"Succession's" Style Twins: How Logan and Shiv's Matching Social Style Builds and Dooms the Only Daughter

Who is the Succession character you most want to go shopping and why is it Shiv? It’s because despite those stealth-wealth monotone neutral ensembles, you know she’s not going to fade quietly into any scenery.

Season 4 of Succession gives Logan Roy's daughter a juicy storyline full of heartbreak (or is it schadenfreude?). What's amazing is that the show has inspired all sorts of instructional articles, from dissecting the characters' sartorial choices to analyzing power dynamics. So, hopping on that bandwagon, here's my fifth article in a series about using the Social Style model of communication to explain Logan's choices in the succession battle.

According to research on Social Style, more than two-thirds of people perceive their communication style differently from how others see it. Basically, most of us have no clue how we're really coming across to others, and that's messing with our relationships.

This model measures our verbal and non-verbal communication on two separate scales: responsiveness and assertiveness. Putting them together gives us a four-quadrant matrix.

In previous articles, we dove into all four quadrants by examining Logan's Driving style, Roman's Expressive style, Kendall's Analytical style, and Connor's Amiable style.

Now let’s see how Shiv appears to others based on her communication style and how that influences her position in Logan’s succession battle.

[Spoilers ahead!]

Shiv keeps her emotions in check when she communicates, favoring pithy sarcastic asides and reacting to her family’s antics with subtle eye movements and sly smirks. Her communication with Tom contains a spousal coldness only rivaled on screen by The Crown’s Queen Elizabeth. So on the responsiveness scale, she’s in either the Analytical or the Driving style quadrant.

To determine which of those two styles she favors, we need to place her on the assertiveness scale. She talks fast, but this can be misleading. As a native New Yorker, speedy speech is par for the course. Shiv generally favors imperative or declarative sentences when seeking to influence others. Out of the four siblings, Shiv is the most likely to jump in and speak directly without waiting for an invitation. And at least one executive management team member reads Shiv as tell-assertive (aka “pushy” depending on where you sit on the style matrix).

Now, let's dig into her backup behavior to gain more insight. Each style has a corresponding go-to behavior that can be observed when people are under pressure.

When tension rises in Shiv's world, she tends to take charge and control the situation instead of avoiding it, attacking directly, or giving in. At the beginning of Season 3, when she perceives Kendall's revelations about the cruise lines as a threat to Waystar and her newly appointed presidency, she takes unilateral action with a press release lamenting his mental health and addiction issues. Later, when she feels Rhea Jarrell is getting in her way with Logan, she schemes to trip her up by dropping hints to Marcia about an affair, planting a reference to deceased-under-questionable-circumstances Aunt Rose into Rhea’s toast, and pointing out Rhea's temperance to show Logan she's manipulating him.

Her tendency to control emotions and assert herself through action place Shiv in the Driving style. Out of all four siblings, Shiv’s communication places her closest to Logan in style.

When our style is similar to someone else’s, we tend to trust them more quickly. Call it a sense of comfort that develops because, depending on where we rest in the spectrum of responsiveness or assertiveness, the other person doesn’t look too far away.

So to Logan, Shiv looks decisive and serious like him, a wide gap away from Kendall’s hesitant communication, Roman’s irreverence, and Connor’s softness. This is why she gets the nod from Logan to be the “one” after Logan concludes early on in the series that Kendall is too indecisive.

So if Logan taps her because of her similarity in style to his, how does she lose Logan’s support for her campaign to become CEO? I’ll speculate outside of the Social Style model here and say it’s Logan’s narcissistic need to control his fear of death - or worse, irrelevance.

Remember the moment when he begins to put her on ice? At Tern Haven, when Logan is coy about naming his successor, Shiv blurts out to all the Roys and Pierces at dinner that she’s next in line (classic autocratic behavior under tension), undermining Logan’s control of the situation. Perhaps his ego was already triggered by Marcia’s swipe at his “New World” wine cellar, but the result is Logan backs away from backing Shiv.

Logan eventually sees Shiv's confidence and cunning as a threat. In contrast, Roman's eagerness for Logan's approval is something he can manage (manipulate?). Ultimately, we learn Logan isn't interested in establishing any succession, and the limited trust Shiv, Roman, and Kendall offer to Logan throughout the battle proves foolish and wasted. Maybe Connor is the smartest sibling after all?

At this point, let's see the Roy family portrait on the Social Style matrix:

Coming up next: how do we use Social Style to interpret the rest of the crowd?

I'll be hosting a live, cohort-based course on Social Styles this summer on the Maven virtual platform. Click here to get on the list to join:?https://maven.com/forms/5ea918