"Succession" and the Social Styles: “Unreadable” Kendall

HBO’s Succession: Kendall Roy

Succession’s pilot sets up the dynamic between Logan and Kendall that propels the series’s most emotionally compelling, and devastating, relationship.

We enter the Roy universe in the series pilot just as the intended succession is about to happen - Logan will announce Kendall as his successor as CEO of Waystar Royco. But within the first half of the episode, we see Logan pull his confidence and change his mind.

How do Kendall and Logan’s communication styles factor into their relationship’s ultimate outcome: Kendall’s name in a legal document indeterminately underlined or crossed out?

Recall from the first article in this series that Logan is viewing others from his position in the Social Style matrix as tell-assertive and controlling emotions: the Driving Style. Where is Kendall in the matrix?

Let’s start with observing behavior on the responsiveness scale: does Kendall display or control emotions in his communications?

In this week’s episode (season 4, episode 5 “Kill List”), Kendall and Roman board the team jet after their mountaintop attempt to “Scooby Doo” Mattson away from acquiring Waystar. When one of the execs tries to discern the deal’s status from the brothers’ moods, Hugo the PR flack says “Ken’s unreadable. It’s Roman you wanna eyeball.”

So people perceive Kendall and Roman differently when it comes to displaying emotions. Roman, as we detailed in the last article, favors displaying emotions rather than controlling them. Kendall favors controlling emotions.

If Social Style theory is correct, then we trust people who are closer to our own style more than we trust others. So wouldn’t Logan, who also favors controlling emotions, trust Kendall rather than Roman? We need to understand Kendall’s behavior on the assertiveness scale, the other measure in Social Style, to get the answer.

The assertiveness scale measures whether you tend to express your assertiveness through commands or through requests (”tell” assertive versus “ask” assertive). In the first article in this series, we establish that Logan is clearly “tell” assertive.

Can we find evidence that Kendall is at the other side of the spectrum, or “ask” assertive? In season 3’s “Too Much Birthday”, remember the coat incident with Connor at Kendall’s bash? Kendall has told the staff no coats allowed, however Connor chooses to “remain coated, as is my right”. Kendall avoids confronting Connor directly and directs his staff with a question, rather than a command: “Can we get Connor to lose his coat?”

A short time later, we are forever deprived of a Kendall performance destined to be even more iconic than his fanboy Logan rap: a descent from above, dressed in a tuxedo, nailed to a cross, singing “Honesty” by Billy Joel. But it’s the way he tells us he’s out that reveals his preferred style:

“Yeah…you know what? I don’t think I’m gonna do this.” Two key tells in that sentence:

• His delivery is careful and slightly hesitant.

• He uses the words “I don’t think…” rather than “I don’t feel like doing this”

Kendall favors an Analytical style, which is characterized by deliberate speech patterns and an orientation toward thinking more than acting or feeling.

What other behavior can we observe? Analytical style backup behavior, the preferred way to respond to tension and reduce it, is avoidance. Is cradling oneself fully clothed in a soaking tub after blowing up your father at a live press conference avoidance? I’d say yes.

It’s this difference between Logan and Kendall that matters the most to Logan. In the pilot, Kendall’s “18 months of corporate strategy” creating the succession doesn’t matter to Logan, because Logan thinks Kendall avoided a tough situation with Vaulter’s CEO rather than seeing that it was a very specific kind of NSFW-labeled competition. What ultimately wins Logan's trust instead is Roman’s spontaneous, instinct-driven actions later in the series (especially when targeting Mattson for acquisition in the first place).

Finally, why is Kendall able to resist Logan’s attempts to woo the siblings with verbal declarations of love? Recall that Kendall responds with a cynical “Did Dad just say a feeling?”

Each Social Style is associated with a underlying primary motivator, or need. For Roman, with his Expressive style, that need is social recognition - he needs Logan’s social capital for his own success, so he’s willing to overlook Logan’s abuse. For Kendall, the need is to be right. Kendall knows that Logan’s Ailes-era values risk ultimately driving Waystar into the ground, and he is content enough in that understanding to set fire to the bridges that Logan attempts to build. It’s impressive that he can stay this course even with his tendency to self-destruct, because it’s his favorite.

Next up, we will look at why Connor isn’t the heir apparent (which should be really apparent, but let’s do it anyway through the Social Style lens).

PS: My own favored style is Analytical, so you’d conclude from everything I said above about Social Style that Kendall would be my favorite character. But after his epic takedown of “Dogman” Mattson on the summit, Roman is my favorite. For now.

PPS: Hanna-Barbara Business School should really be a thing. Who wants to crowdfund this with me?

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