Your ability to express your thoughts and ideas in a manner that can be easily understood by your audience is an essential skill in your professional life. Daily life of most professionals is filled with sending emails and attending meetings, and all of these activities involve passing information across individuals, teams, organisations, etc.
Hence, clear communication skills must be learnt and honed to ensure successful professional relationships. Clear communication will help you to avoid misunderstandings and build trust. Effective communication also helps you become a better leader and problem solver.
We will use this article to help you understand clear communication, as well as some simple techniques you can follow to improve your communication skills.
What does clear communication involve?
A key component of your professional life and teamwork is the capacity to clearly communicate your requirements, wants, expectations, and insights. Communication can be so important to get right. Ultimately, we work with and through others and need to be able to communicate well to get things done. It sounds like it should be simple; we’ve been communicating in various ways ever since we were born. Yet, it can be surprisingly complex to master clear communication and to keep everything together all of the time.
9 techniques that will help you communicate clearly
I highlight below a number of different components of communication. The aim is not to baffle you but to highlight different techniques that you can use to improve and hone your existing communication skills. I’ve summarised my 9 simple communication techniques into 3 main components:
Awareness
1. Communication styles and preferences
Communication styles include extroversion and introversion, but can also extend to cover chatty, quiet, loud, etc. These can have a big impact on the way we communicate and are interpreted by others. There are various theories and tests that you can take – online or with a licensed practitioner – if you want to discover more about yourself.
One of the biggest takeaways is that we are likely to have different preferences and tendencies from at least some, if not all, of the people we interact with. These don’t make us good or bad, just different.
We have our natural styles and preferences, but we can also learn to flex these and adopt other characteristics when dealing with different people. This makes us more versatile and expands the chance of communicating well with as many people as possible.
2. Understand your audience
It’s important to understand who you are communicating to or with.
What is their position? What skills and understanding do they have? What is their level of knowledge on the topic? What is their expectation of you personally, or regarding the points you’re trying to communicate?
These may sound like obvious points, but we don’t always understand the needs of our audiences fully. We may try to direct the same communication to different audiences with varying levels of success. This can risk impacting our effectiveness or credibility, or make us come across lazy, or ignorant.
3. Assess the situation through feedback
Communication is rarely a one-way ticket. There should be some opportunity to assess and course correct, if necessary, through listening and observing, as well as other feedback. This might be possible in the moment. If not, hopefully you can request feedback and review this after the fact for future improvements.
Content
You may have heard the oft-quoted statistic that communication is only 7% verbal and 93% non-verbal, with non-verbal comprising body language (55%) and tone of voice (38%).
That being said…
4. Be clear on your message and outcomes
Be clear on the message and the desired outcome. Keep things simple in structure and broken down into digestible bite-sized chunks. Repeat the key messages for emphasis e.g. “this is what I’m going to say…say it…this is what I said”
5. Use the most appropriate method of delivery
Often, face-to-face communication is preferable, but sometimes a written summary or a detailed analysis may be most effective. This is especially useful if multiple parties are involved or some kind of audit trail is required.
A combination of written and verbal could be useful to convey complex messages, or as confirmation of what’s been communicated (and agreed).
Video conference may be just as effective as being in the same physical room, as long as you’re able to get some kind of feedback from the audience.
Delivery
6. Manage how you present and conduct yourself
This can include the way you dress, but also how you show up more generally, e.g. punctuality and via body language and handshakes.
Dress code shouldn’t always matter, but it can do. Ensure you’re aware of the situation and how other people will be dressed. If nothing else, this can help to minimise noise and distractions, leaving you freer to get on with communicating your message and the audience to receive what you intended to communicate.
7. Use your voice for impact
Looking back at those stats, 38% of communication comes from tone of voice. Imagine your voice has different controls, kind of like a music system. Leverage the controls to adjust the general volume and tone, intonation of sentences and accentuation of certain key words. Listen to others talking and play around with your voice controls for different effects and impacts. You can even record your voice to hear how you sound and to play around with this.
8. Adopt appropriate language
If you’re familiar with the audience, you may be able to flex your language specifically to them, but speaking simply, clearly and succinctly is generally a good start.
Manage the use of technical versus non-technical language and jargon, unless you are very confident that the audience will understand them. Be prepared to check in with the audience for their understanding and spell out any unfamiliar terms. Be careful not to patronise your audience, though!
Many of us also operate in a multicultural world these days, so be cognisant of any non-native speakers and keep your language as “clean” as possible. However, sometimes non-native speakers’ English can be better than some of the native speakers, in my experience!
9. Watch your body language
As mentioned above, body language represents 55% of our communication! Body language is the unspoken element that can reveal our true feelings and emotions. It can include our gestures, facial expressions and posture.
We can use self-awareness to adjust our body language so that we appear more positive, engaging, approachable or however else we’d like to come across.
We can also read signs in others’ body language. This can help us to understand the full message of what someone is trying to tell us and to enhance our awareness of people’s reactions to what we say and do.
Communicating well is an important skill, yet it can be surprisingly complex to master. You may be tempted to test all of them at once, but try not to get overwhelmed by them. My suggestion is to pick a couple that resonate with you and work on these. Once you’ve got these sorted, then move on to some which aren’t so familiar. Keep testing and learning until you’ve got them all covered, or at least all understood.
Observing others communicate can also be very interesting and can help you to learn what to do (or not to do) yourself.
Self-help tips are great, but having professional guidance will accelerate your pace in developing your communication skills. Book your 30-Minute Free Career Discussion to get started today!
