Most of the professionals who are technically excellent often struggle to make fast progress in their career. Where as many professionals who are not that good technically makes faster progress in their career.

It is not the buttering skill as many techies would tell you, it is their better communication skill which gives them an edge over people who are far better than them technically.

As a project lead you need to get work out of peoples, there will always be few peoples in your team who are not even capabale of completing the work assigned to them, and you have to get work out of each of them. Neither you can do the work assigned to them nor can you mishandle them. So unless you pick up good interpersonal communication skill, you will soon find that your project has gone out of your control, nobody listens to you or even they listen, they do not understand what you are trying to communicate.

You also need to interact with customers with lot of cautions, from requirement gathering to project integration the project lead has to work very closely with the customer, and any communication gap between you and the customer could make the project slip for months, or the project could be delivered in bad shape.

Here are few tips to help you improve your communication skills.

• Think in an organized way before you communicate something.
• Many people talks too fast and hence a good percentage of it does not get through. So please reduce the speed in which you speak.
• Maintain positive gestures,a little bit of smile,good eye contact can increase the chance that the person to whom you are speaking are actually listening to you. (non verbal communication is more important than that of verbal one)
• if you are planing to go to the customer location for giving a presentation first give a presentation in your company, ask your collegues to give feedback on your presentation rehearse well, also try to brainstorm on what all can go wrong.
• Be meaningful while you communicate, do not divert too much from the main topics of discussion.
• Take the opportunity to help your listeners like if someone is continously sleeping, you can ask him to take a cup of tea or else if he is not at all interested in your presentation, you can ask him to carry on.
• Follow up your communications. if someone asks you a question for which you do not have an immediate answer, make sure you get back to him when you actually receive the answer
• Be sure your actions support your communications. That is do not make any false promise which you are not going to keep, be honest in your communication.
• The most important of all unless you are good listener you can not be a good communicator. So if you want everybody to listen and understand you, you should fast try to listen and understand your audience.
• If you are making a presentation. Don’t turn your back to any part of the audience.
• Modulate your voice.Do not speak in the same high/low pitched tone for hours. You can also try few voice modulating exercises, which can sharpen your tone and can generate better attention.
• Wait for your audience to finish the question. Never interrupt.
• Don't get offensive with your audience. You do not have to win every argument.
• Do not use repeated hand gestures.
• Never end a presentation with “that’s all”. Have a clear ending line. End with impact.
• Think from your audience point of view.
• Do not take active part in office gossiping,do not talk negative about your bosses or collegues behind their back
• Do not irritiate your coworker by cutting jokes about them which they do not like ,etc.
• Try your level best to maintain a positive relationship with your co workers. And ofcourse this includes peoples who try to bring you down.