Ask ten executives what “great communication” means and you'll get ten different answers.
They might talk about better conversations, sharper messaging, stronger presence or perhaps even cleaner slides.
They're all right.
And all incomplete.
Underneath every one of those skills sit two ingredients that are easy to miss: quality feedback and judgement.
Here are some thoughts to help you include them in your own work.
Quality feedback is both critical and costly.
Feedback that checks whether a draft is good enough to send isn’t what I mean. I mean the feedback that costs someone something: time, attention, and honesty. Maybe even a bit of courage.
Real feedback is specific. It explains what landed, what didn't and why. It also explains whether certain elements of the structure are fit for purpose. Do the introduction, the main message and the body of the story do what they need to do?
Without this level of rigour, feedback locks in mediocrity.
Judgement is both harder and takes time.
You can teach someone the steps to structure a message. You can't teach them, in five minutes, how to sense what a room needs, when to play the story straight or to add in analogies and colour, and when brevity respects people's time or when it reads as dismissive.
That's built, not briefed. And it's built the same way feedback is: through repetition, tested against real stakes, and corrected in real time.
Skill-building gets you competent. Feedback and judgement make you good (and perhaps even great).
Leave either one out of your communication training, and you're teaching people to go through the motions, not to move a room.
More soon,
Davina
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ABOUT AUTHOR: DAVINA STANLEY
Davina helps senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time, nailing the message that engages decision makers fast.
She learned structured thinking at McKinsey in Hong Kong in the 1990s, was approved to teach the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto in 2009, and has coached leaders and teams globally for 25+ years. Clients report cutting review cycles by ~30% and prep time by ~20%.*
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, and Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
* Based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
