Why communication skills are important?
Have you ever felt confused why your colleagues keep asking you the same thing again and again? Do you generally see perplexed faces while you are doing a presentation? Do you always send a reminder mail because your previous mail generated fewer responses? If your answer is yes to the above questions, then you are suffering from a simple, yet a career-growth threatening problem. You are unable to communicate properly. You could defend yourself saying that people around you are day dreamers and are mostly inattentive. You could go one step further and put the blame on the weather saying, it is cloudy outside, so people are feeling drowsy inside. 99 times out of 100, the drowsiness could be because you are doing a presentation.
I am just trying to exaggerate the importance of good communication skills as people rarely wonder how to improve communication skills. I have seen many people wondering why they could not see growth in their career. The main reason is, when you are expecting growth, your company would want you to manage more colleagues of different personalities and when it comes to managing them, it is about being able to communicate with each person effectively. So, during an appraisal, the management looks for people with good communication skills, not necessarily technical skills. So, next time you find colleagues who could be a pain in the neck, follow these 3 simple tips for the pain to ease off.
3 simple tips on how to improve communication skills:
While there are numerous ways to improve communication skills, the following are some tips I follow for better communication with my colleagues.
1) Mail communication is a must:
Many escalations and issues happen within a project or across projects because of a silly reason. People don't always send a mail to acknowledge or summarize the discussions they had in person with other colleagues. Yes, everyone is a grown-up to not have someone poking them to do a task. But, because everyone is a grown-up, then tend to get caught up with other activities and might forget some of the pending activities. Sometimes only when we send a mail asking for an update on the project, our colleagues would realize that such a project was in the pipeline. This problem is prevalent when we communicate with team members from different teams. You think this problem doesn't happen always, don't you? But, remember, escalations don't happen always too. We still want to avoid them. So, no matter how small or big a discussion you had might be, never hesitate to send a follow-up mail to summarize the discussion the same day after the discussion. This mail works in two ways. Gives the day dreamers a chance to finally wake up and understand what the discussion was about. Another way is, it will avoid escalations happening because of people who suffer from amnesia.
2) Body language is more important than language:
Forget about what you are going to speak about. Most of the presentations involve a ppt with slideshows that could be a lullaby to anyone, especially on Fridays. Instead of just acting like a robot that recites every word from the ppt, do some gestures to make the presentation have a lively feel. By gestures, I don't mean, your hands doing some stretching exercises, which they surely would. I want your entire body to move. Walk towards every person in the discussion room. Make them wonder why you come towards them. Make the others realize that they would be the next you would walk towards. This would make everyone attentive and the chances of them sleeping are slim to none. Body language is very crucial as some presentations involve no lights while the projector is in use. This environment could make anyone go out like a light. So, let your body dance to the rhythm of the presentation.
3) Be a fun wikipedia, not a scary encyclopedia:
Your colleagues should not be scared of your presentations or you in general. Don't be a content machine. No one likes meetings, discussions, etc., because they are mostly about targets, summary, blah blah blah i.e. full of content. So have fewer meetings or make them more enjoyable with some entertaining stuff. Have a good rapport with your colleagues by making jokes even if if they aren't humorous. Spend some time with them at the cafeteria or have a Whatsapp call when you are working remotely. These are ways to have casual conversations. This will make your colleagues find you friendly and approachable. This in turn will make them more attentive to you and you need not run behind them to make them finish a task. In fact, they will run toward you because you are full of fun.
If you have any other tips on how to improve communication skills, post them in the comments section below.
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