Thinking & Personal Effectiveness
The part of every job that is other people.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
How to Speak So That People Want to Listen
Julian Treasure (TED) · 2014
Argues that being heard depends on removing specific habits — gossip, judging, complaining — and on treating register, timbre and pace as…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being
Carl R. Rogers · 1975
Redefines empathy as a moment-to-moment process of sensing another person's shifting felt meanings from inside their frame of reference, without ever…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction
Erving Goffman · 1955
Argues that every social encounter is organised around each participant's need to maintain 'face' — a claimed public image — and that the…
+3 more at this level
9 works
Julian Treasure (TED)
Argues that being heard depends on removing specific habits — gossip, judging, complaining — and on treating register, timbre and pace as controllable rather than fixed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carl R. Rogers
Redefines empathy as a moment-to-moment process of sensing another person's shifting felt meanings from inside their frame of reference, without ever losing the 'as if' quality — and argues this is a demanding discipline, not an innate trait some people simply have.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Police Executive Research Forum
Argues police de-escalation should be treated as a distinct, teachable set of tactics — creating time and distance, calling in specialised responders — rather than an attitude, and recommends departments adopt it as formal doctrine rather than leaving it to individual officer judgement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson & Francesca Gino
Finds across lab and speed-dating studies that people who ask more questions, and especially follow-up questions, are liked better by their conversation partners, contrary to a widespread worry that asking questions comes across as intrusive.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Avraham N. Kluger & Guy Itzchakov
Reviews decades of research to argue that being listened to well changes a speaker's psychological state and behaviour directly, making listening an active intervention in its own right rather than a passive precondition for good communication.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Erving Goffman
Argues that every social encounter is organised around each participant's need to maintain 'face' — a claimed public image — and that the hesitations, evasions and rituals people use to avoid a direct confrontation are not mere politeness but a working system for managing a real risk of mutual humiliation.
Nalini Ambady & Robert Rosenthal
A meta-analysis showing that judgements formed from brief, silent samples of a stranger's nonverbal behaviour — a matter of seconds — predict real interpersonal outcomes nearly as well as judgements formed from much longer exposure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis & F. David Schoorman
Proposes that trusting another person is a function of three separable judgements about them — ability, benevolence and integrity — and that conflating these, rather than assessing each, is why trust so often turns out to be misplaced.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Avraham N. Kluger & Angelo DeNisi
A meta-analysis of over 600 studies finding that feedback improves performance on average but makes it worse over a third of the time, and argues the difference turns on whether the feedback directs attention to the task or to the self.