Communication Isn't Simply What Is Said

Organisations communicate all the time... or do they?

Emails are sent. Meetings are held. Information is cascaded. Leaders hold town halls, managers conduct one-to-ones and employees are invited to complete surveys.

But are those exchanges effective? Communication is so much more than the spoken word.

What was intended? What was heard? What was understood? Did the message received reflect the one that was sent? What was it meant to achieve? Was there an opportunity to question, clarify or disagree? And what might have remained unsaid?

Intention Is Only One Part of Communication

We know what we meant. We know the context behind what we are saying, the information that informed it and, often, what we expect will happen as a result.

The person receiving our message does not have access to all of that.

They hear what is said through the filter of their own knowledge, experiences and assumptions. They may also be drawing on information the person communicating does not have. The same words can therefore carry completely different messages, depending on the filters through which those words pass, creating reactions the person delivering them had not anticipated.

That does not mean either person has communicated badly. It means that intention alone cannot tell us whether communication has been effective.

The Person Delivering the Message Can Become Part of the Message

We don't receive communication independently from what we already know or believe about the person delivering it. Their previous actions, the way they have responded to people in the past and the level of credibility they hold with their audience can all influence how their words are interpreted.

A leader may introduce regular communications with the genuine intention of becoming more visible and connected to people across the organisation. But if those communications are experienced as being primarily about the leader themselves, they may create a very different impression. And if people's perception of that leader subsequently changes, the filter through which future communication passes may change with it.

Visibility does not necessarily create connection.

Nor do we receive communication independently from what we are experiencing around us. If the message being communicated appears inconsistent with people's everyday experience of the organisation, that experience will influence how the message is received.

The Assumptions We Don't Know We're Making

When we believe we know something, or have done a task so many times that it has become automatic, it can be surprisingly difficult to recognise that somebody else does not have that same experience. We omit context because it seems obvious, refer to something without explaining it, or expect somebody to understand what is required because we would know what to do in the same circumstances.

The person receiving the message can make assumptions too. They believe they have understood what is required, interpret missing detail for themselves or hesitate to ask questions because they think they should already know the answer.

Neither person necessarily realises that something is missing.

I experienced this myself relatively early in a new role, when I was given responsibility for a project. The broad outcome was clear, but much of the detail surrounding how that outcome should be achieved was not.

I began working on what I had been asked to deliver, only to find that, as the work progressed, I repeatedly needed to go back and ask for further information, direction or clarification. At the time, I found that frustrating and sometimes interpreted my need to keep asking questions as a failure on my part.

Looking back, I can see the assumptions on both sides. Those giving me the responsibility had considerably more experience of the organisation and were familiar with things that had not yet become familiar to me. I was capable of doing the work, but I couldn't know what hadn't been communicated to me.

Equally, I made assumptions of my own. I could have paused before beginning and considered what information I needed in order to proceed. Some of the questions I eventually asked could have been identified earlier. Others only became apparent as the work progressed.

We were each working from what we knew, and making assumptions about what the other knew too.

Sometimes the problem isn't what somebody failed to communicate. It's what neither person realised needed communicating.

Is Communication Genuinely Two-Way?

Providing an opportunity to respond does not necessarily make communication two-way.

What happens when somebody questions what they have been told? Is the message effectively an instruction that cannot be challenged, or are questions, feedback and appropriate suggestions welcomed? And just as importantly, how are they received?

A leader may invite people to speak openly, but their response when somebody does so communicates something too. Do they become defensive? Dismiss the suggestion before exploring it? Explain why something cannot change without first trying to understand the concern? Or do they demonstrate genuine curiosity about what the other person may be seeing that they have not?

Listening does not require agreement, and inviting suggestions does not mean that every suggestion can or should be acted upon. There may be information, constraints or competing priorities that the person offering the feedback does not know about — just as there may be information known to them that the leader does not have.

What matters is what happens in the exchange.

The response to feedback can communicate far beyond the conversation in which it was given. Other people notice what happens when somebody questions a decision, raises a concern or offers a different perspective. Was the person listened to? Was their contribution explored? Were they dismissed, interrupted or made to feel that they had overstepped?

Those moments can begin to shape what people choose to say next time, what they choose to keep to themselves and how fully they will engage.

When Response Is Not the Same as Understanding

Formal mechanisms for gathering responses can tell an organisation something, but what they reveal depends partly on how they are designed.

Quarterly engagement surveys may generate data, but they do not automatically create understanding. The questions being asked matter too. Do they appear to be genuinely seeking specific ways in which the organisation could improve, or are they standard, generic questions that primarily help to populate performance statistics?

