Vocabulary Bank

the named noun a later pronoun refers back to — the anchor that, when absent, turns a fluent sentence into a litigable one

the closed meeting in which managers defend their rankings — the room in which every unresolved pronoun on paper becomes an unresolved decision

the closed meeting at which managers rank their people against a common standard — the room in which every 'they' and 'the team' has to resolve to a named individual

Scott's paired discipline — the emotional register and the referential precision that together carry a difficult conversation

the individual, dated, signed roadmap the difficult conversation lands into — the antecedent the closing sentence of the paragraph refers forward to

the promotion-denied, performance-managed or exit conversation whose failure mode is a paragraph the manager cannot, in advance, resolve every reference in

the two-axis (performance × potential) talent-review artefact whose captions are the paragraph a competent people function's reference discipline is tested on

an 'it', 'this', 'they' or 'the team' with no named anchor a stranger to the room can locate on the page

the short, high-frequency employee-sentiment instrument — the dated source a substitution like 'the team also thinks so' has to be unpicked into

the deliberate check, sentence by sentence, that every pronoun and substitution in a talent paper resolves to a named antecedent

the sequence of pronouns and noun phrases across a paragraph that all point to the same person or thing — the chain a promotion paper is defended on

the short summary a stranger to the room can, without asking, locate every antecedent for

the failure mode in which a manager, to spare feelings, writes an un-anchored paragraph that resolves nothing and helps no one

'the team also thinks so' → 'the pulse survey of 14 March endorsed the same view' — a substitution replaced by a full reference and a date

the named-and-dated map of who covers whom in the counterfactual case — the document whose pronouns cannot, on any page, be left un-anchored

the register the people function has, over years, allowed its own decisions to be recorded in — and by which its next difficult conversation is either helped or humiliated

the sentence a rejected candidate or a mediator repeats to the manager six months later — the failure test for the reference chain

the diagnostic — a manager who cannot draft the opening in advance has not resolved the antecedent of its pronouns