Clarity Is What They Hear: Stop Relying on Nods

Why Verbal Confirmation Lies to You

In a technical conversation, or any conversation where there’s a power gap, saying “I don’t get it” carries a social cost. Nobody wants to be the person who slows down the meeting or looks unprepared in front of a senior leader. So people nod. They say it makes sense. And you walk away thinking you communicated clearly, when all you actually did was create a comfortable silence.

The real skill here isn’t explaining better. It’s noticing the gap between what someone says and what their hesitation, tone, or body language is actually telling you. That gap exists at every level. I recently talked with Dr. Sabine Charles, who’s spent years reading rooms full of senior executives — people whose job is, in part, to project confidence even when they’re lost. Her experience made something clear to me: this gap between stated understanding and real understanding exists at every level, including the top.

The One Question That Actually Works

There’s a formal name for this technique: teach-back. In healthcare, where a misunderstanding can have serious consequences, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recommends asking people to explain information back in their own words rather than simply asking whether they understand it. The principle translates surprisingly well to everyday work: don’t ask people to certify your explanation. Give them a chance to show you what they took from it.

Instead of asking someone to confirm they understood, ask a question that forces them to demonstrate it. Something like, “What’s your take on how we actually get the team to implement this?”

The point isn’t to “catch” someone in a moment of misunderstanding. It’s to ask a question that requires them to reveal their thinking rather than repeat a socially convenient answer. Recent research highlighted by Harvard Business Review makes a similar case for “curveball” questions: when people are given familiar prompts, they can fall back on polished talking points; a less predictable but relevant question can surface what they’re actually thinking.

Build the Relationship Before You Need It

There’s a second piece to this that matters just as much: most people only try to read someone closely when the stakes are already high: in the performance review, the tense negotiation, the moment they need a yes. By then, you have no baseline to compare against.

I think of it as a relationship bank account. Short, low-stakes check-ins with people, done before you ever need anything from them, build a reserve of trust you can draw on later. But it’s not just relationship-building, it’s data-gathering.

Every casual interaction teaches you what someone looks like at rest: their normal tone, their usual energy, how they carry themselves when nothing is wrong. Once you know that baseline, you can actually spot when something’s off. If someone who’s usually animated goes flat during a specific conversation, that’s information. But only if you’ve made the deposits first.

Treat Confusion as Immersion, Not a Wall

Sometimes you’ll run into someone whose way of communicating just doesn’t click with yours. The instinct is frustration. I’d push you toward curiosity instead. Treat it like you’re being dropped into a new culture: your job is to learn the local language, not judge it for being different from your own. The people you can’t seem to reach aren’t a wall. They’re a translation problem. And translation problems are solvable.

This Is an Infinite Game

None of this is a skill you finish learning. It’s closer to leveling up: the thing that used to be hard becomes easy, and then a new, harder version of the same challenge shows up. That’s not failure. That’s how competence actually gets built: not by logging hours, but by paying attention to what worked, what didn’t, and adjusting the next attempt.