Predefined responses or scales of 1–5 can indicate how people responded to a question, but may reveal very little about why they responded that way. Without the opportunity to explore what sits behind those answers, important context can be lost.

There is another limitation. The questions themselves determine what people are being invited to talk about. If every response must relate to something the organisation has already chosen to ask, where does somebody put the issue that wasn't anticipated?

Having completed more feedback surveys than I care to remember, I have often found one simple feature missing: an expandable comments box.

A predefined response may tell an organisation that somebody selected 2 rather than 4. A comments box can begin to reveal why. It can also give somebody space to raise something that the survey designers had not thought to ask about at all.

Equally important is what happens to the answers that have been given. Are they acted upon? Are responses given to the suggestions made?

It would be unrealistic to expect every suggestion to be acted upon. There simply isn't enough time for that to happen in today's busy working environments, and some suggestions may not be practical or appropriate. But each suggestion should be responded to, even if that response is to politely decline it while explaining why it has not been taken forward.

That response matters. It tells the person who took the time to contribute that their suggestion was received and considered. Silence communicates something too. How many of us have been left hanging, waiting for a response that never arrives, whether that is the outcome of an interview or a reply to a suggestion?

What Flows Up?

Organisations can become very effective at communicating downwards. Strategies are announced, priorities are cascaded, targets are set and expectations are communicated. But what happens when information needs to flow in the opposite direction?

As information moves upwards through different layers of an organisation, it can be condensed, softened or filtered. Sometimes that is necessary. Senior leaders cannot reasonably receive every detail of every conversation taking place across an organisation. But filtering can also create dams.

Those dams may even be built with good intentions: to protect the time of senior leaders, prevent them from being overwhelmed with operational detail, resolve issues before they reach them or ensure that only information considered sufficiently important is escalated.

But who decides what is sufficiently important?

A manager may soften feedback because they believe they can resolve an issue themselves, because they are trying to protect somebody else or because they do not consider the concern significant enough to take further. Whatever the reason, the effect can be that the picture reaching the top of an organisation looks rather different from the one being experienced elsewhere within it.

If leaders are protected from the information that might make them uncomfortable, how accurately can they understand the organisation they are leading? And how might that lack of pertinent information affect the strategic decisions they need to make?

Strategic decisions are made using the information available at the time. If concerns have been softened, emerging problems filtered out or inconvenient information prevented from travelling upwards, leaders may be making entirely reasonable decisions based on an incomplete picture.

The decision itself may not be the problem. The foundation on which it was based may have been.

Understanding Does Not Necessarily Mean Agreement

Effective communication does not guarantee agreement. Somebody can understand exactly what has been communicated, why a decision has been made and what will happen next, and still disagree with it.

That disagreement does not mean the message needs to be repeated until the person accepts it. Nor does questioning a decision mean the person has failed to understand it.

Sometimes the most useful communication happens when somebody says, “I understand what you are saying, but I see it differently.”

What happens next matters. Is that difference in perspective explored, or is it treated as resistance? Does the person communicating become defensive because their message has been challenged, or curious about what may be informing the other person's view?

Neither person has to change their position for the exchange to have value. Understanding somebody else's perspective can reveal information that agreement alone may never uncover.

So... What Are We Actually Communicating?

Organisations do not generally suffer from a shortage of communication. Emails are sent, meetings are held, updates are shared, surveys are completed and feedback is requested. But the volume of communication tells us very little about what people are actually hearing, understanding or experiencing.

Consider whether different questions are more useful.

Are people receiving the right message? Can they ask questions when something isn't clear? Can they challenge something they disagree with without the challenge itself becoming the problem? When they offer feedback, do they know it has been heard? Does pertinent information flow in both directions, allowing people at different levels of the organisation to make informed decisions?

And what isn't being said?

Silence may indicate agreement. It may indicate uncertainty, resignation, caution or simply that somebody has nothing further to add. Without curiosity, we cannot know which.

We can see the mechanisms organisations use to communicate. We can count the emails, schedule the meetings, measure survey participation and record that opportunities for feedback have been provided. What is much harder to see is what happens between one person communicating and another person receiving.

And this is where we need to pay more attention.

Because communication is not simply the message we intended to send. It is also the message somebody received, the assumptions that influenced their understanding, the questions they felt able to ask, the response they received when they did, and the information that may never have reached us at all.

The question isn't how well we communicate. It's whether that communication fulfils the purpose it was meant for.