You can become a masterful communicator
If you become a pro in these three tasks
👋 Hey, it’s Andrés. Welcome to Astrolab’s weekly newsletter on how to become a better communicator at work. We write for knowledge workers and business owners.
Today: How to grow faster by focusing on what matters
Read time: 8 minutes
This post is about the three communication skills you need to master in order to be more relevant professionally:
Reporting on your Work
Building Connections
Influencing Others
So, if you want to become noticed, build a reputation, and see your impact scale, be sure to become better at doing these three things.
The C-word
In Raymond Carver’s What we Talk about When we Talk About Love, two couples discuss the meaning of the word love.
In the text, but also in Birdman’s scene that recreates this conversation, we get the impression that everyone has a different meaning for love.
Don’t you feel there’s something similar with the word communication as a job skill?
Every year, different organizations and outlets publish their The Skills of the Future lists, and communication usually appears as one of the most in-demand skills in the job market.
But I found strange that usually there aren’t many clues on what specific activities, tasks or behaviors are they referring to.
You’ll notice that each of these three correspond to different seniority levels (entry level, mid and senior).
Yes, it is definitely a generalization. However, I do think that is difficult to enter middle management without dominating the first skill, extremely rare getting to leadership without excelling in the first two, and impossible to remain there without getting the third one.
Behind all of this there’s a grand unifying theory we’re starting to build at Astrolab.
Instead of being focused only on our storytelling for influence workshop for managers, senior ICs and commercial teams, we decided to aim for something bigger:
To do this, we need to create the path(s) from basic communicator to expert storyteller, and the phases to get there.
These three skills appear to be, maybe, the most important of each of those phases. Think of them rite of passages you need to master.
Entry-Level: Reporting on your work
What is expected of you during your first years at work?
Honestly, not that much.
I started my career as a corporate lawyer for the 7-Eleven stores in Mexico. Here’s me during my 27th birthday at work, and during my in-store training:
What was expected of me during those days was to review contracts, ask our internal clients to use our formats, and report back to Alma, the general counsel.
Of these three, reporting back was the most stressful. We typically had weekly meetings where we talked about how things were going.
During these meetings, each attorney had a couple of minutes to explain their work, showcase their success stories—I, for example, led a negotiation with American Express so that our clients could pay with these cards at our stores—, and asked for help, if needed.
In other words, we had to do a quick recap on your work, and your findings, if there were any.
What is assumed from you in terms of communication?
Enter the PRESENTATION, our first step in this journey.
What is a presentation? A small performance, where you share a structured idea, usually accompanied by slides.
In these moments, you’re expected to be three things:
Clear: Easy to follow and understand
Brief: Don’t take too long. Start—as Wes Kao says—before you’re gonna be eaten by the bear. Skip intro!
Precise: Answer what you’re asked. Do your homework and make sure you have your numbers, data points and insights worked out
If you want to know our step-by-step suggestion on how to get better quick structuring clear, brief and precise presentations, leave a comment: We’re preparing a cohort-based virtual course on this topic that will launch in Spring 2025. Be one of the first ones to join!
(Or, text me and I’ll send you a build a presentation for dummies PDF I love to use)
Mid-Level: Building Connections
In 1936, Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People, a highly innovative book for its time.
Self-help books didn’t exist yet, his daughter wrote for the 2022 audiobook version.
Since then, How to Win Friends… has sold more than thirty million copies—it’s the second best-selling self-help book in history—and has been translated into more than thirty languages.
What made How to Win Friends… so popular, a book that consistently sells around 250,000 copies a year?
One reason, I think, has to do with the correlation between interpersonal relationships and happiness.
The other reason is that building connections is crucial to get things done, especially in medium or big organizations.
If you’re part of a big organization, you need other areas to go along with you, promote your projects, and sum their people to your initiatives.
As a senior IC or a mid-level manager, a huge percentage of your job depends on being able to establish a reputation among your peers, senior managers, and other crucial employees.
How do you do this?
Enter the sub-skill ability of creating a reputation by BUILDING CONNECTIONS, the second step in this journey.
How do you build connections?
There are people who seem naturally gifted to make friends, be cheerful, and chatty.
For those of us who do not belong to that tribe, there’s good news: you can learn how to become one of them.
You can read more about this in these two recent posts I wrote on recently:
Senior: Influencing Others
Finally, you’re on your way to the top.
You’ve learned how to be clear, brief and precise; you’ve forced yourself to attend office parties, networking events, and even mentor a couple of people in your organization.
Now what?
Well, now comes the fun part: it is your turn to decide where to take the organization.
Yes: as a senior IC or manager, you have been granted power, resources and decision-making ability. What are you going to do with it?
Well, first, aligning yourself to the organization’s strategy, of course. But that is only the beginning.
Enter INFLUENCING OTHERS. You can now promote your ideas and win others over.
Yes, you do have more budget than entry or mid-level employees, but money is not enough to get things done: You need to get others on-board with that new ERP, CRM, HRIS, BI, or whatever you’re leading.
And how do you do that?
A couple of weeks I wrote a post about this. The tl;dr is that you need to spend time understanding human behavior, and then forcing yourself to feel confortable designing for influence.
At Astrolab we designed the Playbook, a map on how to influence others, mainly through the power of communication and storytelling. Here’s a glance on the tool.
There’s a lot written in the last 10-15 years about influence and human behavior.
If you want a good source that summarizes some of the most relevant ideas and books, visit Behavioral Scientist, a digital magazine, frequently. Evan and his team are doing a great job of taking behavioral science into a more digestible medium.
Becoming a good communicator takes time, and it’s usually a messy process that involves bitter moments when things don’t go as you expected.
It also includes amazing learning experiences, adrenaline-filled opportunities to shine, and, most important of all, the chance to connect with people, to truly connect in a human way with others that you’ll encounter along your career.
It is definitely worth it.
Briefs
Intros: I want to meet 100 learning managers during 2025 and see if Astrolab could be a good fit for the managers and individual contributors they serve. Would you be willing to help me with an intro?
Guest Posts: Who should write the first ever guest post for INFLUX?
That’s all for today. I’ll see you next Thursday!
Andrés