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Why Your Company's Communication Training is Theoretical

Standing in yet another beige training room watching a facilitator demonstrate "active listening" with role-play scenarios that wouldn't fool a five-year-old, I had what you might call an epiphany. The woman next to me—let's call her Karen from Accounts—was nodding enthusiastically while simultaneously checking her phone under the table. The bloke from IT was doing that thing where you make eye contact for exactly three seconds then look away because someone told him that's "proper listening technique."

This is the problem with corporate communication training. It's theoretical rubbish.

After 17 years in workplace training and development across Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth, I've seen every flavour of communication workshop imaginable. From the touchy-feely "let's share our feelings" sessions to the military-style "direct communication bootcamps." They all miss the bloody point.

The Fundamental Flaw

Real communication doesn't happen in sanitised training environments with perfectly crafted scenarios. It happens when Sarah from Marketing is having a meltdown about the campaign budget while three different departments are breathing down her neck. It happens when your biggest client rings up at 4:47 PM on Friday wanting to "chat" about "some concerns."

The training industry has turned communication into a series of steps and techniques, like following a recipe for pavlova. Step one: listen actively. Step two: paraphrase what you heard. Step three: ask clarifying questions.

Bollocks.

Communication is messy, emotional, and completely unpredictable. It's learning to read the micro-expressions on someone's face when they say "fine" but clearly mean "I'm about to lose my shit." It's knowing when to push back and when to shut up and listen.

What We're Actually Teaching

Most communication training focuses on the mechanical aspects. How to structure a presentation. How to write better emails. How to conduct meetings efficiently.

These are useful skills, don't get me wrong. But they're like learning to drive in an empty car park and thinking you're ready for the M1 during peak hour.

I was guilty of this myself early in my career. Spent three years delivering workshops on "conflict resolution techniques" that worked beautifully in the training room. Then I watched one of my star participants completely implode during an actual workplace dispute because nobody had taught them how to handle the adrenaline rush when someone's genuinely angry at you.

The real skill isn't knowing the "right" thing to say. It's staying calm when everything's going to hell.

The Australian Context Nobody Talks About

Here's something that drives me mental about imported training programs: they ignore Australian workplace culture entirely. We're taught American-style assertiveness techniques that come across as aggressive in our context. Or we get British-influenced approaches that are too indirect for our straight-talking culture.

Australians communicate differently. We're direct but not confrontational. We use humour to defuse tension. We have this thing where we'll say "no worries" when there are definitely worries, and everyone understands this perfectly.

Yet most training programs pretend cultural context doesn't matter. They teach universal "best practices" that work about as well as wearing a suit to a barbecue.

I remember working with a mining company in Western Australia where the facilitator—lovely woman from Canada—kept talking about "creating safe spaces for vulnerability." The miners were looking at her like she'd suggested they start doing interpretive dance during safety briefings.

Different industries. Different cultures. Different communication styles.

The Role-Play Problem

Can we talk about role-plays for a minute? Because they're everywhere in communication training, and they're mostly useless.

"Okay, Janet, you're the angry customer. Bob, you're the customer service representative. Janet, I want you to really let Bob have it about the delayed shipment."

Janet, who wouldn't say boo to a goose in real life, proceeds to deliver the most polite, controlled "angry customer" performance you've ever seen. Bob responds with textbook de-escalation techniques. Everyone nods approvingly.

Then Janet goes back to her desk and the next actual angry customer reduces her to tears because real anger isn't polite or controlled. It's loud and personal and completely irrational.

Real communication training should involve actual pressure. Actual stakes. Actual consequences.

What Works Instead

The best communication training I've ever delivered happened by accident. I was running a workshop for a retail chain when their head office rang mid-session with a crisis. Major supplier issue. Needed immediate response from three different departments.

Instead of pausing the training, I said "Right, this is your communication challenge. You've got 30 minutes to coordinate a response across three teams, brief your managers, and prepare a customer-facing statement. Go."

