5 Strategies for Leaders to Communicate Better at Work

If a solid foundation and structural support hold a building together, what keeps a business from toppling over? We’re not talking about the physical location but rather that cohesive feeling that unites a group working toward a shared goal. While hard to cultivate, camaraderie is often underpinned by leaders who understand what it takes to communicate better at work. When applied at scale, consistently good communication can nurture and sustain an organization.

The leaders who communicate better at work tend to share one habit: they listen first, then build every message around what their audience actually needs to hear. Strong leadership communication is an organizational capability that produces hard results. It’s less obvious than revenue drivers like product development or sales, but speaking, listening, and presenting are the meltwater that gives every other department its flow. Or, in the extreme, they’re like safety nets: most keenly felt when they aren’t in place.

Strategies for Leaders to Communicate Better at Work

To avoid playing Jenga with your team’s performance, we compiled five strategies for greater organizational stability. From syncing internally on processes and goals to projecting an inspiring brand image, it all hinges on communication. And that starts with re-learning how to listen.

Adapt Your Listening

To sharpen your skills, it helps to remember that all communication is a two-way street. While speaking is often given precedence in professional settings, learning when and how to listen is critical. Astute leaders may be shaking their heads and thinking: This doesn’t apply to me; I always practice active listening at work. Unfortunately, active listening often fails to achieve the full scope of what listening should aim to accomplish.

At Duarte, we’ve evolved past active listening to embrace Adaptive Listening®, our method for meeting a speaker’s needs in the moment. Rather than treating listening as an on/off switch, it asks you to read the speaker’s cues and shift between four styles: Support when someone needs an emotional need met, Advance when they need to move a project forward, Immerse when they need you to absorb the details, and Discern when they need you to evaluate the information. For a fuller look at how to put these to work, see our guide to effective listening skills at work.

Knowing when to toggle between the four can carry you through almost any situation. Coaching a direct report, fielding a sharp question from an investor, and working through a decision with your board all ask for something different from you. The VP who brings Discern to a room that needed Support loses the person in front of her. And as a focal point for the company, how you listen becomes the blueprint everyone else follows.

Like leading by example, making a point to adapt your listening sets the expectation that everyone centers the speaker’s needs. But when it comes time to hit the stage or host a virtual event, a whole new set of considerations comes into play.

Make Your Audience the Hero

At Duarte, we have a golden rule: Never deliver a presentation you wouldn’t want to sit through. Our version of “do unto others” forces self-reflection ahead of high-stakes moments. But what does it mean to make your audience the hero? This practice pulls from the time-tested narrative techniques that evolved from Aristotle’s Poetics through to Joseph Campbell’s distillation of cultural storytelling: the hero’s journey.

Fans of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings already know how such stories unfold and can recite their plots by heart. Picture the exec walking into an all-hands to announce a reorg. She can put herself and the decision at the center, or she can put the 3,000 people in the room there and show them what they’re being asked to build. One version gets compliance. The other gets belief. Your job in that moment is the guide who makes the hero’s success possible.

Presentation Tools for Better Workplace Communication

A few storytelling tools make this easier. The Presentation Sparkline™ maps the movement between the world as it is and how it could be, the rhetorical pattern behind speeches from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs. The Torchbearer’s Toolkit from Illuminate bundles speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols to ignite and sustain change. And the Three-Act structure borrows exposition, rising action, and climax to build a persuasive talk, moving between What Is, What Could Be, and the new bliss your vision unlocks. Each one is worth a deeper look in our guide to business storytelling.

Consider which approach best fits your organization, or combine elements to meet your needs. Whichever pathway you choose, think beyond the words so your visuals reinforce the message.

Think Visually

In 2008, Nancy compiled two decades of design knowledge to release Slide:ology, which radically reshaped the presentation landscape. Ever since, we’ve been living in its shadow as sloppy slide decks become increasingly taboo in professional circles. For any leader, “thinking like a designer” is an essential shortcut to seamless audience connection. For the uninitiated, opening your eye for design can often boil down to a single word: restraint.

