Why is communication important?

Communication skills are the delivery system for your best ideas. Communication is important because it's how we do what we do at work and in the world.

Whether you're in sales, in a technical role, customer success, or any other function in a business, the useful ideas you have don't mean anything if you can't communicate them to others. Your communication skills make your expertise visible.

Why is good communication important?

Because none of your professional activities are possible without the miracle of language.

The average person speaks somewhere around 13,000 words a day. It used to be a lot more.

In a 2026 paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Valeria Pfeifer and Matthias Mehl found we're speaking roughly 300 fewer words per day with every passing year. The obvious culprit is only part of it.

"People immediately jump to social media and smartphones, and surely that's part of it," Mehl told University of Arizona News — but the bigger shift is quieter: "We've lost a lot of small, incidental conversations: asking a cashier for help, getting directions from a stranger, chatting with a neighbor."

Fewer conversations mean fewer reps. Fewer reps means fewer opportunities to build and refine the skill of using words to accomplish something.

That cost shows up at work. Regardless of your immediate goal, you are using words as a tool.

Whether you're trying to help someone understand a complex idea or make a difficult decision. Whether you're trying to convince someone to buy a product or to choose a certain course of action. Whether you're trying to get a job yourself, or find out if a candidate is the right fit for a job you're hiring for.

The question is: are those words as effective and efficient as they could be in helping you achieve your goals?

What are the components of your communication skills?

The components of communication — and for the sake of this discussion, we are referring to spoken communication — are not rocket science.

Content is what you say. Delivery is how you say it.

Put another way, your content is the words you choose. Delivery is everything else: tone of voice, pace of speech, expressiveness, physical and vocal presence.

Here at GK Training, our emphasis is primarily on the delivery component of people's communication. Focusing on how you speak — the quality of your moment-to-moment spoken communication — has the highest return on investment of any communication skills training.

This has only become more true in the current age of AI. World-class content, the words you use, is now available to anyone with an internet connection and a free subscription to an LLM.

As these AI tools become more and more ubiquitous, content becomes less and less differentiating.

At the same time, delivery becomes more and more important. How you speak when you share your ideas at work has never been more valuable than it is today.

To break it down more concretely, when we think about the components of spoken communication — your delivery skills — the first thing we think about is the most important.

The Five P’s of Vocal Variety

●Pace, how fast or slow you speak

●Pitch, the musical notes you use

●Pause, your ability to tolerate relaxed, silent thinking time

●Power, the volume that you use, both loud and soft

●Placement, where in your body your voice amplifies or resonates (think about someone who has an overly nasal voice, or a voice that sounds trapped in their throat)

These are the tools we use as speakers to grab and keep an audience’s attention, to emphasize key words and ideas, and to convey our internal state or point of view.

Other Delivery Skills

●Linguistic precision. This is a measure of how many filler sounds — um, ah, erm, depending on your native tongue — and/or conditional phrases like "you know," "kind of," "sort of," "maybe," you use unconsciously when you speak.

●Vocal presence, or breath support. Is there enough air in your lungs to access those 5 P's of Vocal Variety when you speak?

●Physical presence: an upright but relaxed standing or seated posture.

●Eye contact: how effectively you use your eyes to take in information from your audience and connect with them.

●Nonverbal communication: using gestures and facial expressions to highlight or emphasize the ideas that you're sharing.

These are the basic building blocks of your spoken communication. Each can be isolated and trained in the same way that athletes isolate and train the components of their sport.

What do people get wrong about communication?

Many people think that communication is about what you say — content, the words and ideas that you share.

We're not suggesting that those things aren't important, but study after study shows that when they are evaluating a speaker, audiences rely more on vocal presence, on voice quality, than they do on content.

According to a study of 120 executives' speeches by Quantified Impressions, reported in the Wall Street Journal, voice quality accounted for 23% of evaluations; content accounted for 11%. In other words, how you sound is twice as impactful as what you say.

