Read this and I promise it will help you grow.
Why communication matters?
When driving for personal growth and working on ourselves, we often get tunnel vision on our hard skills – strictly related to our domain of knowledge – software engineers focus on design patterns, learning new languages and frameworks, designers spend time on staying up to date with latest trends, latest tools, color palletes – you get the idea.
All of the above is definitely important – there’s no professional success without having strong command of the core of your craft, however one thing we need to keep in mind is – most of the time designers and developers work as part of a team, and no matter how great you are at your craft – if you’re unable to communicate your ideas clearly – rarely will it lead to success.
Think of Bach – one of the greatest composers in history, let’s imagine he never learned how to write music – think how much of his brilliant work would be lost.
What is communication?
Though communication takes on many shapes and forms, in this article we’ll be focusing on the one that’s most used during work – verbal communication.
Words are powerful – how you choose them matters – they can make or break your projects, relationships, organisations – leading to great success or failure.
Think of words as compressed information – a single word can carry a deep meaning, a great idea, well beyond the sounds and characters used in it. Think of the word “home” – beyond just a physical space, it can carry emotional, psychological, and nostalgic weight. It can evoke feelings of safety, love, comfort, and belonging. In a literary or philosophical context, it can also represent the search for identity or a deeper sense of place in the world. All of this conveyed with 1 syllable.
A single word can also make a big difference in a sentence – think of the following sentences, that essentially mean the same thing, but carry different emotion:
“I don’t mind helping you” vs. “I don’t mind helping you out”
“I don’t mind helping you” is casual and indicates willingness, but it feels more like a neutral statement.
“I don’t mind helping you out” feels a bit more informal and friendly, adding a sense of support or camaraderie, as if the speaker is offering more than just assistance.
“You’re welcome” vs. “Anytime”
“You’re welcome” – a casual, neutral response – almost expected after you say “Thank you”
“Anytime” – Implies you do the favor not strictly out of necessity or obligation, but with personal care and motivation, showing readiness to do the same thing in future.
Given the above, we have to carefully think how we compress our thoughts and ideas into words – making sure we get our point across clearly. However, this is only half of communication.
What truly makes us great communicators though is listening. When listening or reading, we have to pay close attention to the subtleties of the sentences, the choice of words, to truly get the full context of the compressed information. We have to analyse it before reacting, as it’s often hard to grasp everything immediately. Delaying the reaction/response, reduces the chances of misinterpretation and potential misunderstanding.
Corruption / Interpretation – Finding the balance
If we think of verbal communication as compressing and decompressing information – we have to understand the goals and tradeoffs.
The idea behind compression and decompression, is to reduce the information to the minimal possible size during transfer, so it can be projected and received with a minimal effort. However, like in software, this comes with two challenges:
- It takes significantly more effort (cognitive energy) to compress information to a compact size
- Extensive compression results in information loss and/or corruption
Because of this we have to play a balancing act – it’s good to speak concisely, but we need to make sure we’re not leaving room for interpretation, as this will often results in misunderstanding (information corruption).
When we’re on the receiving end of highly compressed information, with interpretation possibilities – we have to make sure we exhaust all of them via follow up questions.
Especially in the work environment, when taking on or passing along important information/tasks, we have to make sure all of the communicated points are explicit, before we finalise the conversations. In practical settings, this is close to impossible – but we have to aim for the excellent, if we want good results.
Importance of communication in career growth & leadership
You can make communication what you choose on your career path – it can either be a major hurdle, holding you down or a big boost to accelerating you career growth.
This doesn’t only apply to leadership roles, this matters for individual contributors as well – you need to be able to build a network around you, in and outside of your work – you need to build trust and kinship to push you forward towards your goals. This is very hard to do with limited communication skills.
Imagine you’ve gathered loads of experience in your field and your employer now wants you to step in and share your experience with less experienced colleagues – if you have bad communication skills, you’ll have a hard time doing this – undermining your position as a senior professional.
Truth is – if you ever want to lead – be it in your personal or work life – you’ll need at the very least decent communication skills. If you are unable to project your competence, rarely will people come digging for it. And if people don’t recognize your competence – they will never follow you.
Written Communication Tips
In the era of remote work, written communication is becoming more and more frequent – thus important. No matter if you use, email, slack, teams, discord – there’s multiple things you should keep in mind.
Get to the point
written communication is slow, you throw in teammates in multiple timezones and you can be waiting for hours before your colleague wakes up.
