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. 

For leaders, this means learning and maintaining the soft skills that produce hard results. These are less obvious than revenue-generating skills like product development or sales. However, intangible skills like speaking, listening, and presenting are the meltwater that gives other departments their flow. Or, in the extreme, communication best practices are like safety nets: they’re most keenly felt when not properly in place.

Strategies for Leaders to Communicate Better at Work

To avoid playing Jenga with your team’s performance, we compiled 5 strategies to communicate better at work 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 refine skills and communicate better at work, 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 in-house method of meeting speaker needs. Where active listening presents listening as an “on/off” function, Adaptive Listening encourages listeners respond accordingly throughout a conversation. This means tracking speaker cues, assessing information, and continuously adapting one’s listening style. Our listening experts, Maegan Stephens and Nicole Lowenbraun, spent years researching and identified four listening types that cover most interactions. 

The Four Types of Adaptive Listening Include: 

• Support Listening – The speaker needs you to meet an emotional need. 

• Advance Listening – The speaker needs you to move people, projects, or processes forward. 

• Immerse Listening – The speaker needs you to understand and remember the content. 

• Discern Listening – The speaker needs you to evaluate the information. 

As leaders, knowing when to toggle between these four listening types can help successfully navigate untold situations. Providing guidance to employees, thoughtfully fielding questions from investors, or collaborating with board members all require different listening types. And as a focal point for the company, you’ll provide a blueprint for others to begin adjusting their listening postures to greater effect. 

Like leading by example, making a point to adapt your listening can set an expectation in your organization to prioritize centering the speaker’s needs in all interactions. However, when it comes time to hit the stage or host a virtual event, a whole new set of considerations quickly come 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 onto others” offers explicit guidance to leaders looking to communicate better at work because it 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. For leaders setting their sights on an upcoming keynote or all-staff meeting, visualizing their audience as Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins isn’t a bad place to start. In fact, this mindset can help leaders approach their talks from the perspective of the guides who enable the hero’s success. That’s because a successful talk should convey information that spurs audiences into action without centering the speaker. 

Presentation Tools for Better Workplace Communication 

The Sparkline – Introduced to the world via Nancy Duarte’s infamous TED talk, The Sparkline illustrates the rhetorical movements in a speech between describing the world as it is and how it could be. This toggling allows the audience to picture your Big Idea in action; to move from the current world and move to the world enabled by your vision. Speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs have followed this roadmap into infamy. It’s still a powerful device. 

The Torchbearer’s Toolkit – Outlined in Illuminate by Nancy and co-author Patti Sanchez, this approach bundles the use of speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols to ignite and sustain change within an organization. In crafting your presentations, think of how each part can serve a specific goal or work in tandem to solidify a culture of change for your team. While this may take a certain amount of reflection ahead of implementation, downloading this free toolkit can help accelerate your thinking. 

The Three-Act Structure – The Three-Act structure pulls from dramatic movements of exposition, rising action, and climax to build a persuasive talk. Taking The Sparkline one step further, this approach moves between What Is, What Could Be, and introduces The New Bliss to describe the embrace a leader’s vision. This added dramatic flair can help put the stakes in perspective for audiences by illustrating clearly what they stand to gain through adopting your idea. 

To communicate better at work, consider which approach best fits your organization, or combine elements to meet your unique needs. Whichever pathway you choose, it’s important to think beyond the verbal components to ensure the visuals also complement your efforts. 

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 leaders striving to communicate better at work, “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 workplace communications and presentations can help sharpen your focus to achieve faster results. To help illustrate this in action, let’s imagine a quick hypothetical. 

Consider the following scenario: 

Your company is facing a project deadline, and the client requests significant last-minute changes. To align everyone involved, you create a slide deck that outlines the changes, and which team handles each. To save time, you pack as much information as possible on each slide in the hopes of sprinting through the talk. But when the due date arrives, you find some crucial alternations were overlooked in the finished product. 

How did this happen? 

For one, cramming too much information on each slide can overwhelm your audience and allow crucial details to slip through the cracks. That’s why in Slide:ology Nancy encourages limiting one idea per slide and using white space to ensure key takeaways are prioritized. If you’re in doubt, a quick Glance Test™ can help optimize your slides. Along with making them visually pleasing, these principles can help organize information to ensure accuracy and execution down the line.  

To rewind the above, imagine instead if you gave each change breathing room that defined those responsible for their outcomes. This would make expectations clear by limiting important elements getting lost to information overload. Instead, try showing the current state of the project, the new client changes, and what’s at stake. That way, your team will be more likely to understand their role and act with direction. A similar framework can also come in handy when using evidence to build and back up an argument. From here, let’s talk about data. 

Communicate with Data 

Even if your business lacks a smokestack, it still produces a tone 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. 

Leaders curious how to communicate better at work should make understanding data storytelling a top priority. Where Slide:ology overhauled presentations, DataStory caused a similar rupture a decade later for data analysis and action. Now our most in-demand training course, DataStory applies narrative principles to the data-centric talks that aim to incite change in an organization. Like Illuminate for hard numbers, this framework marries what is/what could be thinking with leading teams toward “a new bliss” rooted in data. It teaches leaders to see stories in impersonal arrangements like graphs, charts, and spreadsheets, and articulate their power. 

Similar to the Three-Act structure above, telling a DataStory requires similar partitions. But rather than thinking of a Beginning, Middle, and End, data storytelling should emphasize the business case for a proposal upfront to help guide the audience toward your solution. With a DataStory, your unique point of view on how to respond to the data, and what’s at stake by choosing whether to act, is your DataPOV™. Here’s how it all works in practice. 

Parts of a DataStory

1: The Situation – There is a problem or opportunity identified in the data. 

2: The Complication – It’s messy to proceed because the data presents problems and/or opportunities. 

3: The Resolution – The DataPOV address the problem at its root, creating a solution with positive outcomes. 

Once you’ve found a problem or opportunity and charted a helpful path forward, communicating this information using a DataStory can align your team to enact your decision. Here’s where thinking visually can also help articulate a clear pathway. For inspiration on how to tell your first DataStory, download our free Recommendation Tree™ resource to map your narrative structure. Along with exercising restraint on each slide and using white space, your team will walk away ready to put your plan into action. 

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, leaders can position their company or brand to connect on a human level with potential customers. This can help form deep connections, build trust, and set your services apart. To meet our Golden Rule, the Duarte Method helps conceive of and deliver persuasive talks that tug audience heartstrings. 

The above image depicts the geometric elegance of placing empathy at the center of your communication. Inspiring change, launching a groundbreaking product, or transitioning your company all demand empathy. This ensures key stakeholders feel recognized throughout the process. Furthermore, finding success with these strategies means honest self-reflection to guide your decision making and leadership. As with any toolbox, knowing how and when to use the right instrument is essential to yielding desired results. 

More Ways to Communicate Better at Work 

With these strategies, 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 stagnant and muscles go soft. Therefore, we recommend implementing a regular cadence to apply and re-engage your communication skills to continue refining their effect. 

We offer a robust menu of training courses for hand-on guidance for applying the above strategies to your organization. With in-person and on-demand options available, you can decide which setting fits best to upskill your roster. 

Or to understand how our workshops could meet your needs, book a call with a Duarte training concierge. When it comes to helping leaders communicate better at work, we’re always happy to help.