All Sound, No signal

All sound, no signal 📢

Why your leadership messaging is failing (and what to do about it!)

It’s easy to assume that when Leaders communicate something clearly and follow up with a nib on the intranet, it will be understood, shared, and acted on.

📰🚨Newsflash. It won’t.

How information flows through modern organisations is different than it has been in past.

Every day, mixed messages or missing messages slow down decisions, erode trust and create a creeping disengagement at every level of an organisation.

Take the following for example:

A strategy is announced, but teams hear conflicting interpretations of what it means for them.
A change initiative is launched, but employees receive too much information from too many sources, too soon, making them tune out.

Time is wasted, momentum is lost and money is burned.

This misalignment – of both the leaders and the message - isn’t just frustrating, it’s expensive.

Here’s what it costs you:

Lost productivity – Teams get stuck in decision limbo, waiting for clarity.
Sunk effort and endless rework – Time is wasted on conflicting priorities or even non priorities.
Erosion of trust – Employees stop believing leadership messages because of the mixed signals and switch off altogether.
Failure to execute on strategy – A great plan means nothing if it isn’t aligned and reinforced and action is often the casualty when messages misfire.

Impact of Leadership Communication on Delivery

📊 Research shows that only 23% of companies have successfully aligned their individual and organizational goals, highlighting the rarity and potential competitive advantage of achieving such alignment.
achieveit.com

📊 Another study found that strategic alignment significantly and positively affects decision effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of considering all dimensions of strategic alignment to achieve the greatest impact.
researchgate.net

Conflicting Messages From Leadership

📊 Over 40% of workers reported feeling that poor communication affects trust in their leadership and team.
notta.ai

The leadership messaging crisis - Why even great leaders struggle

Many leaders assume that if they are clear and compelling, their message will cascade through the organisation correctly.

But here’s the truth:

Leaders are an N of one – You are one person. You can influence messaging, but you cannot be everywhere at once. The same messaging must be reinforced at every level. That means getting all leaders and managers on board and on the same page about the what and the why of an initiative.
Old-school communication skills aren’t enough – We see this time and time again in our work. Leaders are trained in presentation skills and oratory, but they aren’t trained or even aware of how to shape an ecosystem of messaging within their organisations.
Comms teams are disempowered - Moreover the comms teams – who should be guiding much of this - have had their wings clipped and don’t have a seat at the table to punch a meaningful fix. They have all the responsibility and blame for “BaD mEsSagiNg” but not the ability to change how information flows.
Bad structures multiply the problem – Organizations are complex. With multiple leadership voices, functional silos, and decentralized teams, misalignment is inevitable.
The trust deficit is real – Studies show that employee trust in leadership messaging is at an all-time low. In a world of constant change and information overload, employees often assume leadership messages are either unclear, self-serving, or irrelevant.

Misalignment in leadership messaging is not just a communications problem - it’s a leadership failure. And if it’s not fixed, nothing else gets done efficiently.

The hidden causes: What's really breaking leadership messaging

But there’s more…

Looking beyond the obvious issues, several deeper factors drive message misalignment. These are the silent killers and block any momentum and trust in even the strongest organisation.

Conflicting leadership styles – Some leaders over-communicate, others stay silent. Some focus on vision, others on execution. These styles should be able to complement each other and focus on the delivery of a consistent message but when these styles clash, employees don’t know what to prioritize.
Organisational silos and functional competition – Different functions push different priorities, leading to competing narratives that confuse teams. This is playing out “bigly” in organisations as there is a rapid switch from people as value to data and software…the people and tech functions are showing signs of real competition that will become acute.
Desision fatigue and overload – We’re in a high-change, “always-on” environment, and leaders are expected to communicate constantly. Without a structured approach, and leaders reinforcing each other, they default to reactive, inconsistent messaging. This serves no-one.
External noise pollution -This is a polite way of saying “Gurl, there is a whole heap of stuff going on and your small change initiative is at the end of a very long list for me!” There is a huge external challenge to what you are trying to land internally. Like it or not it is part of the landscape – as is economic uncertainty, AI disruption, global political shifts and all other media noise.
Internal noise pollution – Again, your message does not exist in a vacuum. There are plenty of other pulls on your employees eyeballs and notice including slack messages, WhatsApp groups, emails…the Whisper Network. In short, they are overloaded with noise and not able to understand signal.

