The ENRICH Communication Skills Assessment

ENRICH Edition

The ENRICH edition examines what the standard measure misses: communication competence in environments where the rules are unequal. Where assertiveness is read as aggression. Where code-switching is survival, not adaptation. Where active listening is complicated by hypervigilance. This report gives you an accurate picture of your communication profile -- and tells the truth about what specific dynamics you are navigating.

ENRICH EDITION

This ENRICH Edition accounts for the additional layer of communication that ENRICH professionals carry: the continuous calibration required to navigate how your communication is perceived through an identity lens. The Agentic Penalty means the same directness that reads as confident in a non-ENRICH colleague may read as aggressive in you. This edition measures your communication skill with that reality acknowledged.

What this assessment measures

Verbal Expression

Assertiveness

Active Listening

Social Insight

Emotional Communication

Your report includes

An overall score with tier classification
A score and bar graph for all 5 scales
A full personalized narrative for every scale -- not generic text, but language written directly to your score
A Strengths and Development summary
Targeted advice aligned to your lowest-scoring areas
ENRICH-contextualized interpretation for every scale
A print-ready report you can save as PDF

23 questions. ~15 min. Your report generates immediately.

$57 One-time purchase. Permanent access.

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Please Confirm the Following

This assessment is a professional development tool. Please read and confirm each statement before proceeding.

This is an assessment, not a test. There is no right or wrong answer, no pass or fail -- be honest with your responses. Do not answer what you think is best or correct; answer the truth for you as you know it.

I understand that this assessment captures tendencies and patterns -- not fixed limitations. The ENRICH lens reflects systemic dynamics, not personal deficits.

I will use these results for professional strategy and development -- not as confirmation of grievances or as evidence in workplace disputes.

I understand this assessment is part of the DKA Toolkit ENRICH framework and is designed to be used alongside Duane K. Andrews' course content and the 17 Keys.

Communication Load Communication for ENRICH professionals involves an additional layer that standard communication assessments do not measure: the continuous calibration required to navigate how your communication is perceived through an identity lens. The same directness, volume, or certainty that reads as confident in a non-ENRICH colleague may read as aggressive, difficult, or inappropriate in an ENRICH professional. This is the Agentic Penalty applied to communication specifically. Ella Bell and Stella Nkomo's research on bicultural navigation documents the cognitive cost of this continuous calibration. Your scores reflect your communication competence -- and also the tax of operating it in conditions that make communication more complex.

Maria -- Colombian immigrant marketing manager

Maria's communication scores would have been excellent in any environment. In practice, her ideas were consistently heard in silence and then reapproved when a white colleague restated them. Her tone was policed -- she was told her accent made her hard to follow in one review and praised for her international perspective in the next. Her actual communication development was not about skill. It was about building structures that made her contributions undeniable: written pre-meeting summaries, direct attribution requests, recorded presentations that created a paper trail. She did not improve her communication. She engineered her environment to receive it accurately.

James -- Black senior director

James was a genuinely skilled communicator -- clear, direct, persuasive. He was also routinely described in performance reviews as abrasive for communication that his white peers delivered without that label. He stopped trying to soften his style and started documenting the differential. When he presented the pattern to the CHRO with three years of review language compared side by side, the conversation changed. He did not become less direct. He became more strategic about who witnessed his communication and how it was documented.

Engineer Your Communication Environment. When your communication is excellent but is not landing equitably, the problem is not your skill -- it is the channel, the audience, or the documentation. Build structures that make your communication irrefutable: written summaries before and after key conversations, direct attribution practices, a pattern of presenting your analysis before meetings where it might otherwise be absorbed by colleagues. Communication strategy includes environment engineering, not just skill development.

Know When Staying Is the Strategy and When Leaving Is. Some communication environments apply a standard to ENRICH professionals that no amount of skill development will equalize. If your communication has been excellent and consistently penalized or distorted, the honest question is whether you are in a context that can receive you accurately -- or one that will always require you to over-explain, over-document, and over-justify. That distinction should inform your long-term decisions.

Scholar Sources
Sources informing this ENRICH analysis: Dnika Travis (Emotional Tax research), Joan Williams (Prove-It-Again Bias, the double bind), Ashleigh Shelby Rosette (shifting standards for ENRICH leaders), Claude Steele (stereotype threat), William A. Smith (Racial Battle Fatigue), Arline Geronimus (weathering and cumulative physiological cost), Ella Bell & Stella Nkomo (bicultural stress, ENRICH women in organizations), Tressie McMillan Cottom (credential inflation for Black professionals), Quinetta Roberson (organizational justice and ENRICH professionals). Duane K. Andrews, Leading Up While Standing Out: The 17 Keys for ENRICH Outsiders.