Ask someone what makes a great communicator and the answers are usually fairly predictable. Storytelling. Writing. Public speaking. Media relations. Influence.
All important skills. All valuable. Yet after speaking with Andrea Klettner, Director of Communications for Avison Young UK & Ireland, I found myself reflecting on a different capability altogether.
Listening. Not passive listening. Not waiting for your turn to speak. Not listening politely while preparing your response. Actual listening.
The sort of listening that changes your understanding of a business, a stakeholder or a situation. It is perhaps the least celebrated skill in communications, yet it may be the one that separates genuinely strategic communicators from everyone else.
Part of the reason it receives so little attention is that listening does not obviously resemble communications work. Nobody posts on LinkedIn about spending three hours quietly speaking to operational teams. Nobody wins an industry award for asking intelligent questions. No board member congratulates a communications leader for listening effectively.
The outputs receive attention. The inputs rarely do. Yet almost every successful communications activity begins with understanding something that wasn't previously understood.
A stakeholder concern. A business objective. A customer frustration. A journalist's perspective. An employee's experience.
Without that understanding, even the most beautifully crafted communications programme is built on unstable foundations.
One observation from my conversation with Andrea particularly stayed with me. She spoke about the importance of spending time across the business, not just inside the communications function. Sitting with teams. Understanding what they are working on. Learning how different parts of the organisation operate. Developing curiosity about problems that may initially seem far removed from communications itself. That sounds obvious. In reality, it is surprisingly rare.
Many communications teams become trapped in a cycle of production. Content. Campaigns. Internal announcements. Leadership communications. Reporting. More content. The calendar fills. The inbox grows. Before long, communicators spend most of their time talking and very little time learning.
The consequences often appear elsewhere. Communications strategies become generic. Content lacks relevance. Leaders feel misunderstood. Stakeholders disengage.
The organisation starts communicating what it wants to say rather than what audiences need to hear.
This is where listening becomes a competitive advantage. It creates context. And context is what turns communications from a tactical function into a strategic one.
One of the interesting themes running through Andrea's career is that she has experienced communications from three distinct perspectives: journalism, agency and in-house leadership. Unsurprisingly, that experience appears to have reinforced the importance of understanding the audience before thinking about the message.
Too often, organisations start with themselves.
What do we want to announce? What do we want people to know? What do we want to say?
The better question is usually much simpler. What does the audience care about?
The gap between those two perspectives is where many communications strategies succeed or fail.
Business leaders generally care about business outcomes. Employees care about what changes mean for them. Customers care about solutions rather than corporate messaging. Journalists care about what makes something genuinely interesting. People are rarely as interested in our stories as we are.
Strong communicators understand that. They recognise that communications is ultimately an exercise in empathy. Not empathy as a buzzword. Empathy as understanding. Empathy as curiosity. Empathy as the discipline of stepping outside your own perspective and seeing circumstances through somebody else's.
Perhaps that is why the strongest communications professionals often evolve into trusted advisers. Leaders ask for their opinion not simply because they are good writers or presenters, but because they have developed a well-rounded understanding of the people affected by decisions.
They understand the organisation. They understand stakeholders. They understand context. And that understanding is built through listening.
Artificial intelligence, automation and technology will undoubtedly change many aspects of communications over the coming years. What they are far less likely to replace is genuine human curiosity.
The ability to walk across an office, ask a thoughtful question and uncover an insight no dashboard could ever reveal remains surprisingly powerful.
Perhaps because, despite everything that has changed about communications, understanding people remains the foundation of the profession.
And understanding always starts the same way.
By listening.
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