The Collected Works of Jamal Nichols

Communicating Like It’s Your Job

Language:

I once had a manager at Meta who seemed like two different communicators depending on the room.

Outside of meetings he was loose. He cracked jokes, teased people in the harmless way that makes a room feel easier, and came across as genuinely funny rather than as someone trying to be the funny guy. If you only met him in that setting, you would not have described him as careful. You would have described him as natural.

In meetings, though, he changed. He was not stiff, and he did not suddenly become one of those people who speaks in laminated business phrases. He was still himself, but every word felt placed. He named assumptions before they turned into confusion. He called out decisions, risks, gaps, and next steps. Sometimes he would even pause and say, “I know this might seem obvious, but I just want to be explicit about…” and then name the thing everyone was probably half-assuming but no one had actually said.

For a long time I could see the difference without understanding it. I could imitate pieces of the behavior. I could be a little more explicit, a little more deliberate, a little more careful with what I said in a room. But I did not yet have the frame for what he was doing.

The frame came later: with friends, he was talking. At work, he was communicating.

That sounds like a small distinction until you start watching meetings through it. Talking can be loose because the relationship carries some of the meaning. Friends can interrupt, wander, imply, tease, contradict, and recover. The conversation does not need to carry the full load because the people already have a shared history. Work is different: In a meeting, especially in a large company, people often arrive with different incentives, different information, different vocabularies, and different pictures of what matters. If you leave too much unsaid, the gap does not disappear. It becomes work for someone else.

I think people in design can be especially tempted to treat communication as the stuff around the work. The real work, in that view, is the thinking, the craft, the Figma file, the prototype, the flow, the critique. Communication becomes the meeting tax: the thing you do so you can get back to designing.

I understand that feeling. There are days when meetings, Slack threads, status docs, and alignment rituals feel like a siege on the actual work. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index gives some shape to that frustration: across Microsoft 365 apps, the average employee spent 57 percent of their time communicating in meetings, email, and chat, and 43 percent creating in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The same report found that inefficient meetings were the top reported productivity disruptor. So I do not want to romanticize communication. A lot of it is waste. Some of it is people performing alignment instead of making decisions.

But the existence of bad communication does not make communication secondary. It means the bar has to be higher. If a large part of knowledge work now runs through meetings, writing, critique, updates, and decisions, then treating communication as an interruption is like treating the road as an interruption to driving. You can hate traffic and still admit that the road matters.

The real design artifact is rarely just the screen. It is the shared understanding around the screen: why this problem matters, what trade-offs were made, what the team is optimizing for, which risks are still open, what a user is likely to misunderstand, and what needs to happen next. A beautiful design that nobody understands will die slowly in comments, meetings, and implementation drift. A rougher design with clear reasoning has a chance to improve because people know how to work with it.

This is where his explicitness made sense. He was not being pedantic when he named the obvious thing. He was lowering the cost of coordination. He was making it less likely that six smart people would leave the room with six private versions of the same decision. He was also making the room a little safer for the person who did not know whether the obvious thing was actually obvious.

Google’s research on effective teams points in the same direction. In its re:Work guide on team effectiveness, Google names psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact as core team dynamics. Those are not decorative values. They are working conditions. A team does not get structure and clarity because everyone silently intuits the same plan. A team gets there because someone says the quiet part of the work out loud: here is the decision, here is what we know, here is what we do not know, here is who owns the next step.

There is also research on collective intelligence that complicates the fantasy of the lone genius. In a 2010 Science paper, Anita Woolley and her coauthors found that a group’s performance across tasks was not strongly tied to the average or maximum intelligence of the individuals in the group. It was tied to social sensitivity and a more equal distribution of conversational turn-taking. In plainer terms, teams do not become smarter simply because the smartest person is in the room. They become smarter when the room can use what its people know.

That is why communication becomes more important as your career progresses. Early in a career, you can often create value by doing a bounded piece of work well: making the thing, solving the ticket, producing the option, or improving the flow. As your scope grows, the work starts to pass through more people before it becomes real. You have to explain context to someone who was not in the last five conversations. You have to make trade-offs legible to people who do not share your craft instincts. You have to disagree without turning every disagreement into a referendum on taste. You have to notice when the team is nodding while privately meaning different things.

Employers seem to know this, even if workplaces often teach it badly. In NACE’s Job Outlook 2025 report, employers rated communication as the most important of the eight career-readiness competencies, with a weighted average of 4.57 on a five-point importance scale. They rated recent graduates’ proficiency in communication lower, at 3.62. Another study of senior U.S. business executives found that interpersonal skills carried a great deal of weight in recent promotion decisions. I do not take that to mean “learn to talk well so you can climb the ladder.” I take it to mean that once your work depends on other people, your ability to create clarity becomes part of your output.

The caveat is that communication is not the same as talking more. Some people treat airtime as leadership. They fill the room, restate what was already said, or produce documents that are long enough to look serious and vague enough to avoid responsibility. That is not communication. It is noise with a work badge.

Good communication is more disciplined than that. It asks a few plain questions: What do I know? What am I assuming? What changed? What do I need from this person or this room? What decision are we making? What would be dangerous to leave implicit? You do not need to sound grand to answer those questions. In fact, grand language usually gets in the way. The useful sentence is often ordinary: “I think we are agreeing on the direction, but not yet on the trade-off.” Or: “Before we move on, I want to make sure we all mean the same thing by launch-ready.” Or: “This may be obvious, but I want to say it so we do not make different assumptions after the meeting.”

That last sentence is the one I kept seeing from him before I understood it. He was not trying to prove he was the adult in the room. He was taking responsibility for the room’s understanding.

I still like the part of work where something gets made. I like the private concentration of shaping an idea until it becomes visible. But I trust that work less when it cannot survive contact with other people. If the idea cannot be explained, challenged, adjusted, handed off, and remembered, then it is not yet strong enough for the environment it has to live in.

So I am trying to let go of the idea that communication is an add-on to the real work of designing. In modern product work, communication is one of the ways the work becomes real. It is how a group of people with partial information builds one usable picture of what to do next.

When I am in a meeting now, I think about him more often than I expected. I think about the jokes he could crack when nothing important depended on precision, and the care he took when people needed to leave the room aligned. I do not always get it right. I still sometimes assume too much, explain too little, or let a fuzzy agreement pass because the meeting is almost over. But the standard is clearer to me now: if people have to guess what I mean, I have left part of my job undone.

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The Collected Works Of Designer Jamal Nichols

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