Communication Skills: All the successful leaders in the world are able to communicate with each other meaningfully. The famous Steve Jobs inspired his employees to create successful and perfect hardware products. Like him, there are thousands of leaders in this world who possess outstanding leadership with the help of outstanding communication skills.
Here are a few ways by which you can improve your communication skills:
- Learn the basic levels of non-communication abilities
One of the research studies proves that 55% of the audience judge the presenter with the help of the known communication abilities that he possesses. This means that the majority of things that you present is not communicated through your words but through the physical cues that you provide while presenting.
- Try avoiding the Visual Aids
The famous Steve Jobs and Sheryl Sandberg instituted a rule where presentation in PowerPoint using Visual aids was banned. They realized that the PowerPoint presentations can hinder the main motto of presentation rather than helping it.
Be prepared to always use words, nonverbal cues and storytelling method so to get directly to your audience.
- Always ask for honest feedback after the presentation
As with most of the leadership skills, asking for feedback from your managers, seniors, the audience and your team members is very important for improving your communication skills. It is true that if you learn to listen to the feedback and respect it, others will help you discover and improve the areas of improvement which you may have overlooked it ignored.
- Engage your audience in a discussion
Regardless of how the speaker is with his communication, all the audience has limited attention spans. To become an effective communicator, make your presentations and speech a bit interactive. Ask the audience questions, and encourage the people to participate in your brainstorming sessions
- Start and end with key points
Clear communication as the utmost importance here. To ensure that the audience gets all the key points of the presentation, repeat the Keyword at the beginning and end of the whole presentation. This task can also be accomplished by proving the audience with a one-pager which includes only the key points and the main points of the presentation so that they can keep a track.
- Record the important presentation for posterity
It will be taking a whole lot of time to communicate properly and effectively with the audience. There will definitely be a lot of instances where you would have to present the same presentation more than twice, so here we advise you to record it and later share it.
- Master the art of timing for better presentations in limited time
While most of the jokes are not appropriate for the workplace, but the stand-up comedians are one of the best communicators and they know how to properly use the time they have been provided with.
- Try speaking extemporaneously
Try to note down some points and then speak on them. This is way better than memorizing because it seems natural.