Message dissonance leads to message disengagement - Employees don’t just stop listening - they start choosing who to listen to. And in many cases, it isn’t you! Their leadership team.

Beware - The Whisper Network

Not all messaging happens through official channels. In every organisation, there is an unofficial communication ecosystem - hallway conversations, private Slack groups, WhatsApp chats, and quiet side discussions where employees try to decode what’s really going on.

When leadership messages are missing, unclear, inconsistent or lack credibility, the Whisper Network fills the gaps.

Employees turn to their trusted peers, middle managers or even external sources to make sense of conflicting information.

This creates shadow narratives that can:

Undermine leadership messaging before it even takes hold.
Create alternative versions of “the truth” that spread faster than official updates.
Accelerate disengagement when employees feel leadership is either out of touch, withholding information, or unaware of frontline realities.

Once the Whisper Network sets the tone, it’s hard to take back control.

To counteract this, leaders need to:

✅ Get ahead of uncertainty – If there’s ambiguity, fill the space before someone else does.
✅ Check the temperature – If employees aren’t repeating the official message, find out what they are saying instead.
✅ Use trusted messengers – Sometimes, the most effective communicators aren’t at the top but mid-level influencers who can translate leadership messages into something meaningful.

Leadership messaging isn’t just about what you say - it’s also about who employees believe. If you’re not actively shaping the narrative, the Whisper Network will do it for you.

The Fix: A Two Part Approach to Leadership Message Alignment

📌 OPTION 1 Short-Term Patch: Getting an important message over the line

If misalignment is currently derailing something urgent, leaders need a rapid fix to get teams back on track.

Step 1: Construct a Strategic Narrative
Before anything goes out, get your communications team to shape the narrative - including all the difficult, hostile, and sceptical questions upfront. Anticipate objections before they arise.

Step 2: Align Leadership

Spend some leadership capital – Pull key leaders into a focused alignment session to lock in the exact core narrative. If you know there are some outliers then speak to them first and prepare the ground.
No improvisation – Everyone must fully agree on wording, intent, and tone before communication starts.

Step 3: One voice, One message rule

100% agreement and alignment before communication – No leader speaks until messaging is finalised and consistent.
Have a clear cascade plan – Identify who delivers the message, in what order, and through which channels.

Step 4: Signal, Reinforce, Repeat

Leaders must repeat key messages multiple times across multiple channels.
Employees who hear a message twice assume it’s contradictory. When they hear it six times, they start to believe it.
Use different formats (spoken, written, Q&A, reinforcement meetings) to embed the message.

Step 5: Don’t forget the humble line manager

Manager briefings are essential – Mid-level managers translate and reinforce messaging. If they aren’t aligned, the message gets diluted or lost.
Prep your foot soldiers – Equip managers with clear, actionable talking points that go beyond the C-suite and senior leadership.

When speed matters, alignment comes before action. A clear, reinforced message prevents confusion, builds trust, and drives execution. Even if this is a one and done things and everything falls apart afterwards it is a clear framework to align and agree for an important announcement to land.

But if you want to fix the problem rather than patch it, you have to think bigger.

📌 OPTION 2 Long-Term Fix: A structured approach to leadership messaging

Most organisations don’t have a structured approach to fixing their leadership messaging. But it is more than that, the issue is systemic and requires more than just a tactical adjustment - it demands a fundamental shift in how communication is designed, delivered, and reinforced at every level.

And that as a prospect can scare people off starting!

It means that organisations first need to acknowledge the problems.

