The Barrier - Leapfrog in your career - How to improve communication skills

Reading Time 3 mins

Career Trajectory

Career trajectories go in a series of exponential graphs. You get a swift jump for a couple of months followed by years of stagnation. The most challenging part I have seen people go through is their first stagnation. This is where people see a way out through courses or an MBA degree. Though both are viable options, I have seen one area a lot of folks overlook is communications. 

When you start your career, you are expected to learn skills needed for a particular "Job to be done". You are a cog in the machine. You fulfill a specific function. As you grow in your career, you learn specific pieces of information about the company and your skill that increase your value. This is where you get stuck. 

What makes humans great is our ability to collaborate. You have to understand how different pieces fit together to make the whole. As you grow you are expected to lead. To share what you have learned across hierarchies. 

Can you be trusted to share accurate information with decision-makers? 

Can you be trusted to train others on what you have learned? 

For both of these, you need to improve your communications. There are companies structured in a way that they train people on this from day 1, if you were part of such a structure, great. But if you still feel there is a need to improve, the things below can help you to improve.

How to improve your communcation skills

 

Communication: Definition.

 The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.

Communication is about sharing information with accuracy and with as less of friction as possible.

Write

The best way to improve is to write. Write as much as possible. If you have said something over a call, say it again with an email or a chat message. Add detailed notes to your tasks. Start a daily journal of your work. Write as detailed notes as possible. Send meeting notes after a meeting. Send afterthoughts on a meeting. Ideas you had, but couldn't share in the meeting. This will show your eagerness and willingness to learn and contribute. This will generate more conversations in which you can be detailed. Write everything.

Documentation

Next, start preparing documentation. It's one of the best ways to improve communication. Create 300+ words of documentation of projects you have worked on. How you approached a problem? What was the context? How did you solve it? What are the resources you used? How can someone else save time if they were to do it again from scratch?

Editing

What separates greats from the good ones is editing. Great writers edit twice, thrice, or more. Read what you have written. See if it's communicating what you actually wanted to say. See what questions someone would have after reading this. Answer those questions.

Clarity

It is easy to get bogged down with grammar, vocabulary, or sentence structures. They don't matter. Not as much as clarity. Optimize for clarity of communication. remove filler words like "I think" "possibly" and "maybe" etc. Use a spell/ grammar check tool. It's 2022.

 Embrace simplicity instead of complexity. Simple sentences work great. Be yourself, don't try to copy someone else's writing style.

Measure & Improve

Once you start doing this, you will start to see improvement in your communication. You will find it easier to speak out when you would have stayed silent before. Read your writing from a month or a year before, you would see an improvement. If you don't, explore what is going wrong. Seek help, seek feedback. Go over your year-old document and see how you could have improved them. Copy the best templates of communication you find in your work life. Be conscious about clarity of thought when writing and reading others' notes.

Analyze examples of other's work that you found impressive. Great artists steal.

As you master the art of writing well, you will see improvements in your verbal and visual communication as well.

Writing is the best way to start improving communication skills. You get the time to consciously make choices. Once this improves everything else will improve. If you are directly diving in to improve your presentation skills, you'll face the challenges at a foundational level.

Start today. Try to write a summary of what you read here with memory without going over it again. Write everything you accomplished in your career so far.

Communication skill is one of the biggest assets to take leaps in your career. Don't be limited by something that you can improve every day of your work life by being conscious of it.

Best of luck.