The Weight of Your Words: The Importance of Leadership Language.
I’ve been thinking this week about how some conversations feel like they’re actually moving things forward while others just fill the air and stagnate. As an introvert, I’m always fascinated by research on how people connect, because I used to think being a great conversationalist was really only reserved for those extraverts who live for the art of the chat. But the more I have learned and experienced over the years, the more I realise everything I knew about both introversion, and conversations and connections, is actually dead wrong. New research on verbal behaviour and decades of person-centred theory point to the same conclusion: it isn't how much you say, it's what you choose and where you leave room.
The conversation you didn't notice you were having
Most leaders think about their communication in terms of content. What did I say, was it clear, did I cover everything I needed to. Far less attention goes to the shape of a conversation: how much space you took up, how quickly you moved to a solution, whether the other person had time to find their own words before you supplied yours.
New research specifically on coaching conversations suggests that shape matters more than most of us assume, and better yet, it changes outcomes in ways that can actually be measured. As a visual thinker, I have absolutely loved coming across this concept of a conversation shape, as it’s really reframed the way I approach conversations. Let’s see what the research says.
What the research found
Why do some conversations move people forward while others just fill the air?
In 2025, James Gavin and Nicolò Bernardi at Concordia University set out to understand exactly this question inside professional coaching relationships. Over an eight-month process, their team built a coding system fine enough to capture 37 distinct types of verbal behaviour, then applied it to real coaching sessions. Afterwards, both coach and client independently rated how aligned they felt on goals, how much progress they made, and how strong their working relationship was.
The pattern that emerged was consistent. Sessions where the coach leaned into empathic, meaning-making language, reflecting a client's feelings back to them, exploring their emotions and learning, offering genuine affirmation, using the occasional well-placed moment of humour, were rated more highly across every measure. Sessions where the coach relied more heavily on advice-giving, correction, or repeated checking-in were rated lower, even though each of those behaviours is almost always offered with good intent.
The numbers are worth reflecting on. Clients rated sessions significantly lower on goal alignment when a coach's advice-giving climbed toward twenty instances an hour, compared with sessions where it sat closer to seven. The same pattern showed up with repeated verification and checking-in: useful in small doses, corrosive at high volume. So what does this tell us? When you’re coaching, whether professionally or as a leader to a team member, you need to know when to simply … zip it. Shut up. Listen.
Furthermore, sessions that ran closer to forty-five minutes, rather than thirty, were rated more positively across the board, for both client and coach. That extra time rarely bought more content. It bought the space for someone to stop performing composure and actually arrive in it.
Why the questions in your head aren't always the right ones to ask out loud
The International Coaching Federation's definition of one of its core coaching competencies, Evokes Awareness, points at the same idea from a different direction. Facilitating someone's insight and learning, the ICF argues, comes from tools like powerful questioning, silence, metaphor and analogy, not from information delivered faster or more forcefully. The most useful question in a conversation is rarely a pre-prepared one. It's a response, built from what the other person just said, rather than from wherever you had already decided the conversation should go.
I’ve been really enjoying Brené Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground, where she describes her own long-running discomfort with dead air and the work it took to unlearn the habit of rushing to fill it. She has become so associated with the patience to pause, that listeners of her podcast affectionately call it the "pause-cast," and she now asks her producers to leave those long pauses in rather than tighten them out in the edit. It's a small, telling detail: a leader whose work is built on courageous conversation has come to treat the silence itself as part of the message, not dead space to be cleaned up around it. What is the silence telling you? What is the other person not saying?
This is a harder discipline than it sounds. Most leaders have already made the first upgrade, from telling people what to do to asking them questions instead. Person-centred coaching theory, which traces back to Carl Rogers' work in the 1940s and 50s, points to a further step past that. Rogers' original insight was that people carry within themselves the resources they need for growth and change, provided the right relational conditions are there to support it; understanding, acceptance, and a genuine, non-judgemental presence from the other person in the conversation.
Practically, that means the difference between a question that comes from your own frame of reference and a question that comes up because you were listening closely enough to follow theirs. The two can sound identical from the outside. The difference is whether you were listening for the other person's next word, or already forming yours.
What this looks like on a Tuesday
The next time someone finishes speaking in a one-on-one or a team conversation, notice the urge to respond immediately with a solution or a correction, and let have the patience to pause and sit there instead, three to five seconds is enough. Notice what the other person does with that space. More often than not, they will keep going, and what comes next is usually the part they actually needed to say.
It is a small shift. But the research suggests it is exactly the kind of shift that changes whether a conversation moves someone forward, or simply fills the air around them.
If you'd like support building these habits into your own leadership conversations, get in touch to find out more about coaching with The Growth Coach Australia.
