I’ve spent a lot of my career around organizations that are changing. Sometimes that change is significant: an acquisition, a new strategy, a leadership transition or a reorganization. Sometimes it’s simply the natural result of growth. The business has become more complex, and ways of working that used to be almost automatic aren’t anymore.

One thing I’ve seen consistently is that a plan can make complete sense on paper and still be surprisingly difficult to put into action.

Imagine a leadership team that has spent weeks working through a business challenge. They’ve considered the options, debated tradeoffs and ultimately decided that one thing needs to take priority over everything else. They tell the organization exactly that: This is our number one priority. Everything else is secondary.

A few weeks later, they’re frustrated. Teams are still spending time on projects that don’t support the priority. Money is being spent in places leadership thought would pause. Resources haven’t shifted the way they anticipated.

The reaction is understandable: We told them this was the priority. Why hasn’t anything changed?

The directive probably felt clear to the people who made it. They had all the context behind it. They knew what had been discussed, what was being traded off, and what they were trying to accomplish. But some parts of the organization may have heard the priority without knowing what it meant for the decisions sitting in front of them. Should I stop this project? Does this customer request still take precedence? Is the work my team does connected to the priority? What does success actually look like?

That’s the gap I think leaders sometimes miss. We spend a lot of time deciding what the business needs to do and less time asking a different question:

What will this require of the organization?

It’s a surprisingly easy question to skip.

Answering that question means going beyond the decision itself. It means translating what the business is trying to accomplish into what people throughout the organization will need to understand, decide or do differently.

Most of us have played some version of the old telephone game, where one person whispers something to the next person and it makes its way around the circle. What comes out at the end can be pretty entertaining. Organizations obviously aren’t games of telephone, but there’s something useful in the analogy. Every time information changes hands, there’s an opportunity for context to get lost.

The further a decision has to travel through an organization, the more context matters. And the distance a decision has to travel isn’t only about company size.

Distance can come from size, but it can also come from differences in knowledge, involvement and time. In a 15-person company, it may be that the owner and two other people have been

thinking about a decision for six months and everyone else first heard about it Tuesday morning. In a large organization, that distance may be created by layers, locations, or functions.

So before we think about how to communicate a strategy, change, or major decision, there are a few things worth working through. What are we actually trying to accomplish? What will success look like? What will the organization have to do differently to get there?

Sometimes working through those questions also exposes a gap that communication can’t solve. If the business isn’t clear on what success looks like or what it needs people to do differently, communicating the plan more often won’t fix it.

Once we understand that, we can ask the communication question: How can communication support what we’re asking the organization to do?

That’s different from asking what we need to tell people.

Sometimes people need more context so they can make good decisions without someone telling them exactly what to do. Sometimes managers need to be equipped to answer questions consistently. Sometimes employees need to understand what is known, what isn’t, and when they can expect to know more. And sometimes they need to hear how things are going, whether the organization is winning and whether the choices they’re making are helping.

The answer isn’t necessarily more communication. It’s communication that matches what the business is asking people to do.

The challenge presents itself in organizations of all sizes, but the solution doesn’t look the same in every organization. As businesses grow and change, communication becomes less about sending messages and more about how the organization operates. It helps information, context, and decisions reach the people who need them and gives those people enough understanding to act.

Because ultimately, the goal isn’t simply for people to know what the plan is.

It’s for the organization to be able to do something with it.

 

About Soundtrack Consulting

Soundtrack Consulting helps leaders and growing organizations communicate with clarity through periods of change, growth, and transition. Founded by Jennifer Lentner, the Kalamazoo-based firm provides consulting, coaching, and training focused on leadership communication, internal communication, mergers and acquisitions, ownership and leadership transitions, and organizational change. Soundtrack Consulting works with leaders to simplify complex messages, strengthen communication practices, and ensure employees understand where the organization is going, how they fit, and what success looks like.