Most communication failures are not failures of clarity. They are category errors: a message performing one function while the audience believes it is performing a different one.
There are four things a leader is ever doing when they communicate. Naming which one, before choosing any words, resolves more problems than any technique.
The four
Informing. Transferring facts somebody needs. Success is that they now know it and can act on it. This is the only one of the four that is genuinely simple, and it is the one most often overcomplicated.
Directing. Causing something to happen. Success is that a specific person does a specific thing by a specific time. A direction without those three elements is a wish, and it will be received as one.
Gathering. Extracting information that exists in other people’s heads. Success is that you now hold something you did not, including things you did not know to ask about. This one is almost entirely about the questions.
Aligning. Producing shared understanding of why something is being done, so that people can make decisions you are not present for. Success is not agreement. It is that somebody two levels down, facing an unanticipated situation, resolves it roughly as you would have.
The characteristic confusions
Each pairing fails in a recognisable way, and once named the failures are difficult to unsee.
Directing dressed as informing. I noticed the safety inspection is overdue. The leader has issued an instruction and believes they have made an observation. If the inspection does not happen, they will conclude the person is unresponsive, and the person will be genuinely puzzled, having received a remark.
Informing dressed as aligning. A forty-slide deck explaining a decision, delivered on the belief that understanding the detail produces buy-in. It does not. Alignment comes from understanding the reasoning, which is usually three sentences, and the remaining thirty-seven slides are a demonstration of thoroughness rather than a transfer of anything.
Gathering that is actually directing. Asking a room what they think when you have already decided. Covered elsewhere in this chapter as the impersonation, and it is the single most expensive of these.
Aligning attempted through directing. Issuing more detailed instructions in response to people making poor judgment calls in your absence. The instructions cover the anticipated cases and the problem was always the unanticipated ones. This is how organizations acquire procedure manuals that grow annually and never solve anything.
Alignment is the one that scales
The four are not equally important, and the imbalance is worth stating plainly.
Informing and directing operate on situations you already know about. Their reach is bounded by your own attention, which is the scarcest thing you have. Alignment operates on situations you will never hear about, and it is therefore the only one whose effect grows with the size of the organization rather than shrinking.
What alignment requires is that people can reconstruct your reasoning, not that they can recite your conclusions. A crew that knows the rule follows it where it applies. A crew that knows why the rule exists handles the case the rule did not anticipate, and that case is the one that determines whether the standard actually holds.
Which means the criterion for something being aligned is testable: can somebody explain, without you present, why the organization does this? If the answer is only that it is policy, no alignment has occurred regardless of how many times it was communicated.
Say which one you are doing
The practical instrument is small. Label the act, briefly, at the front.
This is for information, no action needed. This is a direction and I need it by Thursday. I want your views before I decide. I am explaining the reasoning because you will face cases this does not cover.
It reads as mechanical the first few times and stops doing so quickly. What it removes is the interpretive work everybody currently performs on your messages, which they perform imperfectly and privately, and which is the origin of a substantial share of what gets described as poor communication in an organization.
Choose the channel after the function
The four also have natural channels, and mismatching them is common.
Informing survives writing well and is wasted in a meeting. Directing needs writing, because the specifics have to persist and be checkable. Gathering requires presence, since the useful material arrives in hesitations and half-sentences that email removes. Aligning requires conversation and repetition, and is the one thing that cannot be accomplished by any document however well written.
A leader who circulates a strategy document and expects alignment has used an informing channel for an aligning task. The document is not wasted. It simply cannot do the thing it was sent to do.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD