Can a lack of communication skills kill your career?

Yes, a lack of communication skills can cost a good job or a promotion or a great career opportunity. It does not matter what field of work you are in. If you cannot communicate effectively, then you lose many opportunities in life, especially your career. Read on to find out why communication skills are important for you to excel in your career and how these skills can bring you lucrative career opportunities.

Communication is one of the top soft skills that employers seek in an employee. World Economic Forum lists communication skills as the top three skills for great career growth. This is one of the reasons why recruiters are actively looking for people with excellent communication skills.

In fact, other skills such as leadership, decision-making, strategic thinking and emotional intelligence may fall short if you do not have excellent communication skills.

If you carefully observe, all the great leaders of the world from time immemorial, have one thing in common. They all have excellent communication skills.  They became leaders because they could communicate effectively.

Communication skills have proven their importance and it rates higher than certain hard skills. Post the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of the world has transformed into a digital workspace. Most companies including the leading ones have offered remote location jobs. People are virtually connected.

However, it is important to develop effective communication skills to interact with teams whose members are from different locations across the globe.

Communication is regarded as extremely important because a lack of communication leads to chaos and even ambiguity. Ineffective communication can lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication between service providers and their clients. In the long run, it can lead to disasters including bankruptcy or even the closure of the organisation.

While communication simply means sharing information, effective communication includes ensuring that the message has reached the recipient and that the message has been understood by them correctly.

Many people assume communication skills mean using refined language filled with jargon and fancy words. However, you can call communication effective when it is simple, unambiguous and clear. People often understand communication skills to be only excellent language skills. But fine language alone cannot make communication effective. Non-verbal communication such as body language, facial expressions, gestures and postures, kinesics and haptics add meaning to the message you wish to convey.

In addition to that, if you cannot be empathetic towards people in your communication, you are not well received. Recruiters and interviewers are specific about communication skills and hence they observe how a candidate communicates in an interview or a discussion or a presentation to assess their communication skills.

While communication is a field of study in itself, here are a few factors to keep in mind to excel in communication skills. These factors help you make your communication both effective and efficient.

1.       Presentation

How you convey a message is more important than what you convey. You may be communicating as a boss or an employee. But for communication to be effective, you need to present it in a way that is easily understood by the recipient. Use simple language. One hint you can use is to think that you are communicating with an eleven-year-old child. This automatically makes you use simple language and short sentences.

2.       Language

Yes, language is equally important for communication. You need not necessarily pick a popular language such as English. You may be communicating in your native language. It is important that you use correct grammar, construct sentences correctly, and understand the cultural nuances of that language. You need to have a good vocabulary and command over the language in terms of diction and pronunciation.

3.        Confidence

Confidence like communication is also a skill. Confidence means the faith or trust you have in yourself and your capabilities. Confidence comes from learning what you do not know. Often, people lack confidence either because they think they are not good at something or because they are actually not good at something. While the former is a mindset issue, the latter is the reason for a majority of people not having confidence.

You sing a song confidently when you know the complete lyrics and their tune. On the other hand, you do not have confidence in your singing because you are either unprepared or you do not know the song.

4.       Attitude

Attitude is the way you think or perceive someone or something. Behaviour that results from such thinking or perception may also be referred to as attitude. It is sometimes seen that employers or bosses review their employees and say that some may have an attitude problem. It simply means the way a few employees approach something or the way they think about something may not be accepted according to certain guidelines or standards. If you have a good command over your language and also possess good presentation skills but have a bad attitude, it is still a loss because a bad attitude is a red flag in any setup.

5.       Listening

Listening is one of the underrated factors in communication skills. Listening is not just a physiological activity.  Listening is much more than just being present in front of a person and hearing what they say. Active listening includes making eye contact with the person talking to you, and not fidgeting with a mobile phone or other distractions.  Further, it also includes not waiting for your turn to speak, but intently listening when others talk to you. A good listener is said to be a good communicator.

6.       Empathy or EQ

Gone are the days when employers looked for Intelligent Quotient in an employee. They now look for Emotional Intelligence. Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient means having an understanding of our emotions and the ability to control them in situations. You need to understand what makes you angry or upset and how you can regulate those emotions when things go wrong.  A good understanding of your emotions is the key to good communication because it also helps you to understand others’ emotions even though you cannot control them.

Empathy is also a kind of emotional intelligence wherein you understand another person from their perspective. This helps you communicate effectively with people.

7.       Feedback

Feedback is the thoughts, ideas and reflections about something that a person shares.  Feedback is extremely important in communication because it gives you a hint of whether the communication was effective. It tells you whether what you are doing is good enough or needs improvement. It is said that no feedback is also feedback. Good business people take feedback about their businesses, products and services because they want to understand the pulse of the market. They are keen on learning whether what they offer is acceptable, admired or disliked.

8.       Simplicity

Often in the run-up to making an impression, you may go overboard and mess things up.  Simplicity means to convey the meaning or the message in the simplest possible manner. The message should not create any ambiguity in the minds of the people. If it does, it means that the communication has failed. Use day-to-day language with easy-to-understand phrases. You need to remember that you are not in the race to win a Booker Prize. KISS or Keep It Short and Simple is the mantra. You can communicate complex things in the simplest manner. Nobody blames you for making communication simple. On the other hand, if your message is loaded with jargon and technical terms, you will fail miserably.

9.       Body Language

Whether you speak or not, your body keeps speaking every moment. How you stand, how you sit and what facial expressions you make are all different ways your body is communicating with other people. While you are more focused on your language, presentation skills and emotional intelligence, you will fail if your body language is communicating a contrasting message. Gestures, body postures, eye gaze, handshakes and so on add more weight to your messages. You can excel in communication skills if you master good body language.

10.   Impression

An impression is your appearance to other people.  It does not mean the colour of your skin or the brand tags of the clothes you are wearing. Impression simply means how you appear to someone in the first instance. Remember that apparel brand tags are not visible to people. However, they can see if you have groomed yourself well with neat clothes and prepped hair and face. It is said that the first thing people notice about a person is the shoes. Neat and well-fitted shoes make a great impression. Similarly, well-fitted clothes, fresh breath and good table manners make way for effective communication.

Each of these factors of communication skills is significant in its way. And all the above-mentioned factors of communication skills have one thing in common. They are not inherited by anyone.  These are skills you can learn all and excel at provided you practice these skills consistently and diligently.

So stop wasting any more time analysing whether communication skills are necessary or why they are necessary. Pick one factor at a time and work on it. Remember that practice is the key. If you practice one each every week, you can ace it in ten weeks.

Read English grammar to master English.

You can also read about improving your English vocabulary.

What are the 3 quick tips to learn Communication Skills?
You can learn Communication Skills using these 3 quick tips;
Use simple language.
Observe great leaders and communicators.
Listen more to people to understand their behaviour.

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