What Are Communication Skills? A Plain-English Guide to the Core Set

Listening, asking questions, explaining, writing, reading and sending nonverbal cues, and persuading make up the core communication skills: the abilities you use to get your meaning across and to understand other people’s. In communication scholar Brian Spitzberg’s model, every message faces two tests, whether it achieved its aim and whether it suited the situation, and the people receiving a message often judge both differently from the person who sent it.¹

People overrate how clearly they come across: in a 2005 experiment with 60 Cornell University students, those who emailed statements meant as sarcastic or serious expected 78 percent to be read as intended, but readers got 56 percent right, a rate the authors found statistically indistinguishable from the 50 percent that guessing would score. Students who spoke their statements instead were just as confident and were understood 73 percent of the time.²

Communication skills are a few abilities under many names

Communication skills are the repeatable, goal-directed behaviors people use to produce messages and manage conversations, in the definition of Brian Spitzberg, a communication scholar at San Diego State University. His reviews with colleagues each turned up more than 100 named skills, which he argues are mostly different labels for the same few underlying abilities.¹

Spitzberg sorts those abilities into four clusters. Attentiveness is showing interest in the other person: listening, asking questions, letting their topics run. Composure is confidence rather than anxiety, including stating your view in an assured but respectful way. Coordination manages the flow of talk, from turn-taking and interruptions to opening, closing and changing topics, and expressiveness brings a message to life through facial expression, gesture, body movement, humor, stories and word choice.¹

1. Attentiveness: listening, asking questions and following the other person’s topics
2. Composure: confidence rather than anxiety, and stating your view in an assured but respectful way
3. Coordination: the timing of talk: turn-taking, interruptions, openings, closings and changes of topic
4. Expressiveness: facial expression, gestures, body movement, humor, stories and word choice

Official job data use similar building blocks. The US Department of Labor’s O*NET database lists active listening, speaking, writing and reading comprehension among the essential skills most jobs need, and defines active listening as giving full attention to what people are saying, taking time to understand their points, asking questions as appropriate and not interrupting at the wrong moments.⁴ Its social skills include persuasion, negotiation, coordination and social perceptiveness, which it describes as being aware of other people’s reactions and understanding why they react as they do.⁵

Put into everyday terms, the clusters and the O*NET list give a working core set of six skills. The table shows what each looks like at work, the strongest research finding we located for it and how much weight that finding can bear.

In teams, these skills turn into habits such as sharing what only you know and speaking up about problems, which the guide to what makes a team effective examines.

Good communication passes two tests

A message counts as competent in communication scholar Brian Spitzberg’s model when it is effective, meaning it achieves the outcome the communicator wanted, and appropriate, meaning others see it as legitimate and fitting for the setting. He treats other yardsticks, such as clarity, satisfaction and efficiency, as largely overlapping with those two or subordinate to them.¹

Fits the situationDoes not fitAchieves its aimMisses its aim

Achieves its aim, Fits the situation: Optimizingeffective and appropriate

Achieves its aim, Does not fit: Maximizingeffective but inappropriate

Misses its aim, Fits the situation: Sufficingappropriate but ineffective

Misses its aim, Does not fit: Minimizingneither

For example, a curt email that gets a report delivered on time but leaves a colleague resentful is maximizing in his terms; a tactful note that nobody acts on is sufficing. Both tests depend on context. Asking what is going on means one thing in a hallway and another in the middle of surgery, Spitzberg notes, and almost any skill fails when overdone: eye contact becomes staring, and questions become an interrogation.¹

Assertiveness follows the same curve. In three studies of coworkers’ and employees’ ratings, Columbia University’s Daniel Ames and Francis Flynn found that people seen as markedly low or high in assertiveness were judged weaker leaders than those in the middle: too little was linked to getting less done, and too much to strained relationships.¹⁰

Further reading

• 

  Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

  by Nicholas Epley

  Epley, co-author of the email-tone study here, explains why we misjudge what others understand and why asking beats guessing.

• Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves

  by Alison Wood Brooks

  Brooks, co-author of the question-asking study cited here, turns conversation research into habits for asking and listening.

As an Amazon Associate WiserHours earns from qualifying purchases.

Why employers put communication near the top

Communication ranks near the top of what employers look for in new college graduates, according to a 2026 survey by the US-based National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Of the 163 employers who answered the question, 78 percent said they look for verbal communication skills on résumés and 72 percent for written ones; only teamwork (85 percent) and problem solving (82 percent) came ahead of verbal communication.¹¹

Read those figures as what employers say they want, not as proof of what gets people hired. NACE surveyed its employer members, about 20 percent of whom responded, plus some non-member companies in February and March 2026; the survey was sponsored by the company Jobscan, and the results are not peer-reviewed.¹¹ Its own definition of the communication competency is broad: exchanging information, ideas, facts and perspectives clearly and effectively with people inside and outside an organization.³

Labor-market data point the same way. In a 2017 study, Harvard economist David Deming found that jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the US labor force between 1980 and 2012, while math-heavy jobs with little social interaction shrank by 3.3 points. The study measured the social interaction jobs require, which is broader than communication, and the data are observational.¹²

