Communication skills help you talk the talk

Some employees approach these courses with a degree of cynicism. Communicating, after all, mostly just means talking, something that we have all been doing since the age of two. But many staff find their training is invaluable, learning techniques and skills that they did not know existed.

Paul Walkden, head of product management at Standard Chartered Grindlays private bank, signed up for some hourly training sessions to help him prepare for some tricky internal presentations.

He was delighted with the results. He says: 'I learned some basic lessons in how to be more persuasive and more confident. It makes all the difference. It's no good having a great message, only to see it ignored because you don't know how to put it across.'

Tim Richardson, UK managing director of the training company Black Isle, says anyone can improve their performance significantly in a number of areas, ranging from reading a prepared text to a large audience of prospective clients, to speaking with notes to a small group of colleagues.

The firm even gives advice on how to leave voicemails. Richardson says: 'Fund managers, for example, might get dozens of voicemails every day. They are ruthless with the ones that don't get their point across quickly and clearly.'

A two-hour course run by Richardson is an exhausting experience. Using a prepared script, plus a video machine to play back the results, it quickly cures the uninitiated of the notion that talking to a group of people is easy. A few people may have a natural gift for it, but there are plenty of tricks for an ordinary person to learn. The course includes reading out chunks of the script, concentrating not on the words themselves so much as on when and how to make eye contact with the audience. You also have to think about the best time to read the next bit of text that you have to say.

Much of this is counter-intuitive. It turns out that you should be looking at your audience when you would naturally be memorising the next bit of text, and vice versa.

At first it is rather like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time, but the video playback shows that the technique pays dividends.

Richardson says: 'We build on a person's natural conversational style. We show clients how to use pauses to engage with their audience, both to hold their attention and to assess their reaction to what is being said.'

Another part of the course deals with the best logical order in which to present ideas. Richardson covers a whiteboard with lines and squiggles that look like a diagram of tank movements at El Alamein. The effect is curiously persuasive.

Communications skills can be taught in many forms. A quantitative analyst at a European bank took a course that included singing, to make him focus on how make his voice rise and fall.

The analyst, a Frenchman, says: 'It was extremely useful, especially as English is not my first language and I am not used to the sounds. It taught me how to project my voice. I also learned about rhythm.'

The course was given by Susan Coombes, a professional opera singer whose City Voice Studio teaches various aspects of voice production.

Coombes says: 'Sometimes people tell me they have been promoted and feel stressed, because they have to make new types of presentation. Some people's knees go stiff, or their hands flap about. I can help overcome this, as well as help them develop a resonant speaking voice.'

Coombes also helps people memorise large amounts of text. 'They might do it by learning six lines at a time, counting them off on their fingers as they walk round the room,' she says.

Other types of course help people learn to read seamlessly from an autocue, or talk to the media, or even sack their staff. A spokesman for one training company says: 'We're doing a lot of 'breaking bad news' training at the moment, amid all the redundancies.' The advice includes getting quickly to the point and not apologising.

A spokesman for Morgan Stanley says: 'We offer a range of communication skills courses for our staff, running from two hours to all day. They include how to speak at conferences to how to do internal presentations.

'We find them very effective. People often take refresher courses, or learn new techniques for a particularly important presentation that is coming up.'

Richardson of Black Isle says: 'Learning how to give a presentation is like golf. It's your own swing that you're practising, but you need a coach.'