10 thoughts on communication
What I try to say is not always what people hear. Is it the message or the tone or something unknown that stands in the way? Often it is a mystery.
What I do know is communication is exceptionally hard to do well.
With that said, here are 10 thoughts on communication that I try to keep in mind:
Give people an on-ramp. When you are ready to share something, you have thought about it at great length. You must speak slowly because the audience is hearing it for the first time and needs to catch up to where your thinking is.
Make it cognitively easy. If you have multiple points to make, preview the actual points up front, then cover each in detail and recap all three at the end. If you say you have three points and then go one by one, you are forcing your listener’s brain to work twice as hard. First to hear what you are saying and second to figure out where we are on your list.
If brevity is the soul of wit, repetition is the heart of effective communication. If only 7% of communication is verbal (source), we must be prepared to repeat a message multiple times. You cannot over communicate critical priorities. When you think you are sounding like a broken record, people are probably just starting to hear you.
Tone matters. The inverse is true too - if 90% of communication is non-verbal, tone matters as much as the words said (a fact my wife frequently reminds me of)
Make it memorable - use tools like to make your points memorable. Mnemonics work
Organizations with strong cultures communicate daily. Example - the Ritz reviews one of their core values each day.
Most people are not listening to you - they are thinking of their response and waiting to deliver it
Circle back. Asking someone to share back what they heard can be a powerful way to build alignment - if it doesn’t feel like you are disciplining them like a teenager.
Monitor psychological safety. Some people seem to be able to say the hard things and maintain relationships - it is because they monitor the amount of safety in the conversation. Highly recommend Crucial Conversations for a deeper dive here.
“It is easier to judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers” – Pierre Marc Gaston de Levis