It gets classified as a soft skill, which places it alongside rapport and approachability, and implies that the hard work of leadership happens elsewhere and is then communicated.
The classification is wrong in a way that costs organizations a great deal. A decision that has not been transmitted has not occurred. Judgment that stays inside one head changes nothing. Communication is not the reporting layer on top of leadership; it is the mechanism through which every other part of the job takes effect.
It is also the only part anybody sees
Consider what an employee three levels down can actually observe about the person running their organization.
Not the decisions, which they see only as outcomes with the reasoning stripped out. Not the judgment, which is invisible by construction. Not the hours, the pressure, or the things declined. What they observe is a small set of communicative acts: what was said at the all-hands, how a question was answered, the tone of a memo, and what happened when somebody raised a problem in a meeting they happened to attend.
From that material they construct a complete model of the leader, and they act on it. This produces a durable asymmetry: a leader with excellent judgment and poor communication will be assessed as having poor judgment, because the judgment is not available for inspection and the communication is. The reverse also holds, which is how organizations end up led by people who are articulate about things they have not thought through.
Transmission, not expression
The distinction that organizes the rest of this chapter is between communication as expression and communication as transmission.
Expression is concerned with conveying what is in your mind. It is satisfying, it feels like honesty, and its success criterion is whether you said what you meant.
Transmission is concerned with what ends up in somebody else’s mind and what they do differently as a result. Its success criterion sits entirely outside you, and by that criterion a great deal of sincere, articulate, well-intentioned communication simply fails.
A leader who has explained the strategy three times and finds that nobody is acting on it has usually expressed it three times. The question that separates the two is not whether it was said clearly. It is what a person hearing it is now supposed to do on Monday that differs from what they did last Monday, and whether that was ever specified.
Position distorts everything you send
The same words carry differently depending on who says them, and leaders consistently underestimate the multiplier on their own.
A speculative remark becomes a directive. A question about whether something has been considered becomes an instruction to consider it. Mild displeasure becomes a warning. Thinking out loud, which is how many capable people work through problems, becomes a set of signals that people act on before you have reached a conclusion.
The remedy is not to say less. It is to mark what you are doing. I am thinking out loud and have not decided anything. This is a question rather than a hint. That is a decision. Three seconds of labelling prevents a category of expensive misunderstanding that would otherwise be attributed to the organization being poor at listening.
Repetition is the cost of transmission
Leaders reliably underestimate how many times a message must be delivered, and they underestimate it by a large factor rather than a small one.
The reason is straightforward once stated. You have thought about the matter for weeks. The announcement is the culmination of a long internal process for you and a first exposure for everybody else, arriving in the middle of their own concerns on an ordinary Tuesday. By the time you are thoroughly tired of saying it, most of the organization has heard it perhaps twice and retained it once.
Repetition feels condescending from the inside and is not experienced that way from the outside. What is experienced as condescending is being told something in a manner that implies you should already have understood it, which is a matter of framing rather than frequency.
What this chapter covers
The subchapters that follow treat the instruments separately, because they fail in different ways and are learned separately.
Foundations deals with what communication is for and the difference between clarity and simplicity. Written and Spoken cover the two channels and the specific disciplines each demands. Difficult Conversations addresses the exchanges most leaders avoid and defer. Listening treats inquiry as an information system rather than a courtesy. Institutional Voice concerns speaking for an organization rather than for yourself, including the particular obligations that attach to public bodies. Persuasion deals with making a case that moves people who are not required to agree with you.
Throughout, the test is the same and it is not whether the thing was said well. It is whether the person on the other end now knows what to do.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD