’ve scored as both important and difficult. These are your highest priority.

You might like to repeat this exercise as you begin to develop your skills.

Pitfalls to avoid

Here are some communication mistakes you can stop doing! Common pitfalls include:

• Sugar coating criticism. This is where you try to make your views easier to hear. Instead of speaking directly, you surround your feedback with nice-sounding fluff. The classic example is the sandwich, where you wrap criticism in two pieces of praise. The problem: people know you’re doing it. They ignore the fake praise and take criticism personally.
• Using the wrong channel. Email, text messaging and chat apps are an efficient way to share information and updates. At the same time, they don’t suit interpersonal communication. Don’t use these channels when you need to connect. For example, if you want to understand motivations or resolve differences. Meet face-to-face or via video call. This lets you check understanding, in both directions.
• Fixing people’s problems. When colleagues come to you with a problem, do you suggest solutions? Many of us do. We want to help, so we try to fix. It doesn’t work. Often people don’t want us to fix their problems. Instead they need to talk it over and choose their next step. Even if they do want your help, you don’t have enough information. Try listening instead.
• Trying to get it right. It’s normal to want to do a good job. But this instinct can get in the way of effective communication. Sometimes you need to abandon your plan. And make things up. Don’t be the presenter who insists on reading out their talk when the situation changes. Connecting with others means being ready to get things wrong.

How can I practise these skills?

Remember, you need to learn communication skills. You weren’t born with them!

The way we learn is to practise. Which creates a complication. Communication happens between two or more people. So unlike technical skills, it’s difficult to practise them on your own. Here are some solutions:

• Record yourself speaking to camera. If you’re preparing for a presentation, this works well. Use a phone or webcam to record yourself delivering your talk. Try to keep going even if you make a mistake. Then watch it back. Write down what’s working and what you’d like to improve. At first, watching video of yourself is uncomfortable. But the effect soon wears off. Keep at it!
• Practise with a friend. One of the most effective ways to develop your skills is to work with a buddy. Find a colleague or friend, and take turns to coach each other. (An approach called “peer coaching”.) You can practise techniques together or talk through recent experiences. Agree goals and help your partner to choose their next steps.
• Work with a communication coach. A coach—like me—can assess your communication and see where you’re blocked. This speeds up your learning because I can tell you what to focus on. As long as you practise in the workplace between sessions, you’ll see fast progress.
• Enrol on a communication course. A course provides a grounding in the core techniques. Find out your strengths and growth areas. You’ll practise skills with a small group of peers and an expert coach. At the end you’ll know which areas to develop to achieve your goals. And you’ll have a plan to get there.

What results can I expect?

You may be wondering what might change if you develop these skills.

If you’ve never focused on communication before, the results may surprise you. It’s like any skill. To improve, you need to practise, get feedback and learn. Once you start doing this, you’ll see major changes.

For example, you might:

• speak up in meetings (when you used to stay quiet)
• share information in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand
• provide clear, direct feedback that helps colleagues to improve their work
• project confidence in group calls, even when others express strong opinions
• address stakeholders’ concerns without undermining your principles

You’ll know it’s working because the responses you get from others will change.

Online skills assessment

Would you like to get a quick sense of your communication strengths and weaknesses?

I’ve created an automated communication skills assessment which does exactly that. It asks you a series of questions about:

• areas of your job which call for these skills
• whether you agree with a series of statements

It will take you less than ten minutes to answer the questions. Then we generate a PDF report, called a Communication Profile. It shows you which areas you need to work on first. And it gives you a starting point for developing your skills. And it’s free.

Take the test!