Communication as a leadership competency, in behaviors

Ask any group of managers to name a leadership competency and "communication" comes up first. Ask the same managers to rate themselves on it and almost all of them land above average — which is statistically impossible and tells you something important: "good communicator" is a label so broad it means nothing and flatters everyone. It's on every competency model and every job description, and it's almost never defined in a way you could actually act on. This piece does the defining. It takes communication apart into the specific behaviors it's actually made of — the deep-dive pattern that works for any single competency, applied to the one that matters most.

Because here's the thing about communication as a leadership competency: it's not one skill, it's a bundle of distinct behaviors that happen to share a name, and you can be strong at some and weak at others while feeling generally "good at communication." The only way to develop it is to stop treating it as a single quality and start working on the parts.

What communication is actually made of

For a leader, the communication competency decomposes into a handful of observable behaviors. Each is something a person watching you could see you do or not do — which, as the pillar's manifesto argues, is the only level at which a competency can be developed or assessed at all.

Clarity — leading with the point. Do you say the conclusion first, then the reasoning, or do you walk people through your whole thought process and arrive at the point last? The behavior is structural: state what you want or recommend up front, then support it. Most unclear communicators aren't unclear in their words; they're unclear in their order, burying the headline under context the listener doesn't yet know they need.

Listening — the kind people can feel. Listening isn't staying quiet while you reload. Zenger and Folkman, analyzing thousands of assessments, found that the best listeners do something active: they ask questions that build on what was said, they make the other person feel supported rather than judged, and they leave the speaker more energized than when they started. The observable behavior is whether the other person's next sentence goes deeper — or whether they wrap up early because they can tell you're waiting to talk.

Checking for understanding. The behavior most managers skip: confirming that what landed is what you meant, rather than assuming transmission equals reception. It looks like "what's your read on the priority here?" instead of "does that make sense?" — the first surfaces the gap, the second just invites a polite yes. The cost of skipping it is invisible at the time and expensive later: the work comes back built against the wrong priority, and it reads as the team's mistake rather than a message that never fully arrived.

Adjusting to the audience. Saying the same thing differently to the board, your engineers, and a new hire — not because the truth changes, but because what each already knows does. The weak version uses one register for everyone and calls it authenticity.

Writing, especially async. In distributed work, most of your communication is written and read when you're not there to clarify. The behavior is whether your message can be acted on without a follow-up thread — whether you front-load the ask, or make six people each spend two minutes decoding it. It's also the most measurable of the five: an async message either gets a clean reply or spawns a string of "wait, do you mean…", and that thread is the feedback, sitting in your inbox.

Why you can't tell, from the inside, whether yours works

Notice the trap running through all five: you experience communication from the sending side, and the competency is entirely about what happens on the receiving side. You feel clear; the only question that matters is whether they felt clarity. You think you listened well; the data is whether they felt heard. This is the gap that makes communication uniquely hard to self-assess — your internal experience of communicating is almost no evidence of how it landed.

Which is why developing this competency, more than most, depends on feedback. You genuinely cannot get the signal from introspection — it's the textbook case of a skill you can't develop alone, because the entire measurement lives in other people's heads. The leader who "knows" they're a strong communicator and has never checked is the leader most likely to be wrong, because the confidence and the blind spot come from the same place: only ever seeing their own intent.

How to actually develop it

You develop communication the way you develop any competency — through the loop, not a presentation-skills course. Pick one of the five behaviors, not "communication." If your gap is clarity, the one behavior might be: open every update with the recommendation, then the reasoning. If it's listening, it might be: ask one question that builds on what they said before I respond. Attach it to a cue, practice it in real meetings where it's awkward at first, and re-measure with the people on the receiving end.

The reason you pick one is that "get better at communication" gives you nothing to do on Monday, while "lead with the point in my next three updates" is a rep you can actually run. Communication feels like one big competency, which is exactly why people try to fix all of it at once and change none of it.

A worked example: from "clear" to clear

Say your own read is that you communicate well, and the round comes back with your team rating your clarity far below where you put it. You resist the urge to fix "communication" and find the specific behavior instead: you think out loud, walking through the whole analysis before you land on what you actually want — so by the time the ask arrives, half the room has stopped tracking.

The one behavior becomes: state the recommendation or request in the first sentence, then give the reasoning. The cue is any update, message, or meeting where you're about to explain something. For the first week it feels backwards — you're used to earning the conclusion, and leading with it feels abrupt — and you keep catching yourself opening with context. After a few weeks you re-ask the same people whether they knew what you wanted sooner. If the read moves, the competency moved, through one behavior — not a course on "executive communication." If it didn't, clarity probably wasn't the gap; maybe it was checking for understanding, and you pick again.

More communication isn't the fix

One misread worth heading off: when clarity scores come back low, the instinct is to communicate more — longer updates, more meetings, more messages. Volume is not the competency. A leader who floods the channel is often harder to follow than one who says less, because the signal drowns. Every one of the five behaviors is about communication landing better, not about more of it. Sometimes developing the competency means a shorter update, a meeting cancelled, a decision stated once and clearly instead of relitigated across three threads. Confusing "communicates a lot" with "communicates well" is its own blind spot — and one the receiving side will happily correct, if you ask.

See where yours actually stands

The starting move is the same as for any competency: an honest self-assessment of these behaviors, then the same questions answered by the people on the receiving end of your communication. The communication and feedback style template is built for exactly this — you answer first on how you think you come across, send it to the people you actually communicate with, and read the two side by side. The gap between "I'm clear" and "we often weren't sure what you wanted" is not a criticism; it's the single most useful piece of information you can get about this competency, and it points straight at the one behavior to work on.

That same decompose-then-measure approach works for any competency on any framework — decision-making, developing others, strategic thinking. Communication is just where the gap between how it feels and how it lands is widest, which makes it the best place to start.

Communication, in one place

• "Good communicator" is a label that flatters everyone and develops no one. Break it into behaviors.
• The behaviors: lead with the point, listen so people go deeper, check for understanding, adjust to the audience, write so async messages can be acted on.
• You experience communication from the sending side; the whole competency is on the receiving side. Your sense of how clear you were is almost no evidence.
• That makes feedback non-optional here — the measurement lives in other people's heads, not yours.
• Develop it through the loop: pick one behavior, attach a cue, practice in real moments, re-measure with the people who receive your communication.