📐Top 10 Skills for Communicators in 2022

Highlights from Interviews with 44 Leaders

Dec 20, 2022

Last week, I reached an exciting milestone — 1,000 followers on LinkedIn. Consider following along for updates in between emails.

This year, I published 44 interviews with leaders. I asked each of them about the skills needed to successfully communicate at work. After tallying and analyzing their responses, I created this 2022 top 10 skills list — excluding the basic skill of writing and editing. To show why these skills matter, I selected quotes from interviews and linked them to their full articles to learn more.

Last year, I published a similar article with the top 10 skills of 2021. Notably, there are four overlapping skills on both lists, but with slightly different rankings — listening, empathy, relationship manager and resilience. But six distinct skills stood out as new additions this year, plus three honorable mentions.

Before I share the skills list, I have a few questions for you to ponder as you review the below:

What do you think of this year’s skills list?
Why do you think these skills were identified as most important?
What would you add to the list?

Top 10 Skills

👋🏽 Manage Relationships
🎧 Listen
💙 Show Empathy
🔮 Embrace the Unknown
♟️ Embody Humility
📚 Keep Learning
🧮 Understand Business Strategy
🎭 Know Your Audience
👷 Engage in Hard Conversations
📈 Study the Data

Honorable Mentions

🥇 Maintain Focus
😂 Welcome Humor
⛔ Don’t Be The Nayser

1. 👋🏽 Manage Relationships

Communications is a people-focused profession. It’s important to manage relationships with colleagues, partners, leaders, customers and external influencers. The timeline of our work relationships begins with building them, nurturing them by staying connected and ultimately influencing stakeholders with our expertise when working on projects.

“It’s also about influence. This is something they don’t teach you in grad school. Partnering and building relationships across the business is critical because at the end of the day, your work will not stick if people don’t believe in you or what you’re there to do. The best path to influence, in my experience, is to build a) trust through forming strong relationships and b) credibility by doing great work.” –Jared Taylor
“Nothing gets done without teamwork and relationships. It's very important to understand the motivations and interests of the groups you're trying to engage or reach internally or externally. From there, you must work to find the sweet spot of shared interests that allow you or your organization to tackle big issues.” -Jerilan Greene

2. 🎧 Listen

There is an old proverb that many of us in communications reference:

“'We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” -Epictetus, Greek philosopher

To accomplish truly great communications, we need to understand what leaders hope to achieve while making space for conversations with the community of colleagues to understand their needs. Then, we balance these areas.

“It might sound counterintuitive, but the most important tool for success in communications is listening. Listen to your leadership, team, and partners. Active listening is more than just comprehending what people are saying. It’s making sure that the party feels heard. This is especially critical when it comes to internal communications.” –Tracy Van Grack
“Being open and a great listener is so important. There’s something about being intuitive — read a situation, understand the dynamics, and what you’re learning from that experience. You want to understand the company from every angle.” -Allison King

3. 💙 Show Empathy

I’ve written a lot on this topic, from Creating your Caring List when the war in Ukraine broke out to the Celebrating the Kindness at Work Honor Roll this fall. The leaders that I’ve featured in articles feel similarly — it’s important to care, be kind and show understanding. This pandemic time has stretched us professionally and personally and serves as a reminder to put ourselves in other people’s shoes.

“I’ve often heard Communications leaders referred to as the heart of an organization – they are what makes the brand human. From that perspective, it’s important to understand what your customers and audiences are going through, what they need and what they care about in order to be a good communicator and connect with them in a productive way.” -Christopher Pearsall
“It goes back to my education in psychology and interpersonal relations. Empathy and emotional intelligence are at the heart of this work.” –Jesse Bianco-Lane

4 . 🔮 Embrace the Unknown

With so many changing world events, the past few years have shown us the importance of being flexible at work and in life. Projects pivot and priorities change, but we have adjusted our work styles to expect the unexpected.

“Adaptability and flexibility are also quite important. Our work is in the spotlight so you have to be able to react fast.” -Laura Colantuono
“Everyone you work with cross-functionally has their own objectives, and not everyone necessarily has the time to provide everything you need on the comms side. This means comms professionals, in my opinion, have to be some of the most flexible and agile people on the team in order to get everything done.” -Emily Busse

5. ♟️ Humility

In Harvard Business Review, Dan Cable, London Business School Professor and Author of Alive at Work writes “when leaders are humble, show respect, and ask how they can serve employees as they improve the organization, the outcomes can be outstanding.” The same is true for communications.

“In communications, I really like that we get to learn about so many different topics. I often tell people that my job is to “ask smart people dumb questions.” Especially when tasked with absorbing very deep technical information and translating it, having the humility to admit when something doesn’t make sense is key to developing a good understanding. Or, the willingness to brainstorm and share ideas even if you’re not sure they’re “good” ones. You never know what spurs a great idea. I also half-joke that my ignorance is part of the value I add. If something doesn't make sense to me – as a comms person who lives and breathes our story – then it’s not going to make sense to the outside world.” -Cynthia Horiguchi

“It’s also important to have a low ego. People have a lot of opinions about whatever you do. I had a former boss tell me that I was too good at taking feedback. It’s because everyone has an opinion on whatever you do. Everything internal communications says hits people in their heart, their wallet or their brain. You have to take all that feedback and move forward.” -Laney Erokan

6. 📚Keep Learning

I ask everyone I interview — how do you continue learning about your field? The reason I include this question is that The Switchboard is a personal L&D project for me. I hope by sharing these answers with all of you, it is a helpful resource in your career journey.