Don’t start of your conversations with “Hey, how are you” and wait for a response. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say hi – this means you should send your intent with the initial message – “Hey, how are you? Can you please send over the invoices from last month?” – this way you can get your answer when you’re colleague is awake, and not risk another waiting cycle of your work hours overlapping.
Format it well
when sending messages with a big chunk of information, make sure you format it well – use paragraphs, lists, quotes, text styling bold/underline to draw attention to important details. In my experience, this speeds up the response times – which, I believe is expected – honestly, no one wants to read your 2000 word paragraph in all lowercase.
Whitespace & Headers
Give your messages some breathing room, don’t cram topics together – instead use headers and insert whitespace between them. We often have to go back to messages after reading them – don’t force the reader to read everything from scratch – make topics and key points easy to find with a glance.
Keep your sentences short
In an era of ever declining human attention span – keep your sentences short to make reading them simpler. Otherwise, you risk losing the attention of the reader or them having a hard time (mis)understanding your intent. This is something I struggle with often, but the tip below helps.
Read before you send
Making reading what you wrote before sending your routine. This forces you into the shoes of the person receiving this message and gives you a better picture of how well formed and readable it is. This can have multiple benefits:
- Might show you that you’re not communicate one or the other point clearly
- Might show that you left room for interpretation – needing to clarify it more
- You might have missed a point you wanted to include
- You might have typed Pubic instead of Public – don’t ask me how I know
Maybe you did it perfect from the first try – good on you – but better safe then sorry. Last thing you want to be doing is misinforming a stakeholder because your mind wandered when you were typing and now you have to reexplain everything, wasting everyones time.
When in need – get on a call
There are many things you can get across with a message, but it’s good to keep in mind that a call is an option.
If you find yourself struggling to explain or understand something in a 100 message long thread, it’s probably late – but better late then never – jump on a call.
I can already feel the “this could have been an email” club objecting to this, but it cuts both ways – there are 30 minute meetings that could have been an email and there are 200 message threads somewhere in your workspace, that could have been done in a 5 minute call.
Don’t choose a club – use whatever is best for the exact situation.
You remember that one student at your Uni, that was great at public speaking? I promise following the above tips will make you stand out in a similar way in written conversations.
How to improve your communication skills
Alright Irakli, we get it, we need to work on communication, but how?
I hear you.
First of – you need to start working on it pro-actively. Don’t sit and wait around for things to improve themselves. This is the biggest step you can take.
Once you decide that you take on this challenge, do a few or all of the things listed below:
Build your vocabulary
Simplicity is brilliant – though not always possible. As you grow, the complexity of the issues you have to face will only increase, so deconstructing and compressing these topics into simple words will become tougher.
To make sure this doesn’t hinder your progress, you have to be ready. Couple of things you can do to build your vocabulary:
- Read – articles, essays, technical documentation – ideally related to your knowledge domain
- Listen to podcasts – they are a great way to both engage intellectually and passively pickup new words
- Watch – ideally documentaries or lectures
Remember, investing in tools is always a good idea – you better have them and never use them, rather then vice versa.
Analyse the greats
Have some favorite people you like to read or listen to? Have you ever thought what makes them your favorite?
Sit down and analyse how they communicate, how they structure their sentences, how they punctuate, how they approach difficult/sensitive topics. Try to understand what it is that makes them stand out.
Personally, I have two favorite categories – writers and standup comedians, whom I consider masterminds of communication – there’s a lot to be learned from the greats here.
Engage in discussions
Once you start picking up new words by reading and listening, you need to make sure you incorporate them in your vocabulary – usage translates into fluency – you’ll no longer have to look for words – with practice, it will come natural.
In and out of work – engage in more discussions, speak your mind and listen to what others have to say.
Write – Read – Write
Write for fun – start a journal, a blog, write a nice invitation card for your birthday party – just write.
Read what you wrote – analyse what you can improve and write again.
Looking back at your output, will let you notice the weak and strong points in your communication – which is hard to do during actual engagement, when you’re focusing on the outcome and not the means themselves.
Bonus: Cross Domain communication – talk in THEIR language
There’s another point to being a great communicator that I couldn’t fit anywhere above. It’s excelling in cross domain communication.
When communicating with a person, you always have to consider their knowledge domain and context and try to talk in their language.
Do your homework – get to know their “lingo” and try to understand what is important for them. This will allow you to communicate with them as an insider and remove the cross domain barrier.
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