Communication Styles & Leadership

A continuous point of musing for me is communication/learning styles.
When I was in middle school, one of my teachers, Mr. Egan, spent part of a day explaining to us that different people learn in different ways. We learned that there are three major learning styles: visual, aural, and kinesthetic. You learn by seeing, hearing, and doing. What is interesting is that most people have a strong subconscious preference for one of the three. For instance, I am terrible at receiving verbal information. I constantly lose track of the conversation and find my attention wondering.
Writing software is a team sport. You almost never write commercial software in a vacuum. There is always a customer, boss, or other developer who you need to educate/train/convince about ideas. One of my biggest challenges has been how to get what’s in my brain across to another person. Whenever I run into these problems (they have been much more prevalent since I’ve been in leadership roles), I think back to Mr. Egan’s class and remember that not everybody learns like me or thinks like me. I use that simple lesson to help guide my communication. These are the guidelines I follow:

• Try to use at least two of the three communication styles (use all three if the point is particularly important)
• When communicating visually, use a mix of written and non-written communication (I hate graphs and pictures, but these are key for some people to visualize a concept)
• Even though your audience won’t absorb all of the communication-types equally, repetition is a key strategy for retention (so seeing/hearing/doing it more than once will hopefully make it stick)
• Be patient! You’ll almost certainly have to try more than once. Of course your ideas already make sense to you - you made them!