They’re experts in their field. But explaining complex topics to outsiders calls for different smarts.

You lead a team of seasoned technical experts. They know their stuff, and they’re not afraid to defend their views. No one doubts their technical abilities. But would your team benefit from learning communication skills?

You might expect me to say yes, since I’ve trained some of the UK’s leading technical teams in this area. But that experience has taught me that only teams with a specific set of challenges need to work on communication. That’s right, many teams don’t need this type of training. It depends on the type of work you do, and how the organisation is set up.

Technical teams will benefit from communication skills training if they regularly need to:

• explain complex topics to lay audiences like clients, managers or business stakeholders
• pitch their ideas to decision-makers, or take part in sales calls
• advocate for the value of their work (that is, when the business value of their output isn’t obvious)

If none of that applies to your team, you’re probably good to go. Perhaps one or two people might need some coaching on a particular area like speaking off the cuff. The team as a whole, though, doesn’t need to focus on communication.

But if that list represents a substantial chunk of your team’s duties, read on. Improving their communication skills will make a significant difference.

Why audience is everything

Senior technical experts tend to have strong communication skills. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have progressed this far. As part of their day-to-day work they might need to:

• debate the pros and cons of different options with peers
• justify a decision on its technical merits
• write complex specifications or proposals
• mentor junior colleagues (and review their work)

Some people will have more advanced experience too, like publishing journal articles or speaking at industry conferences.

For all of these examples, notice the audience. Most senior experts are proficient at communicating with audiences who share their background knowledge. For most of your career, that’s all you’ve had to deal with: other people in the same discipline. Which means you can take for granted the basics of your field. The core assumptions, principles, methodologies and technical terms.

When it comes to communication, audience is everything. If your team needs to frequently interact with non-expert audiences, things get tricky fast.

What experts miss about generalist audiences

If they’re like most technical experts, your team misunderstands generalist audiences—like execs, clients, other stakeholders—in three key ways. Experts tend to overlook:

1. What generalists care about, and how they see the world.
2. Their level of knowledge about your field (often low)—and how they feel about that (embarrassed, annoyed).
3. What they need to learn from you—and crucially, at what level of abstraction.

These blind spots lead to a catalogue of crossed wires, wasted effort and needless heartache. A few examples:

• The team of financial experts who spend months writing meticulous reports to management—who trust them implicitly, and only read the executive summary.
• The technology team who launch into a sales pitch for their solution without listening to the client’s business goal.
• Engineers who freeze up when asked to justify a new process—because they’re trying to explain it from first principles instead of figuring out what the audience needs to understand.

But there’s a much easier way to deal with this problem. Learn to teach.

Why experts can’t teach

We’ve established that senior technical experts excel at communicating with audiences who share their background knowledge. Things fall apart when your team needs to deal with generalist audiences. That’s because they don’t have the skills and experience to get across the essential information that these people need.

The skill to develop here is teaching. A great teacher starts by establishing the knowledge level of their audience (or students). Then they figure out the single next thing this audience needs to learn to make progress. (In the trade we call this their learning threshold). Teach them that one concept, make sure it sticks, and they’ll feel like a million dollars.

Technical experts trip up in a couple of ways:

1. They get stuck trying to explain complex topics from first principles. This is impossible, because research has shown that experts can’t explain everything they know (it’s tacit knowledge.)
2. They think that non-expert audiences either want to understand all the details, or that they doubt your expertise. Both of these are super rare. Most of the time, generalists have superficial questions that experts would find trivial to answer—if they could only figure out what’s really being asked.

When we train teams of technical experts, we spend a lot of time getting into the head of their audiences. What do your execs really want? What do they care about? How does your expertise help them to achieve that?

It’s not that experts are bad at empathy. It simply hasn’t occurred to them that they don’t understand the concerns of generalist audiences. Once we convince them that grokking what matters to execs, for example, is part of their job, things get a lot easier.

It goes from, “how on earth can I explain this?”, to, “I wonder what they really need to know?” Once you figure that out, it’s time to switch into teacher mode. Find out what they need to learn, explain it concisely, and check they understand. Your audience will feel smarter. Your team will feel relieved. And they can get back to doing their real jobs.