How To Communicate Effectively At Work

Communication is the lifeblood of any relationship. And that’s especially true for the leader-teammate relationship. How well leaders communicate with their subordinates affects how motivated and productive they are. And how well leaders communicate with their entire team affects how the team members communicate with each other…as well as how motivated and productive they are.

So, if you want to be effective as a leader, you’ll need to communicate effectively at work.

But a big obstacle to achieving that is misunderstanding the nature of communication itself. Effective communication isn’t one problem to solve. It’s two.

There’s effective asynchronous communication and effective synchronous communication. And the rules for each vary just like the method of communication varies. In this article, we’ll outline the difference between the two, and how to be effective at each one.

Asynchronous

Asynchronous communication is communication that happens between people that doesn’t happen in real-time. It means any kind of communication that is sent at one time and received at another. Email probably came to mind first as a form of asynchronous communication at work, but memos, voicemails, videos, books, and a lot of other mediums of communication also count as asynchronous. But…