Why it works

You can’t fix what you can’t hear

There is no shortage of good advice about how to communicate. What tends to be missing is any way of telling whether you are taking it.

  1. 01

    Nobody hears themselves

    You remember the point you were making. The person across from you remembers being cut off before they finished theirs. Both of you are telling the truth, and neither account is complete, because there was never a recording to check either one against.

  2. 02

    The feedback you get is unusable

    “Work on your executive presence” is not something a person can act on. It usually shows up months after the conversations it describes, in a review, by which point nobody can remember which meeting went badly or what was said in it.

  3. 03

    Specifics are what change behavior

    Show someone the sentence, the ratio, and one concrete thing they could have said instead, and they will try it. The same person who could do nothing with “be more collaborative” will happily open Thursday’s one-on-one with a different question.

  4. 04

    One session is not a pattern

    A single analysis is interesting and not much more. Twenty of them, scored identically, add up to a trend you can actually rely on, which happens to be the only way to show anyone else that something moved.

The gap, in numbers

92%

of leaders rate themselves as effective communicators.

1 in 4

employees say their manager is never open to their perspective.

Sources: Interact/Harris Poll, Gallup State of the Workplace

Try it on a conversation you were in

All of this is easier to believe when the meeting under discussion is one you actually sat through.

Analyze a conversation