Communicating Clearly in 5 Simple Steps

Communicating clearly is an essential skill needed to achieve success in all aspects of life, but it is especially important in your career. If you’re struggling to make progress improving your communication, this five step mental checklist will give you a simple, structured framework to clearly communicate with ease.

1. The Big Picture

Start by talking about the context of the question, task or topic of discussion. This sets the scene and helps to bring everyone onto the same page. I like to start with the big picture as it slows down the conversation, so when I am asked a question and need a moment to process the answer this trick will gives mental space to think about what to say next.

Imagine you’re in a team meeting. Your manager is discussing the status of a major project. You hear your name called, and your manager invites you to share your thoughts on what has made the project successful to date. Now, you take a deep breath, smile, and start with some context.

 You could say something like:

“From a big picture perspective, I agree, it’s important that we reflect back on both our successes and challenges on the project so that we can capture the lessons learnt for the next opportunity”.

2. What

Now, you’ve set the scene and built up some momentum by sharing your thoughts. This is where you begin to address the question which was asked. You can lead the conversation back to the original question by sharing one idea which you feel contributed to the success of the project, by saying:

“From my perspective, the use of automation on the project has played a major role in its success.”

3. Why

Boom! You’ve captured the room’s attention and shared a valuable insight, but don’t stop there. Next, build on your answer by discussing why the task, topic or idea is important.

Continuing the conversation, you could say:

“Automation has facilitated our success by allowing the team to focus on the interesting and challenging aspects of the design while minimising tedious and repetitive tasks”

4. How

Now you’re on a roll, you can start to get into a little more detail. Illustrate your point by giving an example:

“For example, we set up a workflow to streamline the processing incoming data and to automatically generate tables and figures for the required reports.”

5. Conclusion

Finally, wrap up your point with a conclusion where you talk about the results or outcome: 

“I think we can take this success forwards by sharing the automation tools developed internally, so that they can be adopted by the team on future projects.”

And you’re done!

Once you master this simple technique, you will find that the situations in which you can apply this technique are endless. Communicating clearly will gradually become second nature.

Communicating Clearly Summary

In summary, the mental checklist for communicating clearly is to touch on:

1. The Big Picture
2. What
3. Why
4. How
5. Conclusion

Be brave, and share your ideas with confidence, insight and clarity.