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How you say it matters as much as what you say, according to executive coach Kate Mason, who helps leaders to communicate more effectively.
When executive leadership coach Kate Mason was a “young, self-conscious teenage debater”, she received difficult feedback. “I was told, ‘You’re too angry, you’re too much, you need to tone it down.’ I was really confused by that, because I was doing what my male counterparts were doing,” says Mason, who has worked as a global communications and public affairs manager for Google and YouTube. “Then I thought, ‘I’ll be really sweet, kind and gentle.’ That didn’t work, either.”
Refine your communication style
Mason’s book, Powerfully Likeable, aims to disabuse female leaders of the notion they can’t be both popular and powerful. The key, according to Mason, is for women to adopt more nuanced communication styles beyond the two limiting roles of battle axe or deferential people pleaser.
“Power and likeability is one example of dissonant qualities you can bring together, but you could also bring together ‘ambitiously compassionate’,” says Mason, who coaches men and women, but wrote the book to help women struggling with the same issues she has faced.
“I’m smiley, I’m friendly, I’m approachable – and yet, I can hold my own, I can negotiate, I can handle really adversarial, difficult situations as well.”
This process of finding the right communication style will look different for everyone. “The idea is to stop being performative and actually find where you’re already really good,” says Mason. “If you’re an incisive rapport builder, you’re going to be an A-plus in your relational game and really sharp at zeroing in on what a problem is. So when you wobble at work, you can ask yourself how an incisive rapport builder would answer that email. How would she show up to that meeting? It becomes very intuitive, as opposed to feeling as if you’re running off someone else’s playbook.”
Get out of your own way
Many of Mason’s clients will accidentally undermine their own work, in what she calls “imposing syndrome”, the fear of being an imposition. “You may be accidentally kicking out the legs from under you by using lots of different caveats, disclaimers or minimisations in your communications.”
Or you may have received feedback that you’re too transactional or aloof. In such cases, Mason will work with clients to come up with strategies that put their on-edge co-workers at ease. “They may tell their colleagues, ‘I tend to be a bit abrupt in my critique’ or ‘I’m transactional by nature. It’s really in service of us getting to an answer. Please know I’m excited about this and see the hard work you’ve done.’”
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Being concise isn’t dumbing down
One of Mason’s clients received feedback that he was hard to understand in meetings and found it difficult to change. “He found feedback from staff quite galling, because he’s extremely bright and senior,” says Mason.
She sat in on several of the client’s all-hands meetings, which included some 200 staff. “I realised he was telling people everything he knew on the topic,” she says. “But in his mind it was this coherent, detailed and thoughtful summary.”
Together, the pair worked to find a more concise communication style. “There was a bit of resistance at first, because he thought it was dumbing his information down,” she says. “But I pointed out that it was not dumbing something down to have really structured, concise answers.”
This article first appeared under the title 'Support system' in the April/May 2026 Issue of Company Director Magazine.
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