Communication 101: Regardless of format, strong discourse relies on heightened soft skills

There are certain skills required to be a good communicator — skills that aren’t necessarily the ones you’ll pick up in school or through work-related seminars. Instead, they’re the soft skills you’ll have to sharpen throughout your career to reach a high level of communication competence. Whether you’re speaking face-to-face, sending instructions over email or text, participating in a video conference or making a simple phone call, here are three soft skills that will help you improve your communication with others:

1. Interpersonal actions: How well do you interact with others? Are you the type of employee who others enjoy working with or are you the employee

who others try to avoid? If you have strong interpersonal skills, you are someone who realizes the benefits of cooperation. You’re a person who knows

when to speak and when to keep your mouth shut. Sometimes it’s as simple as a positive attitude and a pleasant disposition. Other times, it’s not so simple. But you must be a person who can work with others to get the job done, no matter what personal feelings exist.

2. Listening: We’d like to think that our communication skills are judged

by how we speak with each other but in reality, the most crucial part of communicating is how well we actually listen to each other. If you’re a person who can sit across the table from others and soak in their opinions and ideas, your communication skills are strong. You also need to be able to articulate your and their ideas to others. This can be done in a variety of ways, including face-toface communication, phone calls, text messages and email, among others.

3. Research: We’ve all been in meetings where co-workers act completely baffled by a question about a competing product or a bit of recent tech news that a five-second search on Google would answer. People who have the curiosity to look things up either after or before they speak show a dedication to thoroughness that employers value. It’s one thing to be able to offer a bunch of concepts with little regard to their history or effectiveness; it is something else entirely to research those concepts so you can explain what has and hasn’t worked. Research isn’t limited to search engines. It can also include conversations with others, anecdotal evidence, journal inquiries, personal observations and more.