Why the best leaders say things more than once, more than one way
For years, one idea has quietly shaped how leaders are trained to communicate: that people learn best when you match your delivery to their preferred style — visual, auditory, reading, kinaesthetic. It sounds intuitive. It has also been tested for roughly fifteen years, and the research verdict is unambiguous: it doesn’t work. Matching instruction to someone’s stated learning style produces no measurable improvement in outcomes (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer & Bjork, 2008). The brain does not have separate channels waiting to be unlocked by the right delivery format.
What actually works is far more useful, and far more within a leader’s control: multimodal communication — explaining an idea more than one way. This consistently outperforms any single “matched” style, for everyone, regardless of what they claim to prefer.