What you say about senior people/leadership is pretty accurate, although I'm not sure that the directness is their 'true' comms style. My experience with people at that level is that it's really hard to tell what their true communication style is and they may not have one because they've spent their whole life switching their style to fit the room.
I'd say the difference between a lower-class direct communication style and an upper-class one is that the upper-class can speak indirectly, they choose not to. Whereas the lower-class is gatekept out of such things absent some other influence (institutions, formerly well off family members, etc.) So the professional class uses the register to determine the difference between the guy who's wearing jeans because he grew up in hick country and doesn't own any 'nice' clothes and the guy who's wearing jeans because he's so important he doesn't need to follow the rules.
This is also why there's a lot of friction between the professional classes and engineering. Engineering has status and yet a great deal of them are intractable and refuse to adapt, which reads as "you're beneath me because the rules apply to you but not to me". (Of course the engineers are just like 'the rules are stupid and arbitrary' because class distinctions don't matter a ton to them/us in comparison. Like if there were rules about what language to use depending on your height compared to the other person's. Who cares?) I'd say this happened because techies developed a culture of their own before being subsumed into the dominant socio-economic apparatus.
There are some other differences between lower-class and upper-class direct speech, mostly in diction. I'm very good at code-switching and one of my favorite things to do is find a group of good professional progressives and then call their diversity bluff by deliberately switching from a professional register to a working-class/poor one and watch them try to deal with the cognitive dissonance. It's great fun.
It's also something to watch because as you've noted, those in high places speak differently depending on their opinion of you. It's a good way to figure out what they think of you and it can be really interesting to see what flips them from "this person is a peon/useful for their interchangable ability(abilities) I need at this point" to "this person is unique enough/has enough connections/etc. to be worth cultivating in the future."
I'd say the difference between a lower-class direct communication style and an upper-class one is that the upper-class can speak indirectly, they choose not to. Whereas the lower-class is gatekept out of such things absent some other influence (institutions, formerly well off family members, etc.) So the professional class uses the register to determine the difference between the guy who's wearing jeans because he grew up in hick country and doesn't own any 'nice' clothes and the guy who's wearing jeans because he's so important he doesn't need to follow the rules.
This is also why there's a lot of friction between the professional classes and engineering. Engineering has status and yet a great deal of them are intractable and refuse to adapt, which reads as "you're beneath me because the rules apply to you but not to me". (Of course the engineers are just like 'the rules are stupid and arbitrary' because class distinctions don't matter a ton to them/us in comparison. Like if there were rules about what language to use depending on your height compared to the other person's. Who cares?) I'd say this happened because techies developed a culture of their own before being subsumed into the dominant socio-economic apparatus.
There are some other differences between lower-class and upper-class direct speech, mostly in diction. I'm very good at code-switching and one of my favorite things to do is find a group of good professional progressives and then call their diversity bluff by deliberately switching from a professional register to a working-class/poor one and watch them try to deal with the cognitive dissonance. It's great fun.
It's also something to watch because as you've noted, those in high places speak differently depending on their opinion of you. It's a good way to figure out what they think of you and it can be really interesting to see what flips them from "this person is a peon/useful for their interchangable ability(abilities) I need at this point" to "this person is unique enough/has enough connections/etc. to be worth cultivating in the future."