The energy in that room was electric. Suddenly everyone was communicating with purpose. They had to listen carefully because missing information had real consequences. They had to speak clearly because their colleagues needed to understand quickly. They had to manage emotions because stress was running high.

That 30-minute exercise taught them more about effective communication than the previous six hours of theory.

Real communication happens under pressure. With stakes. With emotions running high.

The Missing Emotional Component

Here's what really gets me about traditional communication skills training: it ignores emotions entirely.

"Stay professional." "Keep emotions out of it." "Focus on the facts."

What planet are these trainers living on? Humans are emotional beings. Trying to communicate without acknowledging emotions is like trying to swim while pretending water doesn't exist.

The best communicators I know don't suppress emotions—they acknowledge them. They can say things like "I can see you're frustrated about this, and honestly, I understand why" or "I'm feeling a bit defensive right now, so let me take a step back."

This isn't touchy-feely nonsense. It's practical. When you acknowledge the emotional reality of a situation, you can actually deal with it instead of pretending it doesn't exist while it undermines everything you're trying to achieve.

Industry-Specific Reality

Different industries communicate differently, and generic training ignores this completely.

In healthcare, communication is about life and death decisions under extreme time pressure. In education, it's about managing dozens of stakeholders with competing priorities. In construction, it's about coordinating complex tasks while maintaining safety standards.

Yet we deliver the same "effective communication" workshop to everyone. It's like giving everyone the same sized shoes and wondering why they don't fit properly.

I worked with a legal firm last year where the managing partner complained that their junior lawyers couldn't communicate with clients effectively. The training they'd received was all about "building rapport" and "active listening."

Meanwhile, their clients wanted clear, direct advice about complex legal issues. They didn't want rapport—they wanted competence and clarity. The mismatch was costing them business.

The Technology Factor

Another thing that drives me nuts: most communication training completely ignores modern technology.

We teach face-to-face communication skills as if it's still 1995. Meanwhile, 73% of workplace communication happens via email, Slack, video calls, or text. But somehow this isn't "real" communication worth training people on.

I've seen brilliant face-to-face communicators completely fail at virtual meetings because nobody taught them how to read body language through a camera or manage energy levels across time zones.

The skills are different. The medium matters. But training programs haven't caught up.

What Actually Matters

After nearly two decades in this game, here's what I've learned actually improves workplace communication:

Practice under pressure. Real situations with real consequences. Not sanitised role-plays.

Industry-specific scenarios. What works in retail doesn't work in manufacturing. Stop pretending it does.

Emotional intelligence. Teaching people to recognise and work with emotions instead of pretending they don't exist.

Technology skills. How to communicate effectively through screens, emails, and messaging platforms.

Cultural awareness. Understanding how your workplace culture affects communication norms.

Recovery skills. What to do when communication goes wrong, because it will.

The problem isn't that people don't know how to communicate. Most humans have been communicating successfully their entire lives. The problem is that workplace communication happens under unique pressures with specific constraints, and we're not training people for that reality.

The Way Forward

Good communication training should feel less like school and more like sports training. You practice specific skills under pressure until they become automatic. You study game footage (real workplace scenarios) to understand what works and what doesn't. You learn to perform when the stakes are high.

It should be messy and emotional and sometimes uncomfortable. Because that's what real workplace communication is like.

Stop trying to turn communication into a mechanical process. Start treating it like the complex, emotional, context-dependent skill it actually is.

And for God's sake, can we please stop with the role-plays where everyone's unnaturally polite? Real people aren't polite when they're stressed, frustrated, or under pressure. Train for that reality.

The companies getting this right aren't the ones with the most sophisticated training programs. They're the ones creating environments where people can practice real communication with real feedback and real support.

Maybe it's time to admit that theoretical communication training is like theoretical swimming lessons. You can learn all the techniques you want, but until you jump in the water, you don't really know how to swim.

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