# Having Good Communication Skills: The 8 Behaviors It Actually Comes Down To Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/having-good-communication-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/having-good-communication-skills.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 Having good communication skills isn't a personality type. Here are the eight specific behaviors it comes down to at work - and how to tell which ones you're missing. ## Key facts - Title: Having Good Communication Skills: The 8 Behaviors It Actually Comes Down To - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: having good communication skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/having-good-communication-skills/ ## What this page covers - Having good communication skills isn't a personality type. Here are the eight specific behaviors it comes down to at work - and how to tell which ones you're missing. - Practical guidance for having good communication skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation You send a message you thought was perfectly clear, and the reply that comes back answers a question you never asked. Having good communication skills means doing a set of specific, learnable things well: listening closely enough to grasp what someone actually means, saying your main point first, keeping it brief, adapting to the person in front of you, choosing between a conversation and a written message, and staying steady when a topic gets uncomfortable. None of that is a personality type. It is a short list of behaviors, and each one can be practiced on its own — which is also why almost nobody is equally good at all of them. ## What having good communication skills actually looks like The lists you will find on this mostly agree with each other. Indeed counts nineteen qualities of a good communicator; most university career pages settle on ten; the same core keeps reappearing — listening, clarity, empathy, feedback, the signals you send without speaking. What those lists rarely do is say which behavior belongs to which moment, so the advice arrives as adjectives: be clear, be empathetic, be a good listener. The eight below are written the other way round, as things you do, in situations you will recognize. ### 1. Listening closely enough that you could repeat it back Active listening is the quality that shows up first almost everywhere, and Indeed's roundup names it as the one that matters most, because it is what lets you catch the intention behind a message rather than only the words. In practice it is less mystical than it sounds. You give the person your full attention. You do not draft your reply while they are still talking. You check your understanding out loud before you respond to it. The test is simple: if you could not summarize what someone just said in a sentence they would agree with, you were not listening yet. ### 2. Saying your main point first Most people build toward their point. They set up the context, explain the background, describe what they already tried, and arrive at the actual message somewhere near the end — by which time the reader has skimmed past it. Leading with the main point inverts that. The conclusion or the ask comes first, and the reasoning follows for whoever wants it. Being clear and being brief are two separate habits, and both sit near the top of every list. Brevity is not about writing less; it is about not making someone else's attention do the work your editing should have done. ### 3. Adapting to the person in front of you The same message lands differently depending on who receives it. Some colleagues want the number and the deadline. Others need to understand why before they will engage with what. Adapting means noticing that difference and adjusting for it — not changing your position, just changing how you package it. The advice lists usually file this under empathy: taking a genuine interest in someone's perspective and letting that shape how you say things. It is also the habit most often missing when two capable people keep talking past each other. ### 4. Knowing when to talk and when to write This one barely appears in the popular lists, which is strange, because choosing the wrong medium causes more friction than choosing the wrong words. A conversation is right when trust is at stake, when the topic is sensitive or complicated, when you are negotiating, or when you are working something out together. Writing is right when the other person needs time to think, when the exchange should be on record, or when you are simply passing on information. Sensitive news delivered by message, and a two-line status update delivered in a half-hour meeting, are the same mistake pointing in opposite directions. ### 5. Speaking up when you have something to say A lot of communication failure is just absence. Capable people hold back in the meeting, in the review, in the moment where one question would have caught the problem while it was still small. Nobody experiences your unspoken thought as tact; they experience it as nothing at all. This habit also has the clearest link to how work gets noticed. Compilations of workplace communication statistics report that employees are around 2.8 times more likely to be engaged when they talk regularly with their direct manager about goals and progress — conversations that do not happen unless somebody starts them. ### 6. Paying attention to what is not said Tone, posture, eye contact, and the pause before someone answers all carry information. One widely repeated figure, attributed to Albert Mehrabian, puts more than 70% of communication in nonverbal signals. The number is contested and worth holding loosely, but the point underneath it survives the argument: your attention is visible. Looking at your screen while a colleague talks, or answering in a flat tone, says something whether you intended it or not — and on video calls, where the whole signal is a face in a small rectangle, it carries further than people expect. ### 7. Giving feedback, and taking it Good communicators do both halves. Giving means being specific and future-focused rather than vague and evaluative, and pairing what needs to change with what genuinely worked. Taking means hearing it all the way through before you respond to it: understand first, add your own view second, reflect