Crafting the perfect email might be a challenge but at least you have time and space to make necessary adjustments. When you’re speaking to someone in person, you can’t just hit backspace and try again.
It has to be right the first time.
When we think about improving our face-to-face communication, we usually focus on skills like empathy and articulation. And with good reason: they’re absolutely vital.
But there are many other valuable considerations and steps you can take to help you at your next in-person meeting.
Effective In-Person Communication for Stronger Teams
Effective in-person communication results in a much more efficient exchange of information and ideas, ensuring everyone is fully aligned on a topic at the end of the meeting or conversation. If you’re able to make your points concisely, answer questions in the moment, and thoroughly discuss any objections or suggestions, you’re much less likely to spend time on lengthy follow-ups or addressing misunderstandings.
Effective communication also helps foster trust and empathy by reducing uncertainty. If someone can easily grasp your point, they’re less likely to jump to (negative) conclusions and more likely to see things from your viewpoint.
If you’re able to effectively communicate why you disagree on something, it’s less likely to be interpreted as a personal attack. This is particularly important in a face-to-face situation as we need to make spur of the moment judgments about others’ intentions. Unlike with an email, you can’t go back and reread an in-person conversation to check if your first impression was right before responding.
But communicating clearly and concisely isn’t always easy.
Common Causes of Ineffective In-Person Communication
There are a huge number of factors that affect in-person communication. Let’s look at a few of the most common.
Firstly, the pressure of speaking to people in public often causes anxiety. Some surveys suggest that the percentage of people with glossophobia, or who fear public speaking, could be as high as 75%. This stress interferes with cognition, potentially causing you to freeze up, lose track of what you were saying, or forget vital information.
Anxiety about how people might respond to what you need to say can be particularly problematic. That’s because the need to avoid conflict can flare up when the person is right in front of us. In turn, this can prompt you to use vague language or rely on a framework like “the feedback sandwich” to soften the blow, ultimately causing confusion and frustration.
Lastly, you might focus so much on what you have to say that you don’t pay attention to others. This could cause you to unintentionally shut out your audience by not physically engaging with them (through eye contact, for example). It may also mean that you miss opportunities to build on what they’re saying – as author Stephen Covey says, we often listen to reply, not to understand.
While these challenges are daunting, there’s a simple way you can start to overcome them: preparation.
How to Prepare for In-Person Communication
There are a number of things you can do to make sure you’re in the best possible position to get your point across in your next in-person meeting. These range from building vital soft skills to leveraging digital tools to support your efforts.
Here are some ideas for ways you could prepare.
Organize Your Thoughts
If you’re leading the meeting or have an idea of the point you want to contribute, executive coach Anne Sugar recommends planning out your message ahead of time and limiting yourself to 3 key points to ensure that you don’t overload your colleagues.
This is also an opportunity to work on being more concise. As Sugar advises: “Think of yourself as an editor eliminating words and ideas that don’t communicate the essence of what you want to share.”
An important caveat here is that unless you’re giving a presentation or speech, you probably don’t want to create a full-blown script as that could make your delivery too formal and stop the conversation’s natural flow. Just give yourself some ideas about how you could say what you need to say.
Get Ready To Be Put On The Spot
A huge part of in-person communication is responding to spontaneous questions or unexpected requests for input. Unfortunately, these are really difficult to prepare for – not impossible though.
Matt Abrahams, an expert in organizational behavior, believes that you can train yourself to respond better when put on the spot by practicing how to quickly organize your thoughts.
One method that he recommends is memorizing certain structures. This enables you to slot the relevant information into a tried and tested framework, allowing you to rapidly create an impactful response.
He offers this framework for dealing with questions: “First answer the question clearly and simply, preferably in one sentence. Next offer an illustration or an example that supports your answer. Then describe your answer’s relevance to your listeners or its benefits if they adopt it.”
Speaking to the HBR IdeaCast Podcast, he also recommends preparing by asking a generative AI tool to pose questions that your audience is likely to ask. While these exact questions may never come up, it will help you get more comfortable with responding spontaneously.
Get to Grips With Body Language
Familiarize yourself with some common non-verbal cues so you can better understand how people are reacting to what you’re saying. Leadership expert Bart Egnal believes that a huge part of effective communication is using this knowledge to adapt your delivery in real-time.
It’s just as important to pay attention to your own body language. Senior leadership coach Kristi Hedges recommends reviewing your intentions for the conversation beforehand and thinking about how you can communicate that. If you want to get people excited, for instance, you should be smiling and energized. You should then regularly check in with yourself to see what your body language is saying and adjust if needed.
As she explains: “A simple acronym I use with clients for an in-the-moment body scan is OUT: Keep your body language Open, posture Up, and lean Toward the other party. (…) Also check your face to align with your intent: soften features, smile, or stay neutral, as appropriate.”
Listen to Understand
Practice active listening techniques in your everyday conversations. This means listening to understand, including observing verbal and non-verbal cues as well as providing appropriate reactions and subsequent feedback.
Taking this approach has two advantages: people will be more inclined to share what they think with you, and you’ll be in a more receptive frame of mind, meaning you’re able to build on what they say.
Work On Your Delivery
You could be making the most insightful point in the world but if your delivery is poor, you could still leave your audience unmoved.
Perfecting your delivery is nearly impossible to do in isolation. While you can always practice in front of the mirror, ultimately, you need real-time feedback about the effect you’re having. See if a colleague or a friend is willing to give you some honest input on how well you come across.
Alternatively, there are now tools powered by AI that let you practice in front of an AI audience, panel, or colleague and that will give you real-time feedback about your word choice, delivery, and ease of comprehension.
Bridge the Gap Between Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication
Asynchronous and synchronous communication are both crucial for collaborating effectively with colleagues. However, to make the most of them both, you need to be able to seamlessly transition between them without things being overlooked, repeated or misinterpreted.
Using tools to manage the feedback process helps to give everyone a firm foundation to rely on. Threaded commenting features mean that smaller or more routine points don’t need to be discussed in person, so you’re free to focus on the meatier topics.
More targeted feedback via an online proofing tool also means that when you need to provide specific examples to illustrate your point when speaking in-person, they’ll be easy to call to mind and you can easily reference them without losing the flow of what you were saying.
To Communicate Well In-Person, Be Prepared
Being able to communicate effectively in person means you can get far more out of your collaborations. However, there are many factors that can undermine your delivery and dilute your message in the moment, from performance anxiety to a lack of clarity about your ideas.
To overcome them, you need to focus on preparing as thoroughly as you can, using a mixture of skill development and digital tools. By doing this, you’ll be able to be truly present during conversations and say exactly what you need to say.
