Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity.

— Nat Turner

To be an excellent communicator; you first have to be a clear thinker, you have to understand your subject matter really well.

The burden is on the communicator rather than on the recipient to deal with complexity and to intentionally remove nuance where necessary. The mark of an excellent asynchronous communicator is the mic drop; or rather how many conversations are closed as opposed to how many conversations are opened.

When I think back to people who were not successful in our ecosystem, I find poor communication skills as one of the top 2 or 3 reasons that it didn’t make sense to continue to work together. Poor communicators had to be chased, had to be reminded, would make vague comments that would beget a question for clarification, then another question, then another etc; poor communicators would not make clear what they needed to be successful, they would “know what they didn’t know” but still wouldn’t ask for help— they would let their egos and their style of communication get in the way of the end-goal: candidly, I find this attitude to be a betrayal to the team, to the clients, and in clear violation of generating results. Poor communicators don’t push relevant information as needed to the team, it can only be pulled from them (requiring great effort and entire days wasted due to time zone differences). By comparison, our most successful team members are on the completely polar opposite end of the spectrum. When I reflect on the top reasons that it makes sense to continue to work together with our successful team members, I find that conversations get closed when relevant and they have good discernment of when a conversation should keep going vs not… they don’t design for ongoing chats, they instead optimize for clarity and momentum through action-taking. Excellent communicators proactively PUSH their updates, problems, questions, and victories to the team rather than requiring them to be pulled from them. Given the nature of our distributed and asynchronous team, we can’t afford to NOT value excellent communication skills, whether verbal, non-verbal, or otherwise. All great leaders, ALL great leaders, ALL GREAT LEADERS are excellent communicators; I don’t just mean at GrowthMasters, I really do mean all great leaders are excellent communicators. All of them… forever. We value formidable leadership, which I’ll expand on below, so by definition, we value excellent communication skills and should surround ourselves with people who do so, too.