Effective communication is the most important skill you need to learn and develop in your career and life, but it is also the most difficult to master.

That's why I ended my last video by saying that my next video will be about communication.

Ironically, I struggled with my script for the video. The script was over 3,600 words, which meant that the video would have run for over 20 minutes!

It might have been good... but, honestly, I'm simply not prepared to make a 20-minute talking head video at this stage of my YouTube journey.

So, instead of making that video, I am sharing my lessons as an email series - https://enochko.com/communication

Even though I have been told that communication is an important skill since I was a student, it was hard to grasp its importance. In schools and universities, teamwork usually means working with no more than 2-4 other students of similar age or background studying the same subject, so the challenge of communication is hard to comprehend.

Firstly, the number of lines of communication grows geometrically with the number of people in a team or organisation. When you work with another person, there's only one line of communication between the two of you. When you work with two persons (group of 3), there are now three lines of communication. For a group of 4 people, there are six lines. By the time you get to 10 people, there are 45 lines of communication. For an organisation of 100 people, that's 4,950 lines.

Secondly, unlike in an educational setting where everyone is studying the same subject, work often involves communicating with people from various backgrounds and expertise with different priorities and interests. Communication is essential to coordinate everyone's efforts so that the whole organisation moves in the same direction.

I remember starting my career as a "technician". I was focused on doing the work, and communication was an afterthought. I had failed to realise that communicating the work is just as important as doing the work. To the organisation, finishing and saving a piece of work on the network drive without telling anyone is practically the same as not doing the work. Others need to know that the work product is ready for them to use in their own work.

As my career progressed and I worked on ERP implementations, change management, and financial transformation, effective communication became critical to my career success. I had to learn to communicate with senior executives, middle management, and individual contributors/subject matter experts from finance, IT, HR, operations, legal, marketing, and sales in order to work effectively and deliver the desired changes for the organisation.

I have created an email series where I share the lessons I have learned over the past 15 years on effective workplace communication, including:

• The importance of communication.

• A model of communication.

• The purpose of communication - the WHY.

• Communication strategy - WHO gets WHAT message, and WHEN and HOW do they get the message?

• Other tips and techniques - two-way communication, human factors/psychological safety, closing the loop, etc.

Sign up here if you're interested in what I've learned about effective workplace communication - https://enochko.com/communication