Brooks holds a PhD in decision processes from Wharton and is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration in HBS’s Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit. Her research is on emotion and conversation, how people talk and mistalk under social pressure, published in JPSP, Psychological Science, OBHDP, and PNAS. She teaches an MBA elective built entirely around conversational skill.
Her relevance here is that she studies the mechanics of the thing a calibration call is: a conversation with a stranger where the asker needs information the other person has not organised for them. “The Surprising Power of Questions,” written with Leslie John for HBR in 2018, is what Management Craft cites for two specific moves. Asking follow-ups so the other person knows you are listening, and offering an escape hatch that lets them revise an answer, which makes them say more. One caution the page records: the tone finding in that literature manipulated a website’s visual design, not spoken tone, so it does not license claims about how you sound on a call.