The skills matter once people are in the job, too. A 2024 registered meta-analysis by Avraham Kluger and colleagues, pooling 664 results from 400,020 observations, found what the authors call a strong link (a correlation of 0.39) between perceived listening and work outcomes, stronger for relationship quality than for performance. With data based only on self-reports set aside, the link with job performance was smaller (0.21), though the authors still describe it as substantial.⁶

Senders overrate how clearly they come across

People tend to overestimate how clearly they come across, especially in writing. In five experiments published in 2005, researchers Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley and colleagues found that email senders overestimated how well their tone or humor would come across in every study, and that speaking a message narrowed the gap.²

The study

Moderate evidence

Sarcasm by email: 5 experiments with US students, 2005

In the largest experiment, 154 pairs of University of Illinois students, some friends and some strangers, tried to convey sarcasm, seriousness, anger or sadness in short statements sent by email, spoken without being seen or said face to face. Whatever the medium, senders expected about 88 to 90 percent of their statements to be understood. Readers choosing among the four options got about 63 percent right by email and about 73 to 74 percent by voice or face to face, and friends did no better than strangers.²

The authors trace the gap to egocentrism: senders hear the tone they intend and find it hard to imagine the bare words without it. When senders in a smaller follow-up first read their statements aloud in the opposite tone, their overconfidence disappeared. The main caveat is that these were students judging short statements in experiments, not colleagues reading real work email.²

Readers were overconfident as well. In the same large experiment, people reading emails believed they had identified about 89 percent of the tones correctly and actually got about 63 percent right, so a message that reads as rude may not have been meant that way.²

The same pattern turns up in real work. When researchers interviewed pediatric interns at the University of Chicago about end-of-shift patient handoffs, the most important fact about a patient failed to get across 60 percent of the time, even though the departing intern believed it had, and peers still rated the handoffs highly. It was one institution and 52 interviews.⁸

Your own impression is a weak test. Spitzberg’s review reports that people’s ratings of themselves as communicators typically correlate only 0.25 to 0.50 with how others rate them, a modest match.¹

What the 93 percent figure really measured

The claim that 93 percent of communication is nonverbal misreads two 1967 experiments led by Albert Mehrabian, as communication scholar David Lapakko has documented.¹³ Mehrabian’s formula (7 percent words, 38 percent tone, 55 percent face) describes how people judged liking from mixed signals, and he says it does not apply unless someone is talking about feelings or attitudes.¹⁴

Myth

93% of communication is nonverbal.

Fact

The figure comes from two 1967 lab experiments on judging feelings and attitudes; Mehrabian says it does not apply unless someone is talking about feelings or attitudes.

The experiments were narrow. The main one involved 37 female psychology students and a single word, “maybe,” and neither study compared words, voice and face at the same time, Lapakko notes. In 1995 correspondence that Lapakko quotes, Mehrabian called it absurd to suggest that words carry only 7 percent of all communication.¹³

Nonverbal cues still carry meaning, especially tone: in Kruger’s experiments, spoken statements were understood more often than emailed ones.² They make a poor lie detector, though: a 2006 meta-analysis of 206 documents and 24,483 judges found that people told lies from truths correctly 54 percent of the time, where guessing would score 50, and did better with lies they could hear than with lies they could only see.⁹

Training improved clinicians’ empathy a little, in cancer-care trials

Communication skills can be trained, at least in part. A 2018 Cochrane review of 17 randomized trials with 1,240 health professionals in cancer care, mostly doctors and nurses, found that training made them somewhat more likely to show empathy, on moderate-certainty evidence, and to ask open questions, on very low-certainty evidence.¹⁵

The review found no clear difference in how well clinicians drew out patients’ concerns or gave appropriate information, and it could not tell whether the gains lasted. Its authors note research suggesting that communication skills do not reliably improve with experience. The trials involved clinicians in cancer care, so the results may not carry over to office work.¹⁵

Where to start: check what landed

Start by checking what the other person understood instead of trusting how clear you felt, since research on email, patient handoffs and self-assessment finds confidence a poor guide to what landed. Five habits follow from the studies in this guide. Each is cheap to try, though none has been tested as a workplace routine.

1. Ask for a playback. After explaining anything that matters, ask what the other person will do first, and compare the answer with what you meant.
2. Say it when tone matters. Tone came through better in speech than in email in Kruger’s experiments, and the authors point out that people use tone of voice and gesture to soften bad news and unfavorable feedback.²
3. Check before you react. If an email seems sharp, ask what the sender meant before answering: readers in Kruger’s experiments misread tone far more often than they realized.²
4. Ask one more follow-up question. In a 2017 experiment by Harvard researchers, strangers told to ask more questions in online chats were better liked by their partners, and the askers did not expect it.⁷
5. Ask others how you come across, since self-ratings match other people’s views only modestly.¹

The bottom line

The habit worth building first is checking what the other person actually understood, because senders tend to overrate their own clarity. The skills themselves are a small set of behaviors, listening, asking, explaining, writing, nonverbal signals and persuading, and each message they produce is judged by whether it achieved its aim and fit the situation.