Your Leadership Strategy Isn’t Failing. Your Communication Is.

The decision wasn’t controversial. The reaction was.

Within hours of an internal announcement, leaders were confused by the pushback. The plan was sound. The timing made sense. The data supported it. Yet employees were frustrated, anxious, and openly skeptical.

Nothing was “wrong” with the strategy. What failed was the explanation.

That gap—between what leaders think they communicated and what people actually heard—is where most leadership breakdowns begin. Not with bad intent. Not with bad decisions, but with words that were cautious, maybe even legalistic, instead of honest, straightforward, and transparent.

Communication has become a credibility test 

In my experience working with executives at major corporations, communication goes beyond sharing information. It’s how leaders earn—or lose—trust. I’ve seen it time and again.

And that erosion of trust is widespread.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals an unprecedented decline in employee trust in employers, driven by fears of being misled and a growing sense of grievance. Employees increasingly worry that leaders are purposely withholding information or speaking selectively, especially amid change and uncertainty.

Meanwhile, Gallup’s ongoing workplace research shows that employee engagement remains low, with managers accounting for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Engagement rises and falls with leadership behaviors—particularly whether people feel informed, understand priorities, and perceive their leaders as communicating clearly and consistently. When communication feels filtered or overly careful, people assume the worst. When it feels human and direct, even tough news lands better.

Visibility is not clarity 

Many leaders believe they’re communicating well because they’re visible: hosting town halls, sending email updates, appearing on video.

Yet employees still wonder:

• What does this actually mean for my team?
• What has changed since last quarter?
• What are we really optimizing for?

The disconnect arises because communication is more than quantity. It’s about quality and building shared understanding.

Research on high-quality listening shows that leaders often overestimate how clearly their messages are received. When communication is one-way, leaders assume alignment that doesn’t exist. Employees fill in the blanks—and rarely in the leader’s favor.

If people leave a meeting with more side conversations than clarity, the message didn’t hit home. And employees feel insecure instead of psychologically safe.

Psychological safety Is built in small moments 

Psychological safety doesn’t emerge from posters, slogans, or values statements. It’s forged—or fractured—through everyday communication.

Google’s Project Aristotle, a multi-year study of hundreds of teams, found that psychological safety was by far the most important dynamic for team effectiveness. It’s the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, where members feel free to speak up without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Safety is fragile, revealed in:

• How leaders react to bad news
• Whether questions are welcomed or deflected
• Whether dissent is explored or quietly punished

Consider one of Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Building a Better Business: “Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.” I couldn’t agree more.

What strong communicators do 

The best leaders don’t sound scripted. They speak from both heart and head.

They share consistent habits:

• Simplify without dumbing down, distilling strategy into priorities people can repeat without a slide presentation.
• Speak before everything is perfect, sharing what they know, admitting what they don’t, and committing to follow-ups.
• Explain trade-offs, recognizing that adults handle tough decisions better with context.
• Repeat key messages, countering the noise of change.
• Sound human, ditching corporate jargon for empathy and clarity in sensitive moments.

As Richard Branson has said: “Being able to effectively communicate is the most important skill any leader can possess. It shapes how people see the world and your company.”

Not just because it inspires—but because it aligns.

The real cost of weak communication 

When communication is strong:

• Problems surface earlier
• Execution accelerates
• Trust endures tough times

When it’s weak, leaders face surprise resistance, disengagement, and risks they “never saw coming.”

They were visible. They just weren’t clear.

Five moves leaders can make immediately 

1. After your next update, ask: “What did you hear?”
2. Clarify one decision that’s being interpreted differently.
3. Replace one announcement with a listening session.
4. Send a short weekly message highlighting what matters most right now.
5. Remove one sentence that sounds like legal review instead of authentic leadership.

Wrapping it up 

Good leadership doesn’t mean you need to have to have all the answers. It’s more important to communicate clearly enough that people understand what matters, what’s changing, and why. In moments of uncertainty, silence creates stories—and they’re rarely generous. When leaders communicate early, explain their thinking, and name what’s still unresolved, they give people something far more valuable than certainty: orientation. Good communication helps teams make sense of ambiguity instead of being unsettled by it.

So when a strategy isn’t landing, don’t assume the strategy is the problem. Look at the communication around it. Ask what people actually heard, what they’re inferring, and where meaning may have been lost. Often the plan is sound, but the message was incomplete, too cautious, or too abstract to guide real decisions. Before you change the strategy, change the conversation. Because strategies don’t fail in isolation—they fail when communication breaks down between leaders and the people responsible for bringing them to life.