When comms issues don't look like comms issues

In my experience, poor communication doesn't show up as poor communication. The symptoms show up as business problems rather than obvious messaging issues. Things like burnout, missed deadlines, or culture complaints quietly trace back to how information is (or isn’t) flowing. Today, I am digging into a few less than obvious ways poor communication shows up at work.

I share this information so you can grow your revenue – don’t believe me? That’s ok, keep doing what you are doing. Think I might be onto something? Cool, keep reading.

FIRST

Teams don’t say we’re burned out because expectations are unclear. They say we’re overwhelmed or we don’t have enough people [they don't know why - but they won't say that]. My 25 years in comms knows that unclear goals, shifting priorities, and mixed messages force employees to do too much rework, guess at what you are asking them to do, and take time to research and double-check outputs. This is exhausting for everyone. When what you think you shared doesn’t match what’s being turned around – that’s a leadership communication issue – it’s up to you to fix it.

When your team says they are stressed, chances are it’s poor communication. Half of US workers say miscommunication directly increases their stress levels. It’s not about how much work they have to do. It’s the mental load that needs to figure out conflicting emails, vague direction, and last‑minute changes.

My husband works long hours, and when I pushed him to point that out in a professional development conversation, he said something I can’t stop considering.

He said, “Working long hours doesn’t impress me. It’s the impact of the work that I want to see. I enjoy the work and don’t mind the hours. I want others to see the impact I make and appreciate the strategy and effort that went into a positive outcome.”

Too many of us focus on the wrong things – the long hours, the busy days, tons of deliverables. If none of it makes an impact, none of it matters.

SECOND

Another contributor to stress is wasted time disguised as inefficiency. Nearly 3 in 5 workers say they’ve wasted time at work because of poor, rushed, or confusing communication: lost files, missed messages, unclear handoffs, unshared delays. On the surface, it looks like poor time management. Really, it’s messages sent over the wrong channels, inconsistent expectations, lack of accountability, and missing ownership. Every you change direction without a clear explanation, that cost comes out of your team’s emotional bank account. When the team knows WHY (and the end result), they can pivot without losing steam.

Organizations blame silos on personalities, org structure, or territorial teams, but siloed information is the result of inconsistent communication across functions and levels. When teams don’t share the same big-picture-view, priorities, decisions, context, and collaboration feels risky and frustrating. An outstanding tech leader I know recently shared how they implemented team stand up huddles at the beginning of every day. She recognized things were getting delayed or missed, not because her team wasn’t working hard – but because not everyone knew what was most important to the business on any given day. Each team had their own ideas of what had to be done NOW.

• One team needed to finish a proposal.

• They were waiting for procurement to provide details on resources.

• Procurement was focused on another big project for an existing client.

• It wasn’t anyone’s fault – nobody (except the owner) had the full picture.

These quick stand-up meetings solved the problem. People started to see what was stalled out. Things got done more quickly – issues rose to the surface before they became big problems.

My friend even shared that when she speaks up in these meetings, everyone starts to react – not always with the right priorities. So she lets her ops leader run most of the meetings. My friend only speaks up when there is something that needs to be addressed and even then she offers grace for what her team didn’t know before the meeting. That’s leadership.

According to the Niagara Institute , about 42% of employees say poor communication negatively impacts cross‑functional collaboration among colleagues, teams, and departments. People are not inherently bad collaborators, they’re working from different, sometimes outdated, sets of information.

Once again, when messages about changes, risks, or decisions don’t reach all groups equally, one team seems difficult or uncooperative because they’re responding to information others haven’t seen. Over time, this breeds an us vs. them mindset that leaders might call culture issues, not communication issues. Best case, people think they were forgotten when sharing the information – worst case they think they were left out on purpose.

Miscommunication results in missed deadlines for almost half your employees, and this doesn’t even address rework and duplicated efforts. The way people dissect what happened in the after-action reviews suggests - we need better project management. The root cause is more likely communication about requirements, ownership, changes, and decisions.

This is getting long. Let’s plan to keep going on Thursday for a few more comms issues that don’t feel like comms issues. In a few days we’ll talk about disengaged teams, high turnover along with rework, mistakes, and waste.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the next part of the story.

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