The Signals Leaders Give Away in Earnings Calls (And Why It Matters)

Dec 11

If you want to understand a company, don’t start with its ads. Start with its earnings call.

That’s how I ended up listening to Cracker Barrel last weekend, of all places.

You know the story: The $700M rebrand. The internet uproar. The sudden national fixation on a rocking chair. When the earnings call dropped, I wanted to hear how the CEO would address it.

Julie Masino opened with: “We misstepped, and guests cared deeply.”
Arguably, she met the moment because the backlash had escalated past aesthetics. People were questioning her judgment, her read on the customer, even her right to be there.

That made me curious about how other leaders handle the same pressure. So, I listened to a few more calls.

Tim Cook at Apple stays contained. Financial review has called him "boring." He says things like: “Apple has always been about taking the most advanced technologies and making them easy to use and accessible for everyone.” A tone designed to settle the room before anyone gets anxious.

Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan is more blunt. “There’s a deep recognition of the flaws in the system, and there should be.” One sentence that states the reality and reinforces that he understands it.

Alex Karp at Palantir chooses a completely different register. “Palantir is not a normal company. If you want normal, you should go somewhere else.” No ambiguity or attempt to be interpreted any other way.

They are all doing the same thing, but the language makes them entirely different leaders.

Listening to them back to back made something obvious: language tells the truth long before the strategy does.

It shows whether someone understands what needs to be said, and whether they’re willing to say it without outsourcing the meaning to page 125 of a 150-page deck.

This is where a lot of us lose clarity.

Not because we don’t know what we’re doing, but because we’re trying to sound like the version of “professional” we think people want. If the voice is over-managed, people stop hearing the point.

Cracker Barrel didn’t reverse its situation with one clean sentence, but that sentence showed they weren’t hiding from it.

The call didn’t promise a revival. It acknowledged the reality: sales are lagging, the recovery is slow, and the rebrand created a real disconnect. Revenue fell about 3 percent year over year, and traffic is expected to decline again in 2026, but the backlash wasn’t the undoing the media coverage made it out to be. What mattered was that leadership finally spoke to the moment instead of spinning it.

Leaders like these CEOs hear feedback fast.
The rest of us hear it from the people who rely on us, and most don’t respond to perfect language.

A recent study found something obvious once you say it out loud.
When a leader uses polished jargon, people trust them less.

People don’t want the performance of competence.
They want to hear someone who actually knows what they’re saying.

Does your writing do that?