The email lands: “Important Changes to Company Procedures.” Three paragraphs outlining a new process starting Monday. No prior consultation. No opportunity for questions. No explanation of the why behind the change.
Leadership genuinely believes they’ve communicated. Employees feel blindsided. Both sides are frustrated.
Sound familiar?
The Unintentional Gap
Most leadership teams aren’t deliberately excluding people. They’re juggling competing priorities, working under pressure, and genuinely trying to move things forward. In that context, sending a clear memo or email can feel like effective communication.
And technically, it is communication. Information has been transmitted. The box is ticked.
But communication without engagement is just broadcasting—and broadcasting rarely achieves what we actually need: understanding, buy-in, and successful implementation.
What Gets Lost
When communication is one-way, several things happen:
Confusion spreads. Without context or opportunity to ask questions, people make assumptions and fill in gaps with their own interpretations.
Expertise goes untapped. The people doing the work often understand practicalities that those in the boardroom don’t see.
Resistance builds quietly. Not from malice, but because people naturally struggle to embrace changes they don’t understand or weren’t part of shaping.
Time gets wasted later. Instead of implementing smoothly, teams spend energy working out what the change actually means and dealing with avoidable problems.
The Three Missing Elements
Effective communication requires more than transmission. It needs:
1. Involvement in Decisions
When people help shape what needs doing and how it will be done, they bring valuable expertise and build ownership. Consultation doesn’t mean consensus on everything, but it does mean genuinely considering input from those closest to the work.
2. Engagement at Delivery
Real engagement means dialogue:
- Explaining why, not just what
- Creating space for questions and concerns
- Being available to discuss implications
- Acknowledging challenges honestly
Yes, this takes more time than sending an email. But it saves time by preventing confusion and resistance later.
3. Ongoing Feedback
Communication continues after delivery. Check understanding, create channels for questions, and remain open to adjusting based on practical experience.
The Real Cost
When we mistake broadcasting for communicating:
- Projects falter because people don’t fully understand objectives
- Good people disengage when they feel undervalued
- Change fatigue sets in from constantly adapting to decisions made without them
- Trust erodes slowly but steadily
What Better Looks Like
Leadership identifies a need and brings affected people into exploring solutions together. When decisions are announced, context is shared: the problem, the options considered, the reasoning.
Multiple channels exist for questions. Leaders make themselves available and actually listen. As implementation progresses, feedback shapes refinements.
The result? Change that sticks—not through compliance, but through genuine understanding and shared ownership.
Moving Forward
Leadership teams face genuine constraints: time pressure, competing priorities, commercial sensitivity around certain decisions. Not everything can or should be co-created.
But there’s a significant difference between “we can’t involve everyone in everything” and “we don’t need to engage people at all.”
The challenge isn’t choosing between speed and engagement—it’s recognising that time invested in genuine communication upfront prevents the greater time cost of managing confusion, resistance, and implementation failures later.
Consider where you currently sit on this spectrum. Are there opportunities to bring people in earlier, engage more meaningfully at delivery, or create better feedback loops?
Small shifts in approach can create significant improvements in outcomes.
Because ultimately, if the message hasn’t been understood and embraced, it doesn’t matter how clearly we think we’ve communicated it.
What’s your experience with organisational communication? Where have you seen it work well?
Deano's World 