Patterns News Briefs

The way you talk affects career advancement. Here’s how. Your next chance at a promotion may come down to how you talk. A working paper from Harvard Business School argues that workers’ careers are often influenced by their speech patterns—not because those patterns are associated with merit, but because managers are inclined to think workers who communicate similarly have better social skills. Drawing on decades of labor-market data and audio recordings, researchers found that workers whose communication style matched a workplace’s norm were more likely to be tapped for the “people-oriented, socially intensive roles” that often result in career.