Skillful Internal Communication

By Alberto Francisco Bent

Famed author and motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, once said, “If you just communicate, you can get by. But, if you communicate skillfully, you can work miracles.”

Write with Your Audience in Mind

Skillful communication is not simply about being creative in one’s communication medium, it is as much about communicating in an appropriate way, with the audience.

Marketing agencies have long followed this principle. Simply watch commercial advertisements on television and you will see this clearly. If a software company creates a software program, which has many uses, by many audiences, their marketing strategy will utilize multiple approaches. Advertisements to the business

community will be decidedly different than those to students or the home market. They are simply communicating the benefits of the software program that are appropriate for a particular audience.

Similarly, as a corporate internal communication specialist, if you are writing a piece for engineers in your company, you will more than likely write using a different technique and jargon than if you write to a group of administrative assistants or customer-facing frontline employees. This is not to say one approach is better than the other; it is simply to say that each audience has its own peculiarities, language patterns, and approach to their jobs and life in general, and we must communicate with each group in a way that will achieve the desired result.

When you want to communicate skillfully, or properly to your audience, there are some questions to ask yourself (this list is by no means exhaustive):

What is the purpose of your communication?
Who is the audience and how will this piece best communicate with them?
If the piece is an internal business or corporate communication:
1. How will this piece elicit more employee engagement?
2. How will this composition help employees feel more pride toward their job specifically and the company more generally?
3. How will this writing help make the audience more efficient?

Additionally, to write engagingly and authentically for your audience, you may need to research that field. Every discipline has its own vocabulary and jargon.

In her excellent book, INFLUENTIAL INTERNAL COMMUNICATION, Jenni Field states:

Develop a true understanding of your target audience. This isn’t about you, it’s about them. What you think works might not be what is right for your audience – you need them to be at the front of your mind at all times. Get to know them: what are the different stakeholder groups in your part of the business? What do they do every day, how do they work? (Page 17)

Tell A Story

Not only should we write with our audiences in mind, but we need also to write in an engaging and appealing way. We must tell a story. It is through the art of storytelling that data and information are internalized and goals achieved.

Janine Kurnoff and Lee Lazarus wrote an interesting and informative book titled, EVERYDAY BUSINESS STORYTELLING. In it they state the following:

Whether you’re making a recommendation to your boss’s boss, providing a product update, or managing difficult questions from a prospective customer, knowing how to build on a story framework humanizes your content, creates a two-way dialogue, and lets you meet your audience’s needs in the moment.

Storytelling will help you confidently lead conversations, giving both you and your audience a guideline to where the narrative is going and where it’s been. It’s amazing how much this prevents both confusion and boredom. (Page 5)

At the outset of the book, these wonderful authors outline, through the introduction of scientists and studies, that most communication is lost, if only presented with pure data or static information. However, there is a dramatic increase in retention by an audience when storytelling and images are used in the presentation of the information. The authors say it this way, “If you wrap your data in a story, you’ll have a much better chance at making your audience feel something. You’ll pique their (right brain) curiosity and their intuition and allow them to take a mental leap with you.” (Page 16)

The End Game

The bottom line is, exciting and skillful internal communication is not simply writing needed data or information on a page and calling it a day; it is more about taking that data or information and putting it in a useful format, specific to a particular audience, and telling a story (using words and images) that engages the audience and advances that audience toward a particular goal or purpose.