How to contribute to the communication skills of the entire team?

A few years ago, I defined a goal for myself. I would contribute to the communication skills of the team I work with. We are all highly skilled professionals, and maybe it tends to make the communication not so smooth for general audiences. On the other hand, we all communicate a lot, through written text or public speaking. Thus, improving communication would bring gains to the organization as a whole.

I created a set of 10 informative pieces, with simple and practical advice that would significantly change the clarity of their messages. For that reason, I named it something like: Being quite clear.

The name was also a strategy to call people’s attention. The first edition, for example, was entitled, Being quite clear: you should know the moment to stop. Since it was also the subject of the e-mail, one of our interns suddenly came to me asking sorry for anything he didn’t know about. After reading, he saw that I was only talking about the maximum number of characters that a phrase should have until it stops being clear to readers.

The title was an important part of the product, its job was to make people click. But the content was the one responsible to make them change behaviors. To do so, I adopted simple texts, with straight contexts, followed by examples of before and after the hint. It was all about getting readers to realize that it was worthwhile.