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    Strategic Translation

    Taking a decision made somewhere else and putting it into terms the person in front of you can act on — so it becomes something they help shape rather than something handed down. The test is not whether they understood you. It is whether they could say, in their own words, what is different about their work.

    Your team member heard the headline and it meant nothing. She'll ask once what it means for her work.

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    15Skill
    Signals
    Research Prevalence
    No. 8

    15.6%

    of the 11,359 leadership cases in our research

    Report 01, draft

    Why it's hard

    The strategy is obvious to you. You've lived with it for months. Everyone else is hearing it for the first time, and nobody cares about a solution until they agree there's a problem.

    So it's tempting to broadcast: present the plan, sound more certain than you are, and keep your own doubts to yourself.

    Translating strategy means connecting it to what people actually do all day, and being honest about what you don't know yet.

    What we look for

    Here is an example of some of the Skill Signals that we teach you how to implement and then test for as you progress with this skill

    Skill Signal Groups
    • Making it concrete
    • Connecting it
    • Checking it landed
    • When you disagree with it
    • Closing
    Some sample Skill Signals

    1. You said what changes for this person

    2. You named a specific example from their work

    3. You asked them to say it back

    A sample of 15 Skill Signals. The assessment also looks for behaviours we don’t list.

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    One four-minute conversation from Strategic Translation. See your initial feedback straight away, then save your results with a free account.

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    No account to start. No card. Your employer can't see how you did.

    How your practice stays private

    Questions about this moment.

    Individual contributor: Low; First-line manager: High; Mid-level leader: Core; Executive: Core. Low relevance means the moment is not offered at that level.

    It appears in 15.6% of 11,359 real leadership cases in draft Research Report 01.

    The assessment uses 15 observational markers across 5 groups. This page shows only a small sample, because held-out assessment depends on some behaviours remaining unseen.