The Warm and Fluffy Test

I remember walking into the office on my first day at work dressed in an ill-fitting blue suit. I looked like a low-rent private detective.

I was nervous beyond belief and still slightly miffed about the three-month process it had taken to get me through the door. People stared. People glared. I was scared. I wasn't entirely sure whether they were pleased to see me or were busy trying to hide their private lives from this low-rent private detective.

Then the phones lit up.

People were grabbing calls left, right and centre, so I was pushed towards the support manager and politely asked to take a seat. He explained that this department was the best in the business. It was the frontline. It was where the action happened. He was proud of what they do.

He was right. Every few seconds another phone rang and somebody picked it up. Then, inevitably, one of those calls made its way to the manager.

He looked nervous now too. He picked up the receiver, announced his name and asked how he could help the person on the other end. His face immediately went bright red.

"The platform's down!" he shouted across the room. "The platform's down! Oh my. Somebody get on to it quickly. Oh my. Oh my."

Everyone already knew the platform was down. That was why they were all on the phone. It turned out this was precisely why he was rarely allowed to answer one. When he did, he didn't calm the situation down. He became part of it. He fuelled it. He was an accelerant to it.

Which, when we think about it, is remarkable. It was a little like phoning the emergency services to report a fire and having the person on the other end panic about how dangerous fires are.

He wasn't a bad manager. He wasn't an incompetent person. He simply had a natural communication style that, in this particular moment, was rather unhelpful.

His default setting was panic but we all have our default settings too. Some of us go quiet. Some of us explain. Some over-talk. Some of us ask seventeen questions. Some of us immediately take charge and dish out commands. Some of us write a very long email. Some of us write a very short email containing the words As previously stated. Some of us put everything in capitals to show how mad we are. And some of us, faced with a difficult conversation or a tough situation, will do almost anything on earth except have the difficult conversation and face the situation.

And that's why being able to flex our natural communication is so effective in the workplace, and a rather under-valued behaviour indeed.

Those that have worked with me know that when there is a whiteboard in the room, I am drawing on it. I often need to sketch to think, and I've discovered over the years that quite a lot of people are like this. Give somebody a pen and a blank space and suddenly the thing they've been trying to explain for ten minutes has a square around it, three triangle, a doodle of a dog and three arrows coming out of it.

So it should come as no surprise that I did the same thing when I was interviewing people. Across well over a thousand interviews, I developed a little ritual. At some point I'd get up, walk to the whiteboard and draw a line from one side to the other.

At the left I'd write: WARM & FLUFFY. And underneath it:

accommodating, indirect, conflict-avoiding

At the right I'd write: ABSOLUTIST & AUTHORITARIAN. And underneath:

direct, specific, command-and-control

Then I'd hand the candidate the pen.

"Where are you?"

It was, I should stress, not a scientifically validated instrument. It certainly wasn't an exercise supported by a gold standard research paper. But it was very helpful and indicative.

I called it the Warm and Fluffy Test.

I always expected people to play it safe. Put themselves somewhere in the middle. A bit of both. Sensible. Balanced. They almost never did. People were remarkably honest.

Some would put their mark firmly towards the direct end. Others would meander off towards warmth and accommodation. Occasionally someone would spend longer than was comfortable, for all involved, trying to locate themselves on the line.

And that was fine. The mark itself wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was what happened next; the discussion.

Why there? Give me examples of when you've had to communicate under pressure, or when somebody isn't doing what you need them to do, or when you disagree with someone senior, or when somebody is upset? Give me examples of when you've had to communicate when you know you're right but others are challenging you, or when you discover you aren't right after trying to convince others?

And, most importantly, can you move?

The strongest candidates almost always did something interesting, even before the conversation. They'd put their mark somewhere and then say, usually without being prompted, "That's my default, but I can move up and down the line when the situation needs it."

That was the bit I was listening for. Not because I thought one end was better. Both ends have their moments. Both ends are right in certain contexts. There are times when being warm, accommodating and patient is exactly what somebody needs from you. There are other times when a room full of warm, accommodating people is the last thing a difficult situation needs.

I've watched teams spend months circling a problem because everybody was being so nice to everybody else that nobody would actually say what was wrong. Eventually someone has to be able to say, kindly but specifically, this isn't working, this needs to change, and we're going to do something about it.

Then there are moments when exactly that person needs to not appear. Once the direction is clear and people know what they're doing, continuing to tell everyone what to do doesn't make the work better. It just means there is now somebody shouting instructions.

I've watched the same person do both.

One leader I worked with walked into a genuinely struggling department and became much more direct than she normally was. She named things directly and clearly. She was honest about what wasn't working, clear about what had to change and decisive about things that had been avoided for far too long.

It worked. But the thing I remember most happened later. As the team became steadier, she changed. She asked more questions. She listened more. She started handing decisions back into the team. She gave people more room to figure things out for themselves.

She hadn't become a different person. She'd simply changed the way she was communicating.

I think that's what makes communication so interesting. We spend an awful lot of time trying to work out what type of communicator somebody is. There are lions and monkeys and T-rexes and mice. There are reds, yellows, greens and blues. There are introverts and extroverts and omniverts. There are direct people, influential people, steady people and conscientious people.

I use plenty of these models. They're useful mirrors. They're much less useful as boxes to stay within. Because people are considerably more interesting than their default setting.

You can be direct because someone needs clarity. You can be gentle because someone needs help.

You can ask rather than tell because you don't understand the problem yet. You can tell rather than ask because you do and nothing much is currently being done about it.

You can listen because you want to learn. You can interrupt because the building is on fire.

You can be the warm and fluffy person at nine o'clock – after a week of great progress – and the direct individual who galvanises forward motion at ten past nine, because the platforms just fallen over and three customers are threatening to stop paying. And neither of those things necessarily tells us very much about who you are, just that you have range in how you communicate.

That's why I've always been more interested in range than preference. Your natural style is useful to know. It's where you start. It's the place you return to when you're tired, nervous, angry, rushed or simply not paying much attention. It's also the first step to any form of self improvement; knowing yourself.

But it doesn't have to be where you stay.

Perhaps that is one of the most pleasant things about getting better at communicating. You don't have to become somebody else. You don't have to turn into the charismatic extrovert, the brutally honest leader, the fearless leader (I used to work with someone who described himself as this), the endlessly patient listener or whatever communication archetype happens to be fashionable this week.

You just get a few more ways of communicating and a few more tools, and a few more lessons learned. A little more room to manoeuvre. A slightly bigger repertoire.

You notice that the person in front of you needs something different from the thing you were about to give them, and, rather than insisting on your preferred setting, you try something else.

You move the pen along the board, so to speak.

That's why I still like the little whiteboard exercise. After all those interviews, I wasn't really interested in where someone put their mark. I was interested in whether they thought they were allowed to move it. And whether they could.

And perhaps that's the real question. Not what kind of communicator are you? But: How much room do you have between who you naturally are and what the moment needs?

I've spent years asking people to put a mark on a line. It turns out the interesting part is not the mark at all – it's the movement.

I still think about that support manager. The platform went down. He picked up the phone. And somewhere between his panic and the person on the other end was the communication that was actually needed for the customer.