# Excellent Communication: What It Means and How to Tell If You Have It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/excellent-communication/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/excellent-communication.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Excellent communication means being understood and getting results - not talking a lot. What employers mean by it, how to tell if you have it, and how to show it. ## Key facts - Title: Excellent Communication: What It Means and How to Tell If You Have It - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Influence, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: excellent communication - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/excellent-communication/ ## What this page covers - Excellent communication means being understood and getting results - not talking a lot. What employers mean by it, how to tell if you have it, and how to show it. - Practical guidance for excellent communication - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Excellent communication means getting a message across so it is understood and acted on — clearly, in the right medium, adapted to the person receiving it, and backed by enough listening to know whether it landed. It is judged by result, not by fluency. Someone quiet who is never misunderstood has it. Someone fluent who constantly has to re-explain does not. That gap between talking well and being understood is why the phrase is so slippery when you meet it in a job ad. It names an outcome rather than a behavior, which makes it easy to claim and hard to prove — and working out whether you can honestly claim it is usually the real question underneath the search. ## What employers actually mean by excellent communication Less than most people assume about speaking, and more about everything around it. Chron's guidance for employers breaks the phrase into five capabilities: the ability to relate, [persuade](/knowledge/influence/art-of-persuasion/), lead, negotiate, and express yourself, in speech and in writing. Recruiter Ambition puts the same thing more plainly — conveying information to people clearly and simply, in a way that means things are understood and get done. Both definitions end in a result. That is why the phrase turns up in ads for roles with almost no public contact: the audience employers have in mind is usually colleagues and managers, not customers. Someone who cannot get a clear update to their manager, or who leaves a handover ambiguous, creates work for other people regardless of how little they deal with the outside world. ## The difference between good communication and excellent communication Good communication is clear and correct. Excellent communication is clear, correct, and adjusted to whoever is in front of you. Career FAQs describes the excellent version as being able to adapt to new and different situations, read how other people are reacting, compromise to reach agreement, handle [difficult conversations](/knowledge/communication/difficult-conversations-at-work/) without dread, and defuse conflict rather than feed it. Cloud Assess makes the same distinction from the other direction: the best communicators adjust their style to the [size and type of the audience](/knowledge/influence/know-your-audience/) they are addressing. The practical difference shows up in the second attempt. A good communicator explains something clearly. An excellent one notices the explanation did not land and explains it a different way, without needing to be asked. ## How do I know if I am actually good at it? Not by asking yourself. A communication self-assessment by writer Luca Dell'Anna names the trap directly: because communication happens constantly, almost everyone concludes they are above average at it, which makes self-rating close to useless as evidence. Behavior is more reliable than intuition here. A few things worth watching: - How often people come back to you asking what you meant. Repeated requests for clarification after you send something are a clarity signal, not a sign that other people are careless readers. - Whether you are assembling your reply while the other person is still talking. Interrupting is the visible version; forming your answer early is the same behavior, silently. - Whether you check that something landed, or assume it did. None of those require anyone else's opinion, which is useful — but they also only sample the part of your communication you happen to notice. If you want something closer to a full picture, it is worth seeing [where your communication actually scores](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than trusting a self-rating that almost everyone gets wrong in the same direction. It is a set of behaviors, so anything weak is something you have not learned yet. ## Do you have to be outgoing to communicate excellently? No, and the sources that define the phrase say so explicitly. Career FAQs makes the point flatly: being a strong communicator does not mean you like to talk a lot. Most of what the phrase actually covers rewards restraint. Being brief. Leading with the main point instead of narrating your way toward it. Not filling a silence someone else is thinking in. Choosing writing when the other person needs time to absorb something, and choosing conversation when a thread has started going in circles. A quieter person often does these more naturally than a talkative one, because they are not competing with their own instinct to keep going. ## Does listening count as a communication skill? It is arguably the central one. The career center at CSUN's Nazarian College treats [active listening](/knowledge/communication/active-listening-in-communication/) as the most fundamental of the communication skills it lists, on the grounds that everything else depends on it. The mechanism is straightforward. Adapting to your audience requires knowing what your audience already understood, and there is no way to know that without genuinely attending to their response. Listening is what makes a communicator adaptable rather than merely fluent — it is the input side of the same skill, not a separate, softer one. ## What counts as excellent written communication? Chron sets out a specific standard for what employers are looking for: writing that is clear and succinct, that appeals to a wide audience, that is free from errors, and