Top tips for improving your communications skills

Good communications skills are an essential part of an accountants' professional toolkit. Mark Walsh offers 15 top tips for sharpening those tools.

Are you paid to communicate? Most people are these days, this is how people coordinate action - yet curiously very little communication training is conducted after the basics have been learnt in school. Even those with natural talent can benefit from a little extra communication training. Communication is a complex, context-dependant and highly individual affair making a generic communication tips article like this challenging - but what the hell, here are some pointers. Please hold them lightly and not as absolutes. Most of the following apply to face-to-face communication, on the phone and via email. Many of them have been influenced by NonViolent Communication and ontological coaching if these are familiar approaches.

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