Communication Questionnaire
A Communication Questionnaire scores how someone naturally asks or tells, and how much they show or control emotion, and gives two people a shared vocabulary for why the same conversation lands so differently for each of them.
A grid splits into four styles, positioned by how directly someone speaks and how freely they show feeling.
Reach for this when…
- Two colleagues keep clashing and both describe the other as 'difficult' with no more detail than that.
- A team keeps rehashing the same meeting friction and nobody can name what's actually different between them.
- Feedback keeps landing badly and neither side can say why.
How to run it
- Each person completes the questionnaire alone.
- Score plots them on assertiveness (asks vs tells) and responsiveness (controls vs shows emotion).
- Debrief in pairs: where do the two styles differ, concretely.
- Discuss what that difference has actually caused in the working relationship.
- Agree small, specific adjustments each side will make.
A worked example
Situation. Camille Dubois manages a support team at Lyon Pay, a fintech startup in Lyon, France, and her ops lead and senior engineer had stopped being able to sit in a room together.
Applied. The questionnaire showed the ops lead scoring as Expressive - tells, and shows emotion openly - and the engineer as Analytical - asks, and keeps emotion controlled. Neither was being difficult; they were reading the same silence in meetings as two opposite signals.
Result. They agreed a rule: the engineer would say one sentence of reaction out loud before going quiet to think, and the ops lead would ask one question before stating an opinion. The clashes didn't stop, but they got shorter.
The catch
A questionnaire score is a tendency under normal conditions, not a fixed identity, and people quote their own result back as an excuse for not adapting. It also only measures style, not competence or intent, so it can't settle who's actually right in a given disagreement.
The score describes the pattern. It doesn't settle who's correct.
Origin: Various (rooted in Merrill & Reid's Social Style model)