How To Improve Team Communication By Learning To Speak Up

Jeannie walked out of Monday’s meeting feeling energized. Her team had just landed a promising new project, and everyone seemed locked in on the vision they’d pitch to the client on Friday. So when they reconvened Thursday to review the slides, she expected their team to prepare slides that reflected their shared vision, sharpened and ready to go, the kind of result that comes from a team that’s internalized effective communication skills and teamwork tips.

Instead, she barely recognized the presentation her team shared. The framing was off. Key points were missing. Somehow, four days after a meeting where everyone nodded along in apparent agreement, her team almost seems to be working on entirely different ideas. What happened?

Jeannie’s experience isn’t a fluke. It’s one of the most common breakdowns on working teams. In fact, a Harris Poll found “nearly three in four business leaders (72%) say their team struggled with communicating effectively over the last year.” Ineffective communication is not only frustrating, it costs a company time and money.

A meeting can feel productive and aligned in the moment, yet everyone in the room may leave with a different understanding of what’s been discussed. The gap isn’t due to lack of effort or talent; it’s often due to misunderstanding. When that happens, it’s time to integrate effective teamwork tips to help improve communication.

So how do you close that communication gap before it derails a project — or a client relationship? The simple teamwork tips that I like to use with my clients are the Three Levels of Speaking Up. I share this communication framework in my book Winning Without Persuading. It provides a simple road map designed to strengthen team communication. It helps teams build effective communication habits where questions, missing context, and honest pushback surface before Thursday. Rather than treating speaking up as an all-or-nothing leap, this approach breaks team communication down into three manageable levels, each one raising the stakes slightly while lowering the barrier to entry. Here’s how it works.

Level One, Clarify and Summarize: Teamwork Tips For Asking Clarifying Questions

Start small. Encourage your team to ask a clarifying question anytime something feels unclear. If they are not sure about something, chances are other people in the room are also feeling confused. This can be accomplished with the simple habit: using the “so, in other words” check: after a key point is made, someone restates it in their own terms to confirm everyone is on the same page.

Example:  “So, in other words, our Q4 priority is retention over acquisition — is that right?”

This low-stakes habit normalizes speaking up early, before misunderstandings compound into bigger problems.

Level Two, Adding and Subtracting: Teamwork Tips For Strengthening Aligning Focus

The next teamwork tip in strengthening team communication is learning to evaluate the focus of the conversation — are critical points being overlooked, while less urgent components are dominating the conversation? During a meeting or planning session, team members should ask themselves two things:

• What important information or perspectives haven’t been raised yet? Why and how could the missing pieces impact the overall outcome?
• Are there extraneous goals, priorities, or requirements that can be removed or temporarily set aside?

Example: “We are focusing on the bigger grant application due in six months. Should we focus on the grant due next month first? Even though it’s smaller, the funding could help us make our case for the larger grant later. Should we save the discussion about the later grant until our next committee meeting.”

This step trains your team to actively shape the conversation, not just react to it.

Level Three, Challenge and Change: Teamwork Tips For Challenging Assumptions

The final teamwork tip asks team members to challenge assumptions directly, even subtle ones. This doesn’t require a dramatic confrontation. It can be as simple as saying, “Can I offer a different perspective on that?” or “What’s the reasoning behind this approach?”

Encourage your team to see this as a contribution, not a conflict. Small, respectful challenges, repeated consistently, are often what drive the most meaningful change.

Example: On a farm where her father had always grown soybeans and corn for the commodity market, the daughter wanted to try growing carrots and cabbages for the local food bank and farmers market. Because he had always been a commodity farmer, the father was not open to trying new crops. The daughter asked, “What if I just try it on half an acre?” The next growing season, the daughter brought in 3x more money on her half acre than the father did per acre.

This small-scale success allowed her father to be more open to innovation on a larger scale when they were working together to make a farm plan for the following year.

Why The Teamwork Tips You Use With Your Team Are So Important

A client of mine shared this story with me that clearly illustrates why learning to speak up and championing it as a team leader is so important: it’s contagious. Early in her career, she was a timid new graduate surrounded by senior male engineers at a technology firm. She worked hard and delivered results, but during her first performance review, her manager told her, “You’re doing great work, but you need to speak up more in meetings.”

She realized confidence wasn’t about always having the right answer — it was about having the courage to speak up. Now, as a leader herself, she makes it a point to draw quiet team members into the conversation, ask what they think, and remind them their input matters.

Sometimes leadership isn’t just about speaking up — it’s about helping others learn how to add their voice to conversation. The teamwork tips found in the framework 3 Level of Speaking Up makes it simple and builds confidence. The effect is additive. The more you model and encourage others to use these teamwork tips, the more effective your communication will become as a team.

Improving Communication Integrating These 3 Simple Teamwork Tips

Had Jeannie’s team practiced even the first teamwork tip, Thursday’s meeting would have looked very different. A single clarifying question on Monday could have caught the misalignment before it ever made it into the slides.

The teamwork tips found in Three Levels of Speaking Up doesn’t ask teams to overhaul how they work overnight. It simply gives them a structure to grow their listening and communication skills. It focuses on building stronger team communication one small, low-stakes conversation at a time. The goal isn’t to eliminate every misunderstanding. It’s to catch them on Monday, instead of Thursday.