This article is part of Make It Land, a 5-part series on leadership communication. Each essay explores a different reason why an idea can fail to land with the audience. The pieces stand alone. Together they reflect on a simple leadership discipline: communicating so that ideas are understood, remembered and acted upon.
Leadership Communication Principle:
Start with the message. Do not make the audience search for the point.
A few years ago the United Nations commissioned a report to understand why UN reports are so rarely read.
Yes. A report about why people do not read reports.
The findings were unsurprising. The UN produces more than a thousand reports a year, yet a significant number are barely downloaded. And downloading, as anyone who has ever saved a PDF “for later” knows, is not the same thing as reading.
It is tempting to blame the audience. People are busy. They skim. They are distracted. All true.
But there is another explanation.
Communication is often designed around the speaker’s process rather than the audience’s experience.
Many leaders communicate as if the audience will patiently follow the path they themselves took. Context. Background. Explanation. Caveats. And finally, at long last, the point.
Sometimes even then, it arrives apologetically.
This pattern appears everywhere. In emails where the request is buried in paragraph four. In presentations where the recommendation sits on the final slide. In meetings where ten minutes of scene-setting precede the sentence everyone needed to hear first.
Leaders often think they are being thorough. Their audience agrees to differ.
In many organisations, important ideas are being developed all the time. They fail to land because the communication surrounding them asks too much of the audience.
Readers must search for the point. Listeners must infer the conclusion. Viewers must wait for the recommendation. Many do not.
Communication is not complete when something has been said. It is complete when the idea lands.
The first discipline of leadership communication is respect for the audience’s time. This requires a shift in mindset. Instead of asking, Have I explained this properly? the leader asks a different question: What does the audience need to hear first? Once the point is visible, the rest of the information becomes easier to absorb. Context makes sense. Detail finds its place. Nuance becomes possible. Without the point, everything competes equally for attention.
This may sound obvious, but it cuts against many habits that professional life rewards. We are trained to show our workings. We are rewarded for volume. We are often more worried about sounding insufficiently rigorous than about being insufficiently clear.
It is tempting to think that if something matters enough, people will keep reading, keep listening, keep following. This is only true if there is a stick to wield forcing people to do so. Usually they do not.
Attention is not a reward granted to important ideas. It is a condition that communication must earn.