The Communication Test Executives Never Take

We need to stop promoting people into executive roles before they've proved they can communicate clearly. I'm only half joking...

Having been in the talent market for over a decade, I’ve seen how executives get hired, the types of questions they’re asked in interviews, and the skills they’re expected to demonstrate. We look for proof of financial results, strategic thinking and execution, transformational experience, commercial performance and growth. Although communication skills are tested, I’ve rarely heard anyone be asked for evidence of transparently communicating a hard decision they’ve made, where they didn’t know what was going to happen next.

We spend a lot of time testing whether executives can make difficult decisions. We spend far less time asking whether they can communicate those decisions in a way that people can trust. Not can they deliver a polished town hall, but can they lead their people through uncertainty. Can they explain why a decision has been made honestly when things are difficult? Can they tell people what they know, but more importantly what they don’t know?

It’s becoming increasingly evident that somewhere along the way, we’ve confused transparent communication with reputation management, and they are not the same thing. The sheer volume of corporate theater I see (and have experienced) is staggering, and a recent example made me want to highlight how this can severely impact culture and trust.

A friend of mine recently resigned. He felt an obligation to the business and knew they’d need time to process and hand projects over so gave more than the required two weeks. He gave his CEO six weeks’ notice, and on his very last day, his team still didn’t know he was leaving.

Now, I can understand in the first week or so keeping it confidential. There may have been a legitimate reason why this can’t be shared – legal constraints, market sensitivity, or even personal circumstances, but keeping it quiet is a short term strategy and once those constraints no longer apply, continued silence often becomes a way of delaying a difficult conversation.

When the teams do find out, and know they have been kept in the dark for a long time, what does this say about how much they’re trusted with information about their own working lives?

If the reason for keeping this quiet for so long is that the person leaving is holding everything together, then it highlights to the rest of the team how dependent the company is on one person. Or, is it that leaving is treated as a shameful thing? If that’s the case, what does that tell the rest of the team about how choosing their ambitions would be treated?

The person leaving has the most awkward seat of all – six weeks of not being “allowed” to tell his own team and set them up for success by answering any questions they have. Six weeks of not being able to say goodbye properly. In a moment where the company should’ve been thanking the person for their service, and ensuring everyone had what they needed before he moved on, they chose silence.

If protection is the intended outcome of the silence, the team experiences something very different. They experience being excluded from information that affects their own working lives. That does more damage to your culture and erodes trust, because the people left in the team know they’re being managed instead of respected.

This isn’t unique to resignations; I see this same pattern happen across almost every organizational change (including AI). Executives announce what is changing, but very rarely will any of the employees understand why it’s changing, or how they’re expected to work differently, or how they measure what success looks like. And execs then wonder why adoption is poor and disengagement is high. There is no amount of office pizza that can save the impact this has on your culture. We talk endlessly about resistance to change, but do we realize how much resistance is created through confusion?

The irony with this is that the more uncertain the world becomes, the more valuable being human becomes. Transparent conversations can’t be outsourced to AI. It can’t do it for you, and neither can a super-polished, rehearsed speech. Leadership means being able to stand in front of a room and say “here’s what’s happening; here’s why. Here’s what we currently know, and here’s what we don’t, but this is what we need from you.”

You don’t need certainty to create clarity, but you do need the courage to say what you know, what you don’t, and what is happening next. If you can’t create clarity when your team is looking for it, then you shouldn’t be leading them.

The fastest way to tell whether a company has great leadership isn’t strategy, it’s seeing how difficult news gets communicated.