Terse communication is generally a bad thing, because ANY part of it that's misunderstood will distort or even destroy the message you intended. You need to build some redundancy into your message so that people can figure out what you intended. The "empathy" part comes down to understanding and anticipating where and when people will misunderstand (as opposed to saying "I was 100% clear and concise! How could they possibly have misunderstood!?"). You'd be surprised at the number of ways you're being misunderstood every single day. They don't have the exact same knowledge as you, so they can't make the same assumptions as you do in your terse messaging (or they have a very different assumption set - right or wrong), and thus receive a completely different message.

And they're going to have a different way of thinking compared to you (that's to be expected - they're different people). So you need to find common ground.

Your job is to HELP them understand.

Start by getting a few books on business communication. They lay out a lot of ground rules for how to communicate effectively, how to control for tone, how to speak to your audience (use of jargon, etc) and other gems. Another one is the old cliché "How to win friends and influence people". Yes, that book is FULL of gold.

When you're getting frustrated talking to someone, it's time to take a step back and ask yourself what you're missing - maybe try another approach to reach that common ground.

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Communication-Harvard-Essent...

After that, I'd suggest looking at what business colleges and universities use for their coursework. At the higher levels, there's a special language and culture to business communications that's used to identify the "in" people and the "out" people. The elite universities teach this, of course.

XD

But if you are interested in becoming a leader to inspire people through talks, I suggest reading other people's speeches and letter like what Albert Camus or Einstein wrote to convey information to audiences, not their books but letters and speeches to understand how they effectively conveyed information.

In the corporate world, the tendency to "talk a lot and say little" is used to maintain appearances and complicate matters. You should not mold yourself to that. But if you want to become an inspiring talker,

1. find something you genuinely care about. 2. study speeches by people who are passionate about their subjects. 3. refine and iterate on your speeches. 4. practice delivering your speech to others, observe their responses, and refine it until they also start to care about what you care about.

My personal opinion is don't read self help books, those are always static, often never matches one individual's true experience since it is taken from someone else's.

Climbing the pole to feed into the 'talk lot, say nothing' system is just feeding the broken system recursively.

It is obvious why OP wants it, but OP should question whether they should want that.

I have so far learned to make meaningless smalltalks and other small techniques just to make sure that I tick all those normal human being boxes. I actually care nothing about that but ticking those boxes makes me feel safer.

Look, there's nothing wrong with broadening your range - with learning empathy, and how to make small talk, and such. But don't take a role that expects you to be outside your normal self 100% of the time.

First is the skill of being an effective and persuasive communicator. This is an important skill to learn for anybody. The best resource I know for this is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. You need to actually read the book, not a summary someone posted on the blog.

People who only read the table of contents or a blog summary usually interpret How to Win Friends and Influence People as a book about flattery and manipulation, but that's not the actual message. The book has strategies for asking people questions about themselves, and presenting an argument in a way that will allow the other person to "save face" by making their change of heart look like their idea. It will make you a little bit of a better person in addition to a good communicator. If you're having trouble getting some of the concepts to click, you may want to find some friends to work through examples with. This type of practice isn't quite the same as Toastmasters, but Toastmasters is also helpful and you might find some interested folks there.

The second is the skill of talking a lot without saying anything of importance. This is used by Public Relations folks and politicians to persuade people to ignore the real issue at hand. It might be a useful skill for cover-ups or duping people who don't actually understand what you're talking about, but I think most people with a decent understanding of the topic at hand see through this sort of pandering. Politicians and PR reps probably still do it because people expect a response and - even for those who don't fall for the ruse - it's still impossible to figure out exactly how badly someone messed up after listening to a meaningless conversation.

They talk a lot because they want everyone to understand and be on the same page. It's very hard to align human beings. Like extremely hard. Things get misunderstood, people drop balls left and right, they go on side quests, etc… If you are managing people your main tool is communication.

Be good at communication. You are misunderstanding the main skill you are trying to learn.

Middle managers are mostly information routers & filters. Sometimes adapters. They summarize important points, they make sure the important information doesn't get blocked or lost in those filters. And if one segment (e.g. customers) don't understand, they translate it. Often they're the ones to perceive the information directly - good managers don't just look at data, they look at the anecdotes too to make sure that the data isn't corrupted.

