Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of

executive coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace

the way you want to be perceived. I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach,

and today we're talking about sorting and labeling.

Joseph is overseeing the development of a multi-billion dollar piece of hardware.

As project manager, he's responsible for keeping this seven-year enterprise on schedule and on budget.

Every week, he delivers a status report to the division executives and he's

driving them crazy. Joseph has a deep knowledge of the hardware and

understands how all the different elements interconnect, but he's

stumbling badly with the executives because he's not making those

connections clear to them. So I taught him the tool I call sorting and labeling. In my 17 years of coaching, this tool

is the one my clients most often tell me is transformational. To begin your understanding of it, I want to give you an idea of what you sound like when you don't use it.

Years ago, Elizabeth Newton created an experiment while earning her PhD at Stanford.

People in her study were either Tappers or listeners.

Tappers were given a list of 25 well-known songs

and asked to tap out the rhythm of one song for the listener.

Tappers reported that they could clearly hear the song, complete with lyrics and musical

accompaniment as they were tapping away.

When asked how well they thought the listeners would do

figuring out the song, tappers felt they were setting a pretty low bar by

guessing 50 percent. After all, the song was clear as a bell to them.

But it turned out that listeners were able to discern the song only 3% of the time.

...