There is a game many of us played while growing up where several people stand in a line, one person whispers a sentence to the first person, and each person passes the message to the next until it reaches the end. By the time the last person says the message aloud, it is usually very different from what was originally said. Sometimes the meaning has changed slightly, but in other cases, the final message has almost nothing to do with the original one.
Now imagine making the game more complicated by including people who do not all understand the same language. Perhaps the original message is spoken in French, but only some people in the line understand French while the others primarily speak English. The message will not merely become distorted as it travels; some people will have to interpret unfamiliar words, fill gaps with assumptions and pass along what they think they heard. By the time it reaches the final person, the message may sound coherent while being completely wrong.
This is what happens inside many growing companies.
When a company is small, communication appears easy because the founder can speak directly to almost everyone. There are fewer people, fewer departments and fewer layers between a decision and the person expected to execute it. The founder can explain an idea in the morning, answer questions during the day and correct misunderstandings before they become expensive.
As the company grows, however, information begins to travel through several people before it reaches the person responsible for acting on it. A decision moves from the founder to a leader, from the leader to a manager and from the manager to members of the team. Every person hears the message through the filter of their own understanding, experience, priorities and sometimes their own insecurity. Unless the company has built a disciplined system for communicating clearly, the message gradually changes while everybody continues to believe that they understand it.
This is why companies often grow until communication breaks. Growth does not always stop because the market has disappeared, the product has failed or the company has run out of opportunities. Sometimes growth stops because information can no longer travel accurately through the organization.
The leader carries the responsibility for clarity
One of the most frustrating experiences for a leader is watching people do something completely different from what you believed you asked them to do. You explain what you want, wait for the outcome and discover that the team has produced something else entirely. The immediate temptation is to conclude that people are not listening or that they are simply incapable of doing the work.
Sometimes that conclusion may be correct, but it should not be the first conclusion.
I believe that the initial responsibility rests with the leader to ensure that communication is clear. It is not enough for me to know what I mean. I have to communicate it in a way that allows the other person to understand what I mean, what outcome I expect, why it matters, when it must be delivered and how we will know that it has been done properly.
This is where leadership becomes difficult, because what appears obvious inside the leader’s mind may not be obvious to anybody else. The leader may have spent several months thinking about a problem, observing customers, reviewing data and gradually arriving at a decision. The team, however, may be hearing the decision for the first time during a thirty-minute meeting. If the leader communicates only the conclusion without explaining the relevant context, the team will have to fill in the missing information themselves.
When people fill those gaps with assumptions, the company begins playing the communication game in which the original message becomes less accurate each time it is transmitted.
This does not mean that employees have no responsibility. Once communication has been made clear, questions have been answered and expectations have been documented, repeatedly doing something entirely different raises another set of questions. At that point, the problem may no longer be communication. It may be incompetence, carelessness, laziness or insubordination, and a leader must be willing to identify the real issue and respond appropriately.
However, before arriving at that conclusion, the leader must first do the hard work of making clarity possible.
Questions do not undermine leadership
I have worked with leaders who did not want members of their teams asking too many questions. They appeared to believe that repeated requests for clarity undermined their competence or authority, so they became defensive when people asked them to explain a decision further.
I think that reaction often comes from insecurity.
A secure leader is not threatened by reasonable questions. In fact, questions can reveal where communication has failed before that failure becomes an operational problem. If several people leave a meeting with different interpretations of what was decided, the meeting did not produce clarity, regardless of how confidently the leader spoke.
Leaders must create an environment where people can ask, “What exactly do you mean?”, “Which outcome matters most?”, “Who owns this decision?”, “What must be completed first?” and “How will this be measured?” Those questions are not necessarily evidence that the team is difficult or unintelligent. Sometimes they are evidence that the message has not yet become clear enough to execute.
Of course, there is also a point where questions become a substitute for action. A team cannot continue asking the same questions after receiving clear answers simply because it is afraid to make a decision. Communication must eventually produce execution, because execution is the reason the communication exists in the first place.
