To be an effective manager, one must master some essential manager communication skills. After all, managers are in a unique position when it comes to communicating. While senior leaders can often be removed from direct interaction with employees, managers are usually on the front lines.
Where customers are concerned, managers must sometimes communicate with people who are frustrated or angry and are seeking resolutions to product or service issues. Managers also need to feel comfortable relaying information up to more senior leaders or across to colleagues.
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5 Communication Competencies All Managers Need
Given these challenges, it’s not surprising that many managers—especially middle managers—can get frustrated or overwhelmed when attempting to communicate effectively in the workplace.
1But communication skills can be learned and developed for maximum effectiveness. Here are five essential competencies all managers can develop to improve their communication with more senior leaders, colleagues and peers, direct reports, and customers.
1. Adaptability
Managers must often act as translators between leaders, employees, customers, and other managers. As the frequent “middle man,” they are often called on to adapt to a variety of communication styles, cultural differences, and generational preferences.
Managers should be able to adapt to the communication styles of those in authority, and they need to be able to ask the right questions to assess and clarify senior leadership goals and their own part in helping to meet those goals.
Managers should also learn the communication preferences of their bosses and senior leaders. Do they prefer phone calls, e-mails, or instant messaging? Are there hours they won’t respond? And are they generally more formal or casual?
Finally, managers need to be able to adapt to cultural differences to keep communication healthy between members of their teams. Some of those cultural differences result from working on global teams, while others might be the result of generational preferences between employees of different age groups.
2. Conflict Resolution
Conflict is inevitable, but many managers and leaders struggle with how to navigate it effectively. It’s tempting to try to avoid it altogether or gloss over it with short-term solutions, but good managers will learn the skills necessary to manage conflict well.
Start by modeling good communication behavior and etiquette and working with team members to set guidelines about how to treat each other, what values will guide the approach to conflict, and what behaviors are never acceptable. Clarify any distinctions between in-person guidelines and conflict in a virtual environment.
Remember to encourage good psychological safety, where team members are allowed to push back or offer criticisms and critiques, but are discouraged from name-calling or abusive behaviors.
Managers should also remember that they have the authority to enforce guidelines the team has agreed on. If team members habitually violate guidelines, it’s appropriate for the manager to counsel them and, if necessary, remove them from the team.
3. Active Listening
High-profile leaders across multiple industries and geographies credit “listening” as one of the biggest factors that led to their success. They recognize that genuine listening involves more than just physically hearing what people say—it also involves understanding what people are saying and fully participating in conversations.
Active listening is a skill that all managers should strive to improve. Be attentive; listen to understand, and ask clarifying questions. Reflect the feelings of the speaker and restate and summarize what people have said to ensure full and accurate comprehension of the conversation. Finally, whenever possible, encourage the speaker with questions and statements that invite the speaker to keep providing information.
Practicing active listening will not only demonstrate full engagement with other people, but will even improve organizational outcomes.
4. Giving and Receiving Feedback
Whether giving or receiving, most people struggle with feedback on some level. Feedback can easily trigger our fight, flight, or freeze response, which makes it tough to hear, process, and regulate emotions throughout the process.
Managers need to practice giving brain-friendly feedback—even when it’s positive! Start by maintaining a calm, mindful demeanor, which can help lower tension and communicate safety. Leave room for pauses, and be willing to take a break if the other person is showing signs of entering flight or freeze mode. Finally, learn from past feedback conversations. What went wrong? What went right? How can you improve your side of the conversation?
Managers should also learn to receive feedback and even to solicit it. Practice asking questions; the Stop, Start, Continue model can be a good place to begin. Being open to receiving and acting on feedback will help managers see their blind spots and develop a growth mindset.
5. Good Electronic Communication Skills
Even though e-mail has been around for several decades now, the electronic communication landscape continues to evolve. Teams are often dispersed across cultures and time zones, many people work flexible hours or locations, and generational expectations introduce communication challenges many leaders couldn’t have foreseen.
In this complicated electronic communication landscape, leaders can help their teams establish good communication by encouraging guidelines and ground rules. Decide on appropriate tone and language in various written communications. Are certain words inappropriate? What about emojis—is it okay to include smiley faces in instant messages?
Equally important are time and circumstance guidelines. Team members should agree on when it’s okay to send electronic messages and what appropriate response times look like.
Finally, managers should have basically clear, grammatically correct language in their e-mails. No one is expecting Pulitzer-level writing in an e-mail, but managers and other leaders should be able to clearly communicate in writing without raising more questions than they answer.
Remember, electronic communications are part of a leader’s brand. When managers demonstrate good electronic communication skills, they will improve how other people perceive their leadership abilities.
Clear communication is essential to building a strong team and becoming a high-performing leader. When leaders listen, speak, and write clearly and competently, they can improve both business results—and people results!
Self-check:
- What is one communication competency I can improve?
- What is one thing I can do to improve that competency this week?
- What do my direct reports think of my communication skills? Have I asked?
