Top Skills to Develop
Developing these skills is an excellent way to further develop your communication skills. If asked in interviews, you can also use these to answer why you think you have strong communication skills.
- Listening: this is one of the most critical aspects of communication. Successful listening is when a receiver not only receives the written/verbal/visual communication but also understands the communication (message).
- Active listening, where the speaker can see that they are carefully listened to and understood, also helps build a robust and deep relationship. It also fosters a safe environment where people feel encouraged to express ideas and opinions and solve problems creatively.
- Non-Verbal Cues: as you learned before, on average, according to research by Haiilo, 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone and inflexion, and 55% is body language.
- Emotions are a crucial part of communication as they are, more often than not, communicated via non-verbal cues.
- How you look, react, and make gestures express more about your real feelings than words do. Understanding others and being more aware about your non-verbal cues will help you connect with others, express your thoughts and better solve the challenges and problems.
- The more you can control your emotion, the better you can communicate via non-verbal cues.
- Sharing Feedback: strong communicators can accept feedback and criticism, and provide feedback and inputs to others as well.
- Feedback, in general, helps answer questions or provide solutions to make something/someone perform better.
- Taking and giving feedback will help you and the people around you grow both personally and professionally. One good way to be better at providing feedback is to note the feedback provided to you. Observing and analysing why detailed feedback was good will help you offer future solid feedback.
- Empathy: this means being able to understand and share the emotions of others. It is a crucial skill nowadays in both one-to-one communications and team settings.
- Being empathetic means understanding where the other person is coming from and respecting their views, no matter how different they may be from your views.
- This particular skill proves very beneficial when communicating during a crisis and when diffusing certain volatile situations at the workplace. Learn more about empathy here.
- Respect and Friendliness: setting the right tone of respect and friendliness goes a long way in effectively communicating.
- If you can display friendly traits, such as honesty and kindness, these would provide trust and understanding in a work environment.
- Small gestures such as a polite smile or remembering small details about the person will help foster trust and respect, thus providing more transparent communication.
- In addition, respecting another person’s opinions, actively listening to them and respecting another person’s time (answering clearly and concisely) will help foster effective communication.
- Confidence: demonstrating confidence (but not over-confidence) will help your stakeholders gain faith in your abilities and help you communicate effectively.
- Confidence can be as simple as looking somebody in the eye while speaking, sitting with correct posture and preparing beforehand.
- Confidence fosters trust, which in turn enables effective communication.