I recently ran a poll on LinkedIn about leadership pressure and what the biggest cause of leadership frustration was. The answer that came from the poll was that communication was a key frustration in leadership teams.
It wasn’t really a surprise to me, in over 20 years of working with professional service business owners, I have seen how often communication becomes a recurring source of frustration. It shows upthrough repeated practical frustrations, things like:
• Repeated questions
• Missed expectations
• Unclear handovers
• Difficult client messages
• Team hesitation
In this article, we will explore what might be going on beneath the surface of these things, not to apportion blame to anyone in the team including the leader. My aim is to give a better understanding about what communication is actually revealing, as communication is often where leadership pressure shows up and becomes the most visible.
Communication breakdown is often not just about unclear words, it is about pressure, interpretation, responsibility and the patterns people have learned inside the business. The causes of this breakdown are intensified in professional service firms because of the desire to maintain standards, quality and reputation and delivering an excellent client experience.
Communication is often the surface issue
In businesses there is often an intersection between communication, lack of accountability and an overlap in the different priorities of individuals.
The results of the leadership pressure poll recognised all three aspects but by far poor communication was the one that was voted for the most, and that happens because communication is the part that is easiest to see.
This shows up in a number of practical ways:
• People saying that they haven’t been told about something
• A variation in how people interpret urgency
• Hesitation from employees, where they are waiting for clarification
• People avoiding saying what they really think or feel
• Leaders having to repeat the same instructions over and over again
Many businesses and leaders want to do better and will overtly ask ‘how do we communicate better?’, but things don’t seem to improve. There are a number of reasons why not, but the most obvious one is that the question itself is too broad, what types of communication are you referring to?
Also, with that question you are looking at the symptom rather than the root cause.
A better question to start to truly make a difference to how you communicate is to ask yourself, ‘what is our communication telling us about pressure, clarity and ownership?’
Communication under leadership pressure
Communication under leadership pressure is rarely only about the words being used. I have talked in previous blog posts about how certain patterns repeat in businesses and how those patterns become more noticeable and automatic under pressure. But there is also an importantl ink here to communication too.
When we are under pressure our focus becomes narrower because there is less space to pause, reflect and consciously choose how we respond. Instead, we return to what feels known, what feels most reliable in that moment, the things that give us a sense of control or security.
This can show up in everyday moments and naturally formed habits:
• Stepping in to offer a solution
• Answering questions perhaps before someone else has had chance to try
• Smoothing things over
• Avoiding difficult conversations
• Tightening controls
• Being more direct.
These responses are formed from our habits,but they also make sense because in the moment they feel like the right thing to do. It feels like being efficient, or responsible or even protective, how those habits land can vary significantly from one person to another.
What feels like good intention doesn’t always land in the same way. Where you as the leader feel you are offering clarity can feel like criticism to someone else. Your stronger sense of urgency can feel like mounting pressure, and stepping in and taking over can feel like closing down a discussion.
When good intentions land differently
What start out as good intentions can quickly separate from the impact that those actions have on someone else.
Let’s explore this in a simple example.
A leader sends an email that simply says “Can we all move faster on these client responses please?” you would think that it conveys one message that will be received the same by everyone.
In reality, that same email can be taken in numerous ways.
One person will take it as a practical nudge and might be glad of the prompt, another might hear this as criticism that they are personally not handling things quickly enough. Another could take this on board as pressure to succeed or deliver, or perhaps they might not react at all.
Why?
The challenge is that when it comes to communication nothing lands in a neutral space.
What I mean by that is that every message,spoken or written, lands with the person receiving it and their response is based from how they have interpreted things from their different internal starting points. Starting points that are based on their personality, their beliefs, their past experiences, which I have shared more about in this article.
On top of the different internal starting points, your employees will also respond based on the expectations they have of themselves and the expectations they believe you have for them as well as the current level of pressure that they are experiencing.
That means that things like an urgent client message, a deadline reminder or a quality correction on work reviewed and be heard very differently across a team.
Unclear ownership makes communication heavier
Most business owners don’t overtly go about creating a culture that means everything is dependent on them. I wrote more about how accountability isn’t something that can be asked for and how it grows over time, even amongst good employees, in a previous blog.
But the short message from that blog that is relevant here is that when responsibility, authority and expectations are not clear, then stepping up feels risky.
Over time your team will learn what feels safe, what’s expected, what’s rewarded and what happens when things go wrong. If they inadvertently learn that making mistakes is risky and it is safer not to act, then they will keep checking, waiting or deferring to you for decisions.
One of the easiest mistakes to make in leadership is to assume that repeated questions are mainly a capability issue. Sometimes it is that there is a clarity issue, perhaps they don’t feel that they have all the information they need, or maybe they feel that they are being given responsibility for things that they don’t have enough authority for or it could simply be a confidence issue.
If you are looking for a way to use communication to strengthen your team’s ownership then the next time you get a repeated question ask yourself whether you have:
• Given sufficient detail that they understand what is being asked of them
• Made it clear what the expected outcome is and what good looks like
• Have they got sufficient authority to take on the responsibility
Silence is also communication
When someone leaves a business, leaders often say, “I didn’t know they were unhappy” and usually that’s because the signs were quiet.
Most people don’t leave without communicating anything at all, what tends to happen first is that they stop communicating in certain ways.
Here are a few early warning signs you might spot:
• asking fewer questions
• offering less ideas or suggestions
• stop sharing concerns
• reticence to volunteer opinions
• challenging decisions less
The challenge comes when business owners interpret this silence as an automatic agreement to what they are sharing. At some level, this can feel easier for the business owner, or it seems that the employee is a steady pair of hands, has confidence or independence. But more likely to the employee it is a form of adapting their communication as a form of self-protection.
The reason being that people learn very quickly what feels safe to say and do and what feels easier or better to keep to themselves.
This is where involving someone independent to work with your team can help open dialogues that the employee might not want to share initially with you as their employer, no matter how approachable you are.
How communication patterns shape culture
Culture is often talked about in an operational way but there is more to culture than just what is overtly said, your culture is shaped by the everyday communication patterns people experience repeatedly
The way that decisions are made, how mistakes are handled and how consistently and actively leaders listen as well as how pressure changes the tone all have influence on the culture you create and experience.
Ultimately it is about how you show up in those small moments, and the repeated communication habits you demonstrate, indirectly teach your people what is expected, what is safe, where the authority sits and whether it is worthwhile them speaking up.
The culture you create is shaped heavily by communication as when communication feels unclear, unsafe or draining, people may either withdraw or keep escalating decisions upward which creates a culture of dependency rather than ownership.
Practical ways to create more clarity and ownership
When you are thinking about communication there are a few helpful things that you can consider:
• Clarify what good looks like before expecting ownership.
• Notice what pressure is present and how it may be shaping the response.
• Check what was heard, not only what was said.
• Notice your own default response when something feels urgent, important or risky.
• Replace “Why don’t they understand?” with “What have they learned from how we usually communicate here?”
Communication has historically been known as a ‘soft skill’, something extra that is a nice to have, but I believe that this view is now outdated. It is one of the ways that leadership pressure travels through a business and in the face of the increasing technological advances, in particular AI, effective communication is becoming vital to maintain human connection.
I will leave you with this question to consider:
Think of one recurring communicationfrustration in your business.
What might it be revealing about pressure, ownership, clarity or culture?
I’ll be exploring this further in my upcoming webinar, Why Good People Misunderstand Each Other at Work, where we’ll look at why communication breaks down, why people interpret situations differently, and what sits underneath behaviour at work.
