Communication skills must first be developed face-to-face

Online communication will grow, but the skills required for it are best developed offline.

New school won't prepare you for old school. But the reverse is true.

Thanks, largely, to the (still emerging) legacy of Covid-19, we are now rushing forward into a world of virtual communication. We have had this option for a long time, you might say, ever since we got Morse Code, the telegraph and the telephone. But the unity of free video, voice and data transmission is now here, and it's flourishing: Zoom, WhatsApp Video, Webex, Facebook Messenger and dozens of others are freely available and (generally) fully-functional.

So we can probably all agree that there will be more virtual interaction in the future, and not just in the work environment. That means 1:1 video chats, virtual group team meetings, online presentations to a big audience and probably a whole lot of things we can't fully imagine now.

Just like in the physical communication environment, some of these interactions will be high-stakes, evaluative situations where excellence in communication will be essential. For example, the final job interview, the presentation to decide upon your promotion to the partnership or the big sales pitch will all require speakers to be engaging, coherent and persuasive - amongst many other things.

Fundamentally, the skills required to achieve that excellence will be the same as they are now in face-to-face communication. That's because audiences will always respond to speakers who manifest confidence, warmth and clarity when they speak, whether they are looking at them on stage or on a screen. The skills might be concentrated differently, and a few new skills will be required (such as how to manage audience distraction) but the core skills of communication must be in place for the future leader to be effective in online communication.

Those skills fall into two main categories:

• Content - what is said. This includes the language that is used in the presentation, its structure and any visual aids that are employed.

• Delivery - how it is said. This encompasses a range of physical behaviours such as eye contact, gesturing, moving, pausing and breathing.

It's best to learn these things in a real world environment first and then to migrate them to an online environment because face-to-face is a tougher and less predictable learning environment which makes your skills more robust. The pilot who trains entirely in a simulator can't easily develop the same competence as one who trains also in a real aircraft. If you can stand up in front of a large audience and speak for more than fifteen minutes with little or no visual aids and ideally with no lectern in front of you, that is when you will have the baseline skills in content and delivery required to succeed in all communication, including virtual communication. In fact, the core challenges of communication are often reduced in a virtual environment because you are not fully exposed to the audience. Sometimes you are not at all visible to them. Sometimes you are seated at a desk and only your torso is visible. There is less room for things to go wrong.

“The best communicators are those who train in the physical environment and alter their style to meet the needs of a virtual environment."

So if you really want excellence in virtual presentations, learn and practice in the physical environment. That is where the greatest fear, and thus the greatest learning, lies. And if you can do that well, the issues that virtual communication throw at you - and there are some of them that are unique - are much easier for you to handle. The best communicators are those who train in the physical environment and alter their style to meet the needs of a virtual environment. In short, if you can handle this situation, you can handle almost anything.