It’s important to always be discovering new platforms and exploring ideas to tell stories creatively. In order to have this learning mindset we need to ask questions and take on projects where we don’t always know the answers, but learn them along the way.

“Embrace a “never stop learning” mindset, whether we’re just starting out or well into our careers. One of the things I love most about working at a start-up is the wealth of opportunities to try new things and acquire new skills, including digging into work outside the internal communications space…It’s fun to experiment, learn, and take a fresh approach.” -Philip Hales
“If you are leading a project and don’t understand it, then you are the very best person to share this because you will put in the work to make sure you — and everyone else — understands it. I lead with that approach in everything I do, and encourage others to do the same. Don’t ever be afraid if you don’t know something. The important thing to do is to ask the hard questions, figure it out, and break down the vernacular. Similar to people who speak multiple languages, the ability to translate is a critical part of being a communicator.” -Tiffin Jernstedt
“It’s so important to broaden your expertise with business knowledge or a speciality. Last year, I took a six-week course on Diversity & Inclusion at Cornell. As communicators, we need enough DEI-specific knowledge to be able to partner with our DEI counterparts as well as translate it broadly for the org.” -Jiyoung Pamela Yoon

7. 🧮 Understand Business Strategy

As communicators, we need to know the organization and its strategy — what are the growth priorities, what are the revenue goals and how does the organization aspire to stand out in its industry? This knowledge comes from many sources — reading about the industry in the news, learning from internal resources and joining work meetings to be part of conversations. With this knowledge, we can make an even greater impact. Rather than handing us the story to tell, include us in the process of creating the story and it will be even greater.

“You play a very crucial role in coordination. When you’re willing to step out of the comms lane to own more decision-making, you can have a huge impact by being collaborative and serving as a project manager. Sometimes you end up being a tie-breaker or a negotiator on a major announcement before it’s shared! There aren’t many disciplines that let you have that level of visibility at an organization.” -Roberta (Bertie) Thomson
“You also need to be fluent in the language of the business so that you can communicate effectively and deliver counsel that will help make a business impact.” -Joe Cohen
“When you understand how your business operates, you’re able to think strategically and be a better partner to the executive team, and in turn, keep employees informed and the company marching forward.” -Holly Nicola

8. 🎭 Know Your Audience

Who do you want to reach and why do you want to connect with them? This question is key for marketing and communications, whether you’re sharing stories externally or internally. The ability to refine your target audience(s) and develop messages for them makes communications impactful.

“Have an appreciation for your audience, know the demographics and put yourself in their shoes with empathy. When you do, it makes you a far better communicator because you're managing both the company's overall storyline and what you want your employees to know and feel.
You also have to really understand what your employees need from you as a communications team. In some ways, we are the keepers of the employees' experience and their attention span. We have to protect that.” -Gina Laughlin

9. 👷 Engage in Hard Conversations

Always ask why! It can be easy to agree and move forward with a strategy because others have already signed off on it, but to be a truly great communicator, we need to speak up when we have hesitations or need more clarity — if we don’t ask the tough questions before it goes lives, others will likely engage and leaders will want to be aligned in advance before that happens. Ensure these conversations are done in a thoughtful and respectful way.

“Most importantly, you need to be able to have hard conversations and say things that might not be popular, but that's the only way you can actually be strategic and prepare your leadership for the crisis moments. I always look to poke holes so that I can shape the best narrative.” -Cath Anderson

10. 📈 Analyze the Data

To improve our impact, we need to know and analyze the data. This step can often be overlooked in what feels like a race to produce. Make time to measure and look at the metrics to continue your professional growth and enhance the organization’s influence.

“In particular, data is a key part of any communications program. It used to be that comms professionals only used a spreadsheet to track reporters they were pitching, now it’s so much more. You need to be able to communicate with data science and tell those stories.” -Ken Shuman

Three Honorable Mentions

These skills were only mentioned by one leader but really stood out to me as meaningful recommendations. I’m highlighting their thoughts below:

🥇Mantain Focus

“Focus is also so important. With all the platforms to communicate through, and the expectations of brands to align with people’s values, it can be easy to be pulled in a lot of directions that don’t help you drive your most important goals. As a team, we are constantly looking at our top priorities to ensure everything we do checks off the priorities we set, rather than focusing on topics that aren’t aligned with our mission. As communicators, we have to be laser-focused on our overall goals.” -Christopher Pearsall

😂 Encourage Humor

“Since your book report convinced me to read Humor Seriously. Part of why I enjoy this work so much is that I get the chance to help leaders use humor to show up in a way that’s relatable, to infuse joy into the content my teams and I create and, ideally, to invite everyone in the org to tap into their funny bones and their creativity to do their best work.” -Nathan Fisher

⛔ Don’t Be The Nayser

“I’ve learned that it is critical to give things the chance to transform, turn into something new, or just have a different outcome. This practice has also helped me to create the safe space needed for my teams to bring their ideas and challenge ideas too.” -Julie Inouye

Let’s remind ourselves to be open to doing our work differently and growing with many skills in 2023 and beyond.

The Switchboard