Most performance reviews and job postings ask for better "communication skills" without ever saying what the phrase actually covers. Treated as self-evident, it gives no one anything concrete to act on.
A workable fix starts with a basic distinction: the difference between a skill and a disposition.
Skill versus disposition
A review of decades of workplace-skills literature found the same conceptual error appearing across dozens of studies. Skills, meaning specific actions built on knowledge, kept getting folded into the same lists as personality traits, attitudes, beliefs, and values, none of which function the same way (Matteson, Anderson, and Boyden, 2016).
Using knowledge to perform a specific action.
e.g. active listening
Trainable through practice and feedback
A stable personal quality that shapes behavior.
e.g. warmth, confidence
Rarely trainable, and not directly
This matters because the fix depends entirely on which one is actually in play. A skill responds to coaching and repetition. A disposition rarely does. Labeling a disposition problem as a communication problem and sending someone to a workshop wastes the workshop.
The twelve skills that actually qualify
A separate analysis reviewed 58 existing lists of interpersonal skills spanning academic and practitioner sources, covering more than 400 named abilities in total. After merging the overlapping items, 12 survived as distinct, trainable skills, split into two groups (Klein, DeRouin, and Salas, 2006).
- Active listeningLetting someone finish, then reflecting back what was said before responding
- Oral communicationOrganizing points before speaking instead of thinking out loud
- Written communicationStructuring messages so the point is findable in the first two lines
- Assertive communicationStating a need or boundary directly, without over-softening or over-apologizing
- Nonverbal communicationMatching tone, posture, and expression to the message being sent
- Cooperation and coordinationAdjusting your approach so joint work actually fits together
- TrustFollowing through consistently on stated commitments
- Intercultural sensitivityChecking assumptions before interpreting someone else's behavior
- Service orientationTreating a colleague's or client's problem as the actual priority
- Self-presentationFraming your own contributions clearly, without minimizing them
- Social influenceBuilding a case around what the other person needs, not only what you need
- Conflict resolution and negotiationNaming a disagreement directly instead of letting it sit unaddressed
Charisma is absent from this list. So is likability. Every item is an action a person takes, and every action can be practiced.
A self-check worth running
The goal "communicate better" is unfinished. It names a disposition, not a target. Run it through the lists above instead.
Try this with the last conversation that went badly. Identify the single skill that, if it had been stronger in that exact moment, would have changed the outcome. The answer is rarely all of them. It is usually one.
Better feedback, same table
Managers run into a version of this problem constantly when writing reviews. The comparisons below show the difference between a read on someone's personality and a note someone can actually use.
“Needs to communicate better.”
Tends to interrupt before others finish. Practice active listening: let the speaker complete their point, then paraphrase it before responding.
“Isn’t good with people.”
Has difficulty establishing trust quickly with new clients. Practice self-presentation and social influence: open with shared context before making the ask.
“Needs more confidence in meetings.”
Softens direct requests until they disappear. Practice assertive communication: state the ask once, clearly, without qualifying it three times.
The vague column names a person. The specific column names something to do differently next week.
Where this still gets hard
Even a genuinely trainable skill is hard to measure accurately. Most instruments still depend on people rating their own abilities, an approach with well-documented bias (Matteson, Anderson, and Boyden, 2016). The value of the twelve-skill list is not that it makes measurement easy. It gives anyone trying to improve, or trying to help someone else improve, a concrete place to start instead of a vague verdict to absorb.