The Leadership Friction  |  Edition No. 23  |  August 4, 2026

When Everyone Is Talking and Nothing Is Landing

Communication rarely breaks down over words. It breaks down over translation. Part two of a series on the three diagnostic lenses of the Next to Nunn Diagnostic Method.

I sat in a leadership meeting recently where the CEO said something that stuck with me: “We over-communicate here. We have all-hands, Slack, email, one-on-ones. And people still tell me they don’t know what’s going on.”

He wasn’t wrong about the volume. He was wrong about what volume solves.

This is the second piece in a series on the three diagnostic lenses of the Next to Nunn Diagnostic Method™. Last time, we looked at People. This time, we’re looking at Communication, the lens most leaders assume they already understand because they talk constantly. Talking and communicating are not the same activity. One moves information. The other creates shared understanding. Most organizations are excellent at the first and starving for the second.

The Research

What the Research Actually Shows

Here’s what I’ve noticed matches the data. Gallup’s 2023 research on workplace trust found that only 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree they trust their organization’s leadership communication. Not the message itself. The communication of it. That’s a trust gap, not an information gap.

Harvard Business Review’s research points to where that gap originates. Its analysis found that two-thirds of managers report discomfort communicating with the people who report to them. Think about what that means practically. The layer of the organization closest to the work is also the layer least equipped, or least confident, in the conversations that build trust.

And Gallup’s ongoing engagement research shows managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement, while only 44% of managers report ever receiving formal training in that role.

The people with the most influence over trust and engagement are the least prepared for the conversations that build it.

The Pattern

Why This Gets Missed

One thing I’ve learned is that leaders diagnose communication problems by counting. How many meetings. How many updates. How many channels. None of that tells you whether understanding actually transferred.

Here’s where leaders get stuck. They add more communication to fix a communication problem, the same way you’d add more water to a bucket that has a hole in it. The bucket doesn’t need more water. It needs the hole found.

The hole is almost never volume. It’s usually one of three things: expectations that were assumed instead of stated, feedback that got softened until it lost its meaning, or decisions that were made in one room and never explained to the people executing them.

Communication is the connective tissue between people and systems. When it’s working, people understand not just what to do, but why it matters and who owns it. When it’s not working, you get the exact scenario that CEO described. Constant noise. No shared understanding underneath it.

What’s one message you sent this month that you’re not sure actually landed?