Fundamental communication skills

Communication skills are just like other skills. You need to learn to use the basic tools and techniques before you learn a more complex one. For example, a great carpenter must learn to use a saw, a chisel, and many other tools and techniques before they can make a beautiful cabinet. In the same way, a great communicator must learn the basic building blocks of communication before they can make a beautiful and compelling speech.

Before you can master the skills of public speaking, influence, having difficult conversations, storytelling and more, you must learn the core communication skills. The articles below will help you learn and apply these core skills.

After you’ve learned the fundamental communication skills you can learn how to use them in common work situations.

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Want People to Pay Attention? Lead With Impact.

26 July 2025
A sad truth about communication at work: Having an important message doesn’t mean people will listen. Important updates, great ideas, and even urgent warnings can all go ignored—if your audience doesn’t see why it matters to...

10 tips for how to start a successful work conversation

24 May 2022
The way we start conversations at work has a significant impact on the success of the conversation. In this article I share 10 tips for how to start a successful work conversation. Why does this matter? Well, there are lots of ways to...

15 essential communication skills you need at work

17 December 2021
You’ve heard about the communication skills all employers are looking for. Presentation skills, public speaking, delegating, listening skills, and empathy. Every hiring manager has a list like this in their head when they evaluate...

How to make sure your message is relevant

17 November 2021
Relevance is the first thing to consider when communicating with business teams (read more about the Four steps to communicating with business teams). If a message isn’t relevant to the audience it doesn’t matter how relatable, simple...

Get your message across quickly and clearly

6 October 2021
Very few people work completely alone. Most of us work with other people whether it is with our own team, someone in another department, or directly with a customer. Whenever we communicate with other people at work, we need to make...

Three common problems when creating a summary

4 October 2021
Communicating clearly at work often means having short conversations about really big topics. Unfortunately, there isn’t time to explain everything we want other people to know. The solution is to strip the topic down to the essential...

What language do you speak at work?

1 October 2021
What language do you speak at work? I’m not talking about English or Spanish. I’m talking about the type of language you use to communicate ideas and information. Is it business language, or technical language? Or something...

Three mistakes when explaining complex things

22 September 2021
Why do we find it so hard when explaining complex things? Why do we make the same three mistakes when explaining complex things? A comment I often hear from attendees at my workshops is ‘My topic is too complex to summarize in one...
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Fundamental communication skills
Communication skills you need at work
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