Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 023
Train the response, not the personality
Interpersonal effectiveness improves when goals, perception, response, feedback, and adjustment become observable and trainable
Premise
Leadership communication is often judged as personality: someone is naturally persuasive, awkward, empathetic, or poor with people. Michael Argyle and Adam Kendon’s 1967 Social Skills Model offers a more useful diagnosis. Focused interaction can be analyzed as organized skilled performance involving goals, perception, interpretation, response, feedback, and correction.
This makes communication trainable. A failed conversation can be located more precisely: the wrong goal, missed cue, mistaken interpretation, limited response repertoire, poor timing, or ignored feedback. The executive opportunity is deliberate practice with consequences rather than generic advice or demands to “communicate better.”
What the model is: The Social Skills Model in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainConversation & Relationships
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeThe Social Skills Model