Likewise, GK Training’s own white paper about vocal variety, conducted with social scientists at Northwestern, Columbia Business School, USC, and elsewhere, found that just one of those 5 P's — Placement — had an outsize impact on audiences attributing positive personality characteristics to political speakers: think trustworthiness, leadership ability, emotional stability.

At a fundamental level, this is why communication matters: it directly affects how you are perceived by the people you work with.

We've worked with thousands of professionals over the last decade-plus, and one of the primary things that people get wrong when they come to work with us is that they are overly focused on writing a script, or preparing a deck, or drafting bullet points. All of those practices are useful, don't get us wrong. But out-loud practice to improve your delivery skills is the best place to start improving your communication, 100% of the time.

When should you start thinking about improving your communication skills?

In a recent coaching engagement with the deputy CFO of an HCM software company, we heard this story from them. They started in management consulting, at which point, early in their career, they got a ton of training on presentation skills, asking questions, and having good conversations.

After a couple of years in that role, they moved into 12 years in investment banking. The first eight of those years, they were never asked to speak. It was head down, 14 hours a day, building models, doing research, building analysis.

In fact, there was a culture at that particular bank where junior people were expected not to speak in meetings.

Fast forward to getting to the level of an ED in that organization, and all of a sudden there's an expectation to have to speak to clients again.

Guess what? That skill had atrophied. It had withered over the course of those eight head-down years without any speaking opportunities.

We see this over and over again across industries. One of the primary things we suggest when we're talking to L&D professionals at firms and companies is: start sooner, train junior employees.

The same pattern emerges at law firms. Junior and even mid-level associates aren't given opportunities to speak or to practice and build those skills, and all of a sudden they're expected to lead client calls. And then senior partners are surprised when they don't do that well.

This is all to say, the time to start working on improving your communication skills is right now, if you haven't already.

This is not a skill that is only for senior people. This is an essential skill, from your first day on the job all the way up to landing in the C-suite.

How do you improve your communication skills?

One of our mottos at GK Training is: Speaking is a Sport.

We say that because it is in fact an intensely physical activity. We think of it as a mental activity because it's how we all get our ideas out of our heads. But to do that with speech, there are over 100 muscles in your body acting in coordination to make that happen.

As a result, your habits as a communicator — how fast or slow you speak, how frequently you say um, how effectively you use eye contact, the quality of your physical presence — those are all physical habits.

Just like any other physical skill (a sport, playing an instrument, dance, martial arts, etc.) the only way to change or improve those skills is through some kind of physical or kinesthetic practice.

That fact—communication is a physical art—is the foundation of everything that we do at GK Training.

It's also the fundamental thesis of Michael Chad Hoeppner's best-selling book, Don't Say Um.

If you want to start improving your communication skills right away, grab a copy of that wherever you buy books, or e-books, or audiobooks. Start at the beginning. The book gets the theory out of the way quickly and gets right down to practice: concrete, practical ways to build the physical skills of powerful delivery.

What are the benefits of communication?

Here's a non-exhaustive list of the kinds of things people can get better at by improving their communication skills:

●Interviewing

●Speaking up in meetings

●Giving presentations

●Answering tough questions

●Convincing coworkers on a particular course of action

●Negotiating

●Selling goods or services

●Pitching an idea to an internal audience

●Building rapport with colleagues

●Influencing

●Delivering actionable feedback

●Having tough conversations

It’s hard to overstate the importance of communication: Language, used skillfully, is how we get stuff done. Full stop.

What should I do next?

Buy Don’t Say Um and get to work. Sign up for GK Training’s newsletter, Good Talk (link TBD). Book a free Communication Skills Assessment.

FAQs (to be written)

Is communication a soft skill?

What are the other types of communication?

Can you still improve communication skills as an adult?

To be included in a box of some kind at the end.

How this post was made. Shawn Fagan wrote the first draft. We then asked Claude to review it for search and AI-answer optimization. It made twenty recommendations; we took fourteen. It also caught two factual problems we would otherwise have missed — a statistic we'd credited to a different publication, and a word-count figure that was both unsourced and out of date — and pointed us toward newer research that made the argument stronger. The thinking and the words are ours. The fact-checking was a collaboration.