Embracing a minimalist approach of “less is more” in your communications and presentations can sharpen your focus and get you to results faster. To see it in action, let’s run a quick hypothetical.

Consider the following scenario:

You’re up against a project deadline and the client comes back with significant last-minute changes. To align everyone, you build a deck that outlines the changes and names the team that owns each one. To save time, you pack as much as you can onto every slide and sprint through the talk. Then the due date arrives and you find that crucial alterations were missed in the finished product.

How did this happen?

For one, cramming too much information on each slide overwhelms your audience and lets crucial details slip through the cracks. That’s why in Slide:ology Nancy encourages limiting one idea per slide and using white space so the key takeaways are prioritized. If you’re in doubt, a quick Glance Test™ can help optimize your slides.

Now rewind it. Imagine you gave each change breathing room and named who owned the outcome. Show the current state of the project, the new client changes, and what’s at stake if they’re missed. Your team leaves knowing their role and acts with direction. The same framework holds when you’re using evidence to build an argument. So let’s talk about data.

Communicate with Data

Even if your business lacks a smokestack, it still produces a ton of exhaust in the form of data. Site visits, customer trends, sales funnels, and pipeline all produce a deluge of figures. But when parsed correctly, these data points can reveal pathways toward unique opportunities. With technological innovations showing no signs of slowing down, user-generated data from apps and platforms can offer invaluable insights. But like learning a second language, knowing how to speak and translate data into actionable strategies requires ongoing education.

Any leader who wants to move a team with evidence should make data storytelling a priority. Think of the director staring down a 40% dip in renewals. The dashboard tells her what happened. It takes a story to tell the executive team why, and what she needs from them to fix it. Where Slide:ology overhauled presentations, DataStory did the same for data analysis a decade later. Now our most in-demand training course, it applies narrative principles to the data-centric talks that drive change, teaching leaders to find the story inside graphs, charts, and spreadsheets.

A DataStory leads with the business case so your audience knows where you’re headed, and your point of view on what the data means and what’s at stake becomes your DataPOV™. For the full framework, see our guide to data storytelling.

Communicate and Lead With Empathy

Imagining and responding to what your audience or customer base is feeling should infuse every aspect of your communications. This approach has been at the heart of Duarte’s work since its founding and remains our North Star.

The Duarte Method™ combines story, visuals, strategy, and delivery into an audience-first package that aims to empower and activate through an empathetic message. With this approach, you can position your company or brand to connect on a human level with the people you’re trying to reach. That builds trust, forms deep connections, and sets your services apart. To meet our Golden Rule, the Duarte Method helps you conceive of and deliver persuasive talks that tug audience heartstrings.

The image above shows the geometric elegance of placing empathy at the center of your communication. Inspiring change, launching a groundbreaking product, or transitioning your company all demand it, because it’s what makes your stakeholders feel recognized through the process. Finding success with these strategies also takes honest self-reflection about how you lead and decide. As with any toolbox, knowing how and when to reach for the right instrument is what yields the result.

More Ways to Communicate Better at Work

The leadership communication skills that matter most are the five above: listening, storytelling, visual thinking, data storytelling, and empathy. With them in place, it’s easier to focus on providing exceptional service or innovating your product line. But try to avoid just enjoying the solid ground under your feet. Resting on your laurels risks letting new knowledge stagnate and muscles go soft. These habits are the backbone of strong leadership development, so set a regular cadence to apply and re-engage them and keep refining their effect.

If you want to move from a good communicator to a great one, our take on the communication shifts that separate good and great leaders pairs well with these strategies.

When you’re ready to build this across your organization, team training gives your leaders hands-on practice with everything above. Or contact us to talk through what your team actually needs. When it comes to helping leaders find their voice, we’re always happy to help.