You really have to say the same thing 100s of times and in 50 different ways for only 10% of it sticking

1. Identify the most important parts of the message you want to convey.

2. Imagine they’re under NDA and you can’t disclose them publicly.

3. Think about generic placeholders for the parts you can’t disclose.

4. Now say what you wanted while replacing confidential stuff with the placeholders.

—-

That being said, don't try to imitate managers, instead try to put yourself in the shoes of the person you are talking to and talk to them using language, concepts and terms that they will understand.

As much as life might be simpler if people were just apis that we could supply information to and get a logical response back from, that isn't how we work (most people, anyway).

Another useful thing for me is to not just talk about technical aspects but to talk about a “Vision” as in a long term easy to understand end goal that this technical thing is building towards. On YouTube there is a channel called healthy gamergg, I recommend you watch his video on “charisma”

here, i suspect the actual issue “coldness” is lack of soft skills and empathy which is orthogonal to efficiency and effectiveness. Politicians and managers understand their audience very well as well as their psychology. There are hundreds of self help books about communication, try walking into an irl book store and browsing the self help section. Fastest path from zero to one might be a therapist (they do zoom now).

I can assure that whatever is happening, your problem isn't that you communicate effectively. No one is saying behind your back "wow that guy communicates effectively, we hate that".

I can't know why people think you're not management material, but if I had to guess I'd say perhaps it's related to your belief that being good at management involves talking a lot and saying nothing. Ironically the opposite is true - one element of being good at managing people is communicating effectively.

Good managers don’t talk to hear the sound of their own voice. Good managers talk because they have something worth hearing. Worth, not to themselves, but to the other person. That requires high empathy and low sympathy. Be direct, even if brutal.

add by building on the established foundation, go into more technical detail, make sure people can follow by repeating the concepts from different angles, pause and ask questions to gauge whether people are still following your chain of thought,

and the end of your monologue give space for follow up questions, repeat what you have already said if necessary. assure everybody that rewriting the codebase is only 1 story point and you and your team are working hard on it as a priority. ensure everyone you'll keep then in a loop and schedule another meeting two weeks from now where you will repeat exactly what you have said with more assurances. rinse and repeat.

Well first of all, stop with the backhanded insults.

Next, figure out what you’re actually trying to achieve because it’s not “talking a lot and saying little.”

Do you just want to make more money? Have more power? What’s your goal here?

To answer your question, to improve your communication skills, join your local Toastmaster, and combine with several leadership/personal development courses/books.

Talking a lot and saying nothing will make you insufferable. Better cold than insufferable.

You could learn to say some simple “grease the wheel” type of expressions. But that is going to cone across as feigned.

People prefer genuine, so perhaps you could just try and be polite and turn the cold into warm.

This is a blessing and a curse. While it can make certain communications sound better to the right audience, sometimes an email will end up being so long that people won’t read it. Then a new challenge arises. How do I structure my writing, or speech, so people can know at a glance if it applies to them, while also providing the full context for those who need it. I’ve experimented with different options over the years, but don’t think I’ve really nailed it yet.

While you don’t want to be seen as “cold”, I don’t know that going full “management-speak”, talking a lot and saying nothing, is the right goal. I work with many of those people, and we have side-chats where people complain about these jokers monopolizing the whole call, providing 0 value, and leaving no space for people that have important and relevant information to add.

I think the better goal is to find ways to warm up your current communication style, rather than completely swapping it out for one that is also very problematic. Part of this is simply practice. I got much more comfortable in meetings and on calls when I was doing them all the time. It also really helped when a lot of those meetings were about things I really cared about and I was the domain expert. Being the expert on the phone helped me to be more comfortable and confident in what I was saying, and I could speak from a position of technical authority. When I’m less confident about a topic, I’m much more reserved and shy when talking about it. The people who loudly and confidently talk at length about stuff they clearly don’t know anything about are a huge pet peeve of mine. They might sound good to the uninformed, but they are toxic to an organization, as they spread vast amounts of misinformation. They are ignorant, but people trust them due to the confidence they speak with. This is a dangerous combination that should be avoided at all costs, imo.

I never read the whole thing, but I assume the book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, would be one that could help. It’s often recommended in scenarios like this. Just don’t go overboard with the “use people’s names” thing. Some people over do it, and it because awkward and obvious they just read some book that told them to do that.

Or watch "Yes Ministers".

Or watch any politicians answering difficult questions.