The honest guide to executive communication exercises

Executive communication exercises produce evidence rather than opinions. You cannot assess your own message, because you read it knowing what it means.

Each of the seven below removes that advantage in a different way. One uses something you already sent. One uses a reader who has none of your context. Others are a record kept over time. Every one leaves you something to look at afterwards.

Do the first one before the others. It changes what you notice in the rest.

What to take away

1. The first-two-lines audit

Time. Forty minutes with your sent folder.

Take twenty messages you sent to someone more senior. Copy only the first two lines of each into a separate document, with nothing else. Read the list.

What it reveals. How many of them state what you want. In most people's collections the number is under a third. The rest open on background, process or a summary of activity. The ones that do state a request are usually the ones that got a same-day reply, and you can check that.

The U.S. Army has a name for the fix: BLUF, short for bottom line up front. It puts the recommendation in the first line of a memo, ahead of any background. You can borrow the rule without the rest of the format.

2. The blind reader

Time. Ten minutes, plus five of someone else's.

Take a message you are about to send. Hand it to a colleague with no involvement in the subject. Ask them to read it once and then tell you, from memory, what you want and by when. Do not help, and do not explain first.

What it reveals. Whether the message works without you. This is the same move federal writing guidance calls testing for understanding, done with one reader instead of a panel, and it catches more than a careful reread ever does.

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 puts the same demand on U.S. federal agencies, which must write documents for the public in plain language. The guidance that followed treats testing with real readers as the check, ahead of any reading-level score.

3. The prediction file

Time. Two minutes per message, then a month.

Each time you send something upward, write one line in a file: what response you expect and by when. When the reply arrives, write what actually happened next to it.

What it reveals. Where your model of the reader is wrong. The interesting entries are the ones where you expected a decision and got a question, because the question is nearly always about something you assumed was obvious.

The method matches the one Philip Tetlock's Good Judgment Project ran with thousands of volunteers: a dated forecast for each call, recorded before the outcome was known, then scored against what happened.

4. The confidence log

Time. One line per estimate, reviewed quarterly.

Every time you state a number, a date or a judgment to someone senior, log it with how sure you said you were. When the outcome is known, mark whether you were right.

What it reveals. Whether your stated confidence tracks your accuracy, which is the skill of calibration. Most people find one of two patterns: confident on the things they enjoy and hedged on the things they dread, or uniformly confident and right about two thirds of the time.

Both are fixable once seen, and neither is visible without the log. Stating a number with a confidence level is one of the executive communication techniques that survives triage.

The Brier score, published by Glenn Brier at the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1950, grades those entries by squaring the gap between the probability you gave and what happened. Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner reported in Superforecasting (2015) that the best volunteers in that project outperformed intelligence analysts with access to classified briefings.

5. The activity strike-through

Time. Fifteen minutes.

Take your last three status updates. Strike out every sentence describing what was done, leaving only sentences describing where things stand and what has changed.

What it reveals. How much of your reporting is activity rather than state. If the remaining text is under half, your updates are being read as requests for credit, whatever you intended, and the reply "so are we on track?" is the tell.

Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle, developed at McKinsey & Company in the 1960s and published as a book in 1987, argues the same order: the answer first, then the reasons behind it, then the evidence.

6. The forward test

Time. Ten minutes.

Take a message you sent last week and paste it into a blank document with no thread, no subject line, and no sender. Read it as though it had been forwarded to you by a stranger.

What it reveals. Internal shorthand shows up, along with numbers missing a unit or a period and references to conversations the reader was not in. Each one breaks the moment a message travels, and messages upward always travel.

Amazon made that standard a requirement in 2004, when it banned slide decks from senior meetings and moved to six-page narrative memos. Attendees read the memo in silence at the start of the meeting, so it has to stand alone.

Two cheap second opinions exist. Microsoft Word's Editor reports a Flesch-Kincaid grade level for a document, and the free web version of Hemingway Editor flags sentences over 25 words. The Hemingway desktop app sells for $19.99 as a one-time purchase. Neither replaces the blind reader, but each turns a vague feeling about sentence length into a number.

7. The silence check

Time. Twenty minutes, once a quarter.

List the updates you sent that received no reply at all. Look at what they had in common.

What it reveals. Usually a rhythm problem rather than a writing problem. Messages sent because it was the day for one train the reader to skim, and the update that mattered arrived looking like the ones that did not. Send on change and the silence pattern shifts within a month.

Gmail's Schedule send and Outlook's Delay Delivery make a fixed cadence easy to keep, which is why the habit is hard to break.

The set together

Start with the audit and the strike-through. Both use material you already have, both take under an hour together, and between them they tell you whether the rest are urgent.

These exercises test reasoning set out in executive communication. Sentence-level patterns are in executive communication techniques.

Exercise 6 exists because your request is usually decided in a room you are not in. That is the central problem of influence without authority. Exercise 3 surfaces the same thing from the other direction: what reaches a senior person is filtered before it arrives, as described in leadership influence.

Common questions

I do not have twenty messages to a senior reader.

Use ten, or use messages to anyone outside your team, where the same triage happens with less at stake. The pattern in your openings does not depend on who received them.

Nobody has five minutes to be my blind reader.

Ask for two minutes and one sentence back. People agree to that readily, and one sentence is all the exercise needs. If it is still hard, use someone in another team who owes you nothing. Their reading is more honest anyway.

The confidence log feels like keeping score against myself.

It is, and that is the value. Nobody else can do it for you, because only you know how sure you actually felt. Three months of entries is enough to see a pattern, and the pattern is nearly always a specific subject rather than a general trait.

What if the audit shows most of my openings are fine?

Then check reply times instead. The audit measures shape; the useful follow-up measures effect. If well-shaped messages are not being answered, the problem is rhythm or routing rather than writing, and exercise 7 is the one to run.

Can I do these on messages I received rather than sent?

Yes, and it is a good way to start, because other people's failures are easier to see. Just do not stop there. Reading a colleague's weak opening teaches you the pattern. Reading twenty of your own teaches you which pattern is yours.