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Effective communication with an impatient boss is far less challenging if you know their preferred communication style. One simple way to distinguish communication styles is how linear people are. Here's what that means. Some people are very linear. 
Imagine that it’s Friday afternoon and your boss walks over to your desk and tells you the following:
Boss: I need you to come into work this weekend to help finish the Johnson proposal.
You: When is it due?
Boss: Monday at noon. We hoped to have it done today (Friday)
Here’s something you don’t often hear under the category of good customer service skills: not everybody wants friendly customer service. I know, it's a bizarre thing to say, right? How can that possible qualify as good customer service skills?
One big mistake many leaders make is delivering advice instead of constructive feedback. People often think it’s nicer to phrase criticisms more gently by injecting words like: should, would, ought, and try. The problem is that by using these words, your constructive feedback becomes advice.
It may seem like there’s no good way to deliver bad news to the boss. But when you deliver bad news in a way that increases the boss’ feeling of confidence in your competence to handle the bad news and that gives the boss a sense of control, you can actually deepen your working relationship with the boss.
Employees whose bosses recognize their accomplishments with praise are 63% more inspired to give their best effort at work. Simple, right? Just pay attention to your employees’ accomplishments and when you notice great things happening, praise the employees responsible. And that free activity can create huge increases in employee effort and engagement. So why don’t we do it?
One of the biggest problems that occurs between bosses and employees is a mismatch in their communication styles. When you speak and the boss doesn’t hear you, or vice versa, it can greatly hurt your chances of career success. 
Around nine out of ten managers have avoided giving constructive feedback to their employees for fear of the employees reacting poorly. Well, is it any wonder that an employee would react badly to getting constructive feedback when less than half of them know if they’re doing a good job? 
Let’s imagine that you’re a manager and your company has just given out bonuses. Each manager received the bonus numbers for their specific employees and everyone was told explicitly not to share the numbers with other managers. So, of course, the manager down the hall catches you later and says “I think my employees got shortchanged on the annual bonus. What did your employees get?”
When we think about all the ways we have to communicate with each other, and there are a bunch of them in the workplace setting, most communication modalities offer some possibility of messaging beyond the words we say.
Face-to-face communication, which has the biggest communication bandwidth, for example, lets us stuff a whole lot more information than just words into our message.
