3 Cs of Communication
Imagine walking into a room to give a presentation to get all the people on the same page as you and get their decision in your favor aka influencing them. This is an everyday skill we need in every role of our life; from an engineer, to a product manager, to a salesman, to a friend, to a business partner, to a life partner.
Here are the 3 basic skills of communication and strategies to be effective in those.
#1 Be Concise: How many times have you sat listening to a person and screaming inside: “get to the point” or “what’s the bottom line”. Turns out being succinct is very hard. God forbid the speaker is an extrovert, who thinks out loud. Then the listener is left with dealing with the verbal vomit. In the name of concise, here are concise strategies that helps with being concise:
- Prepare: Brainstorming and influencing are 2 different modalities. Don’t think out loud in front of audience you are trying to influence. Think through what you want to speak ahead of time.
- Practice: Practice to get the nerves and word-noise out of your system.
- Shhh: When in doubt, take a breath of silence. Silence is always better than babbling.
#2 Be Clear: Clarity is a reflection of your state of mind and your grasp on the topic. Here are strategies on how to drive clarity.
- Intention: Every time you open your mouth, you better be clear internally on what’s your intention. Are you just speaking because you have not spoken, or to add your opinion or to add some facts or to raise a concern or to question a decision etc.
- Structure your content: Its hard for people who are listening to you first time, to take in the flood of information. Give them summaries, bullet points, have a structure and framework for the content you are presenting.
- Say one thing: Your default should be that everything stays out unless it is in service of your intention and goal. I am sure we know people who just “add on” one more thing and one more thing to their one thing, and the listeners are overwhelmed and lost.
- Picture is worth thousand words: Use pictures, whiteboards especially in a complex technical communication. I can’t tell you how many hours I have saved in talking by just drawing one picture and reusing it.
#3 Be Convincing: This is the hardest. The first two skills are completely in your control but to convince someone is not. Here are strategies to give it your best.
- Empathy: Step into the shoes of listener, speak their language and from their point of view. For e.g. if you are talking to an engineer don’t talk about how to sell the product or if you are talking to sales don’t talk about the systems architecture.
- Listen: Listen to their concerns, opinions. People don’t have to agree to buy-in / get convinced but they have to feel heard.
- Storytelling: Humans love stories and you will have everyone’s attention if you tell a story. This is where you can use customer personas or better yet, real customer stories.
- Support with data: Use data to support your story instead of throwing gazillion data points just coz you have them. Data in itself have no meaning, it only derives meaning in a context. And your story is the context.
- Authenticity. Be authentic. People don’t care for what you know, until they know you care. So speak from your heart and passion.
- Delivery. Speak confidently, project your voice, mind your body language, show energy as it is contagious (high and low).
- Adjust: As you are speaking with your intention, charisma and all the story telling, watch for impact. If you are losing the audience, acknowledge it and engage them to recover.
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