that conveys messages which cannot be misinterpreted. That last clause is the demanding one. Error-free writing is a proofreading habit. Writing that cannot be misinterpreted requires anticipating how a sentence might be read by someone tired, someone skimming, or someone who does not share your context — and then removing the ambiguity before you send it. Most of the practical work is unglamorous: a subject line that says what the email is about, the main message in the first two sentences, and only the people who actually need it on the recipient list. ## How do you show excellent communication on a CV or in an interview? By not using the phrase. Anyone can write "excellent communication skills" on an application, which is precisely why it carries no weight with a hiring manager — the claim is free, so it signals nothing. What builds credibility is a specific example or a quantifiable result that demonstrates the skill in the real world. The move is to replace the adjective with an incident. Not "excellent written communication," but the report you restructured because nobody was reading past page one. Not "strong verbal communication," but the disagreement with a colleague you raised directly instead of routing around. A concrete example gets you the credit the label was asking for, and it also survives the follow-up question. ## Can excellent communication be learned? Yes, and this is the part that tends to be assumed away. The phrase gets treated as a description of personality — some people are naturally good with people, some are not — which quietly makes it unlearnable. It does not hold up. Leading with your main point is a decision. Summarizing back to confirm understanding is a move. Rewriting a subject line so it says something is a thirty-second habit. None of them requires becoming a different person at work, which is usually the real worry hiding underneath the question. Gaps in these behaviors are gaps in what you have been taught, and most people are never taught them anywhere. ## Where the difference actually comes from Read those answers back and the single phrase turns out to be covering three different things — and only one of them is about how you talk. **Communication** is the mechanical layer, and it is wider than the phrase suggests. It runs on a handful of principles that show up in every answer above: genuinely wanting to understand the other person, adapting to how they take things in, being clear and direct, being brief, putting the main point first. Around those sit the practical decisions — conversation or writing, what belongs in an email, how to participate in a meeting — and the situations most people avoid: disagreeing, giving feedback, handling someone who is angry, apologizing properly. **Influence** is the second half of the definition everyone skipped over. Both employer definitions above ended in a result: understood *and acted on*. Clarity gets you the first. The second runs on preparation more than delivery — working out what is actually in it for the person across from you, keeping the case simple, presenting the drawbacks alongside the benefits, listening to an objection all the way through before answering it, and following up until something happens. Two people can be equally clear and only one of them gets a decision. **Building Confidence** decides whether any of it is used. Knowing you should raise the objection and actually raising it are separated by discomfort, and the way across is not waiting until the discomfort clears. It is the smaller version first — the point made to one person before the same point made to a room — and accepting that the awkwardness comes along for the ride. Confidence follows the evidence you build, not the other way around. The free Job Skills Test scores each of those separately, which is more useful here than a single verdict, because "excellent communication" collapses three distinct things into one word and they rarely fail together. Knowing [which one is weakest](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is what tells you where the work is. It scores nine others alongside them — twelve in total, all of them behaviors nobody is born knowing. ## Where this starts to matter more Some of this is probably already yours. If you have ever reread an email and cut the first two sentences because they said nothing, or gone back to check that someone had actually understood you rather than assuming, you were doing the thing the phrase describes. If there is a gap, it will sit in a specific place rather than across the whole thing, and gaps in behavior close differently from gaps in ability. Nothing here asks you to be more talkative or more forceful than you are — the quiet version of every behavior above works. It also compounds. The further into a career you get, the more of the people making decisions about you will know your work only through how you describe it. That is easier to build now, while the audiences are small and the stakes are low. Most people meet this phrase in a job ad, decide they probably qualify, and move on. You went looking for what it actually means, which is the harder and more useful move. ## See where your communication actually stands What is left is the part you cannot work out by reading. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer questions about how you genuinely operate rather than how you would like to, and it shows where you stand across all twelve — communication, influence and confidence among them — and which one or two would make the most difference right now. It takes about 7 minutes and there is nothing to prepare. If this is a good moment, it is worth doing now; if it is not, it will still be there. **Take the skills test** Free, about 7 minutes, and your results appear as soon as you finish. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Excellent communication means being understood and getting results - not talking a lot. What employers mean by it, how to tell if you have it, and how to show it. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Influence, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/excellent-communication/ Preferred summary: "Excellent communication means being understood and getting results - not talking a lot. What employers mean by it, how to tell if you have it, and how to show it." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.