Leadership messaging gaps – Even the phase, is it is leaders or is it the messaging? Are leaders themselves sending conflicting signals? Or are communications creating weak messages?
The communications function itself – Is it effective, or just reactive? Are they the problem or the fall guy?
Uncontrolled conversations – You’ll never be able to control all conversations in the build but it is worth seeking to understand what is being said in the margins of meetings, slack or zoom channels, or informal networks?
The flow of information – Is critical information getting lost, diluted, or delayed with a bad workflow?
Leadership capability – Do all leaders have the same skills or skill level required to communicate effectively in an “always-on” change environment? Are they supported when they ask for help?

If you are serious about getting a long-term fix, the most effective way is starting with an independent, external review of communications to pinpoint and diagnose the root causes.
Once the issues are clearly identified, and out in the open, can an effective fix be applied.
Our experience tells us it will likely follow these three steps:

Step 1: The Self Fix

Leadership messaging starts with individual leaders. From the C-suite to senior managers, right through to line managers and team leads, each leader needs to apply a bit of self-inquiry to understand their own communication effectiveness before they can expect alignment at the team or organisational level.

This means focusing on four key areas:

Self-awareness – How do I currently come across when I speak?
Skills development – What do I need to enhance what I say and how I say it?
Storytelling – What narratives do I use to engage and inspire?
Support structures – Who reinforces my messages, and where might they be breaking down?

Key questions to ask:

How do others perceive my communication style?
Does my leadership style support or hinder message clarity?
Do I adapt my messaging based on the situation and audience?
How can I make my messages more actionable and memorable?
Who are my key messengers, and are they aligned with what I say?
Am I reinforcing messages consistently, or am I assuming people already understand?

Step 2: The Team Fix

Once individual leaders improve how they themselves communicate, the next challenge is ensuring that the leadership teams communicate in a unified way.

To be clear – this is not to say that all messages are said in EXACTLY the same way. That would look and feel odd. You can have the same message communicated well and in a unified way but said through the prism of different communication styles and personalities.

Fixing collective leadership messaging requires effort, collaboration and a shared framework for communication.

Key principles for leadership teams:

Clarity is kindness – Be direct, specific, and unambiguous in messaging.
Decide the message before you send it – No communication should go out unless the senior team fully agrees on the wording and intent.
Don’t be the blocker – If 80% is good enough, let it be good enough…don’t die in a ditch over semantics! Factually 100%, stylistically 80% is good enough.
Fix the “grey zones” – Clearly define who owns which parts of communication. Many leaders assume “someone else” is handling it, which leads to gaps and inconsistencies.

A well-aligned leadership team can filter and refine messages before they reach employees, ensuring that what is said at the top is reinforced throughout the organisation.

Step 3: The Organisation Fix

Once individual leaders are aligned and leadership teams are unified, the next challenge is fixing the way messages flow through the organisation.

A structured system (and a quality comms team) ensures that messages:

Flows consistently from leadership → middle managers → teams
Are reinforced at multiple levels and through multiple formats
Are actually absorbed and acted on by employees

Key questions to address at this stage:

Where are the comms team in this? What is their role? What is working and what is not?
How does information currently move through the organisation?
Are middle managers equipped to translate leadership messages into action? If not, why not and who can help them?
How do we know if messages are landing as intended?
How do we fix misalignment as soon as it appears?

A Final Thought

As AI takes over the world, perhaps we need to work harder to retain the core elements of humanity at work – namely connection and how we communicate.

How leaders communicate and the messaging they use must be intentional, reliable, and repeatable.

That is entirely in the gift and practice of you as a leader and the tone and example you wish to set.

What to Do Next

You have all the information above to go ahead and fix this problem internally. But we appreciate that sometimes people are too close to see their own problems.

If you want a faster, expert-led approach that removes the guesswork and delivers real results, let’s talk.

With Our Sound & Signal Communication Review, we take the heavy lifting off your plate.

We’ll:

✔ Diagnose your exact communication challenges - pinpointing where breakdowns occur and why.
✔ Provide a clear, structured plan to fix issues at the self, structure, and story levels.
✔ Work directly with leadership, teams, and stakeholders to implement that plan and effective changes.
✔ Deliver a comprehensive communications strategy designed for long-term impact.

Want to get started?

Let's Talk