The purpose of clarity is not to make meetings sound intelligent. It is to make coordinated action possible.
Write it down before you communicate it
One practice that has helped me is writing down what I want to communicate before presenting it to other people. Writing forces you to confront the gaps that remain hidden when an idea exists only in your head.
When you write an instruction, objective or strategy down, you begin to notice the assumptions you have made. You may discover that you have not explained why the work matters, who owns the outcome, what resources are available, what restrictions exist or what success should look like. You may also realise that you are using words that mean one thing to you but could mean something entirely different to the person receiving the message.
After writing it down, try presenting it before the actual meeting. Go through the explanation as though you were speaking to someone who has not been part of the conversations taking place in your head. A simple rehearsal will often expose missing context, conflicting instructions and questions that other people are likely to ask.
The more consequential the communication, the less a leader should rely on improvisation. Important decisions, strategic priorities, performance expectations and changes in direction should be written clearly enough that people can return to them after the meeting. Otherwise, everybody leaves with their own memory of what was said, and those memories will not always agree.
OKRs are communication tools
Companies often treat objectives and key results as performance-management documents, but OKRs are first instruments of communication. They translate what the company considers important into outcomes that teams and individuals can understand, prioritize and measure.
An objective should communicate where the organization is going, while the key results should explain what evidence will demonstrate that progress has been made. If the objective is vague, or the key results merely describe activities, people may remain busy without moving the company towards its most important goals.
The usual SMART framework asks whether a goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Regardless of the exact terminology used, the underlying question is whether the goal is clear enough for people to act on and precise enough for the company to determine whether it has been achieved.
This becomes more difficult across different departments because outcomes are not equally obvious everywhere. Sales can often be measured through revenue, conversion, pipeline quality and closed customers. Engineering can be measured through reliability, delivery and technical performance. Other functions, including marketing, product marketing and human resources, may require more thought because activity can easily be confused with impact.
A marketing team may publish content, organize events and run campaigns, but what outcome did those activities produce? A human-resources team may conduct training sessions, complete performance reviews and recruit employees, but did the company improve its ability to attract, retain and develop the people required to achieve its objectives?
It once took me more than three months of working with a team leader to identify the specific outcomes that genuinely needed to be measured for that department. That process was not wasted time. It was part of developing leadership capacity, because one of the responsibilities of a leader is translating the company’s objectives into outcomes that every department can understand and own.
If people do not know how their work connects to the company’s priorities, they will naturally optimize for the activities closest to them. They may complete their tasks, protect their departmental interests and report that they have done their jobs, while the company’s most important objective remains unachieved.
Communication must survive the organization
A company does not have clear communication merely because the founder communicates well. Communication is working only when the message can move through the organization without losing its meaning.
That means leaders must communicate with their teams, teams must communicate across departments and people must be willing to raise dependencies before they become delays. It also means decisions need to be documented, ownership must be visible and outcomes must be measurable. When a message reaches the final person responsible for execution, that person should understand the same essential objective that the founder or leadership team originally intended.
As companies grow, communication cannot continue to depend entirely on the founder being present in every conversation. The organization must develop a shared language, a reliable rhythm of meetings, written objectives and leaders who understand that passing information accurately is part of their job.
Growth increases the distance between intention and execution. Communication is what closes that distance.
When communication breaks, execution eventually breaks with it. Teams start solving different problems, departments protect their own priorities, leaders become frustrated and employees become confused about what truly matters. The company may still appear busy, but movement in many directions is not the same as progress.
The work of leadership is therefore not merely to have the right vision. It is to communicate that vision so clearly that people throughout the organization can make decisions and execute consistently without requiring the founder to translate it again every day.
A company can only grow as far as its ability to communicate clearly. Once information can no longer travel accurately, growth begins to slow, trust begins to weaken and execution becomes unreliable. The solution is not simply to communicate more, but to communicate with enough clarity, discipline and repetition that the organization continues to move as one.
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