Communication is two-way. But the split is not where you think.
You have one story where you took the whole of your side. That story shows where the line actually runs.
A video call, mid-morning. The man on the other side has several turnarounds behind him and the particular calm of someone who has been in decidedly worse conversation than this one. We are forty minutes into a chat about how leaders get understood, and he says something very reasonable. “It’s a shared responsibility. Communication is two-way.”
He said a version of it three times in different moments, and each time it arrived as a settled conclusion, the kind you reach after watching a lot of messages fail for reasons that had nothing to do with you. “However good you are, if people don’t want to listen, they won’t.”
Something in it did not sit right. First I let it go, but then, going back over the notes after the call, a realisation: minutes after saying it, he had described himself doing the exact opposite.
The sentence is not lazy. That is the problem with it.
The belief inside “communication is two-way” or “communication responsibility is fifty-fifty” is that you own the sending and the other part owns the interpretation and what they do with it. Between the two runs a line no amount of skill crosses, because you cannot get inside someone’s head and install the wish to hear you.
That sentence from that leader is experience talking rather than an excuse dressed up as experience. Anyone who has run something real has gone through that. The initiative explained perfectly that died anyway. The team that nodded and went back to doing exactly what it had done before.
The line is real. But it looks like my leader has it in the wrong place, and his own record shows it.
He did not wait for them to want to listen
He had been brought in to turn round an operation after a dispute had shut it down. The workforce had decided, with reason, to push back on whoever arrived next.
He did not wait for that to change.
What he did after meeting them for the first time was go down to the floor and spend two days there, asking people one at a time what they thought his three key messages had been. He also kept a small group who would tell him over lunch, honestly, when something he had said had been rubbish.
What he did with the answers is the telltale. He went back the following week, and the week after. He explained why, every time, not only what.
Some of what he had to tell them was bad. On a pay claim he could not meet, he took them through all of it.
*“You might deserve ten per cent. Yes, we had record profits. But what happens if we don’t deliver the value to shareholders? They’ll put the money somewhere else. So yes, you deserve it. So do I. But for this reason, we can’t.”*Then the part almost nobody says out loud. “We think it’s right. If it turns out it’s wrong, we’ll adjust.”
He did not get agreement out of it. What came back, in his account, was: “I don’t like it, but at least I know why.”
The town hall was never the point. The asking was.
He was adamant: “If they didn’t remember the three points after two days, it’s on the delivery. It’s not on them.”
Read the story quickly and it says: go back more often. More town halls, more repetition of the message until it sticks. That reading is where we often fail, yet it is the one we are most likely to take, the one where we believe we are doing all we can.
He went back because he had asked and heard that it had not reached them. Take the asking away and you have a man repeating himself on a schedule, which is what was already failing before he arrived.
He found out what had landed. He went back where it had not. He gave them the why and not only the what. He told them the parts they would not like, and admitted in front of them that he might be wrong. And his word turned out to be good.
The decision stayed with them the whole time. Some were never going to accept it.
That is where the line runs. When asked, we put it between the sending and the interpretation. He showed with facts that it runs further away, between the conditions, which are entirely yours, and the decision, which is entirely theirs.
He gave them the most accurate picture he had
He said something would happen, and then it happened. He came back the next week and said another thing, and that happened too. What he told them turned out to be true, over and over.
He was also the one doing the checking. He went down and found out what they thought. He kept people around him whose job was to tell him when he had got something wrong.
He gave them the best picture he had of where they stood. He kept testing whether it had reached them. And he left the decision where it was.
He could not have done any of it in advance. A picture is only accurate once the things in it have happened, which is why it is slow. With people who have learned to wait and see, slow is the only speed there is.
But you cannot force people to listen
True, and he forced nobody. Nothing on that floor was compulsory, and any of them could have carried on ignoring him for as long as they liked.
He did not take the decision off them. He made it a different decision. By then they were deciding about a man who had told them things he did not have to, and who had said out loud he might be wrong.
When something does not land and we cannot see why, we do one of two things. We decide it was their half that failed and we leave it there, or we decide our half was too small and we do it again bigger: another all-hands to land what the last all-hands did not, a longer deck, a clearer email, the same thing again with better slides.
People read the first as a leader who does not much care what happens to them, and the second as a leader who cannot tell whether they are getting through.
We did not go and ask. So we are guessing, and they are reading the guess.
You already have the evidence
You have a version of his story.
Somewhere in your record is a stretch where the stakes took the option away. A client you nearly lost. A migration that failed in public. A funding round where the story had to hold. A year the business might not have made it.
Go and find it. Then look at the conditions you were running, not the hours you were putting in.
Whether you went and found out what people had actually taken from you. Whether you went back when it turned out they had not. Whether they heard your reasons and not only your conclusions. Whether you told them the parts they would not like, and admitted you might be wrong. And whether the things you said would happen, happened.
My guess is that when you managed to eventually succeed, you did most of these naturally, and when the stakes came down again, you stopped.
Then the question I did not ask him. What is it about an ordinary week that makes it feel fifty-fifty?
The weeks nothing was at stake
He was not wrong that communication runs two ways. He was describing the ordinary weeks, the ones where nothing much rides on it and a message half landing costs a bit of rework and an awkward follow-up.
The other weeks, the ones his reputation is built on, he took the whole of his side and never once asked them to meet him in the middle.
You have done it too.
You have just never counted it.
If this landed, there’s more every week on The Leadership Last Mile