on it later when you are less defended. The lists describe this as offering feedback that builds and accepting criticism with humility, which is right, but it undersells how much of it is sequencing. Most feedback conversations that go badly went badly in the first thirty seconds. ### 8. Staying in the conversation when you disagree The hardest situations are the ones with something at stake: a disagreement, an apology you owe, a colleague who is angry with you. The skill is not avoiding them. It is staying in them without making it personal — disagreeing with a decision clearly and then committing to it anyway, or apologizing without a paragraph of justification attached. This is the difference between someone who communicates pleasantly when things are easy and someone whose communication holds when they are not. ## Why the difference shows up in your results None of this is only about being pleasant to work with. The organizational case is the better-evidenced part of the topic: compilations of workplace communication statistics put the annual cost of miscommunication to U.S. businesses at roughly $1.2 trillion, and link effective communication practices to substantially higher retention. Those are company-level numbers, but they are assembled out of individual exchanges — the meeting that clarified nothing, the email that needed three follow-ups. The awkward part is that you cannot assess this from the inside. You know what you meant; you do not know what landed. Harvard's Division of Continuing Education makes the same point from another direction — these skills develop through practice, trial and error, and honest self-reflection, and the reflection part does not work without some outside reference. If you have never had one, [seeing how your skills compare](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a reasonable place to begin, and it costs nothing but a few minutes. ## What makes these easier to put into practice Read back through the eight and you will notice that only part of the difficulty is knowing what to do. The rest sits elsewhere — in whether you can tell how you currently come across, and in whether you will actually do the uncomfortable version of a thing when it counts. **Communication** is the skill this whole article sits inside, and its value is in how specific it gets: a set of everyday principles, a clear split between what belongs in a conversation and what belongs in writing, and separate treatment for the tricky moments — disagreement, apologies, someone who arrives angry — that general advice tends to skip. Treated that way, it stops being a quality you either have or do not, and becomes a set of situations you get better at one at a time. **Building Self-Awareness** closes the gap between how you think you come across and how you actually do. The practical part is small: ask two people you work with a specific, future-focused question about your communication, then hear the answer out before you start explaining yourself. Blind spots are by definition invisible from where you are standing, and this is the ordinary way people find theirs. **Building Confidence** is what gets items five and eight off the page and into a real conversation. It works through action rather than through feeling ready. You take the smaller version first — the question in the one-on-one before the objection in the team meeting — and let the evidence build up. The discomfort does not go away first, with the confidence arriving second. It runs the other way around, which is inconvenient, but at least it is something you can act on. Those three pull on each other, which is why working on communication in isolation so often stalls. What helps is knowing which of them is your actual weak link — and that is what the **free Job Skills Test** measures, across all twelve of the work skills the framework treats as buildable. It gives you an order to work in rather than a list to feel bad about, so it is worth knowing [which one to strengthen first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Some of the eight probably already describe you. Most people are genuinely good at three or four of them without ever having thought about it — usually the ones that suit how they already are — and quietly route around the rest. That is the normal shape of it rather than a failing. What changes is which ones you need. The habits that carry you through your first year are not the ones that carry you when you are coordinating across teams or explaining a decision to people who had no part in making it. The harder items take more weight as your work involves more people, which is the argument for picking one now, while the stakes are low and the practice is cheap. None of it asks you to become a different kind of person; it is the same you, with two or three more situations you know how to handle. You have already done the part most people skip, which is looking at this closely enough to name specific gaps instead of concluding you are just bad at communicating. What is left is smaller than that. ## See where your communication actually stands The only thing left is finding out which of these you already do well. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills — it takes about 7 minutes, it costs nothing, and your results appear the moment you finish. You will see where you stand across all twelve skills, including communication and the two that sit underneath it, and which ones would make the most difference to how you work with the people around you. There is nothing to prepare and nothing to get right. Take it whenever it suits you. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 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? Having good communication skills isn't a personality type. Here are the eight specific behaviors it comes down to at work - and how to tell which ones you're missing. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, 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/self-awareness.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/having-good-communication-skills/ Preferred summary: "Having good communication skills isn't a personality type. Here are the eight specific behaviors it comes down to at work - and how to tell which ones you're missing." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.