363. The Reason Your Team Doesn't Listen
You can't fix a listening problem with more talking. So stop trying.
You can’t fix a listening problem with more talking.
But that’s exactly what you’ve been trying to do.
Almost every company I’ve worked with tells me they have the same problem: “We need to improve communication.”
By the time you call me, you’ve usually tried all the things.
You had meetings about it. Added a Slack channel. Scheduled more all-hands meetings. Longer 1:1s, daily stand-ups, program management software.
All the things
Still, you end up talking over each other in meetings, not caring about each other’s needs and getting frustrated that “they” are constantly screwing things up. Where “they” is another way of saying “that group of people I don’t trust.” And when the most dangerous word in leadership shows up, it’s the alarm bell that things have gotten bad.
That’s when you’re going to call me.
And that’s when I’m going to tell you the thing you don’t want to hear:
Your communication problem is rarely because people aren’t talking. It’s because people aren’t listening.
The Highway Problem
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
When a highway is continually congested, the obvious solution is to add more lanes. After all, more lanes means less congestion, right?
Wrong.
Studies have shown that adding lanes to congested highways doesn’t reduce traffic at all - it increases it.1
This is called “induced demand.” It’s basically the DoTs version of “if you build it, they will come.”
If you give people more lanes, more people will drive and fill up those extra lanes. In fact, traffic usually gets worse, because there are more cars merging, exiting, and doing the dumb stuff drivers do to slow everyone down.
Your company’s communication strategy works exactly the same way.
You’ve Built More Lanes
When companies think they have “communication problems,” they naturally try to improve the flow of information.
Leaders think that if the team just KNEW more, everything would work better. Because obviously, if you have a communication problem, you need to add more communication. Duh.
So you add channels. Create more meetings. More updates. More transparency.
And just like cars on highways, the communication expands to fill the new channels you’ve created.
You’ve done all the things and you simply don’t understand why the communication problem gets worse.
Take me, for example:
I have ten email addresses. Slack. Teams. A newsletter. A CRM. Multiple social networks. Podcasts. Project management tools.
There’s no possible way I can stay informed. There’s simply too much information.
And I’m just one person running a small company so I can imagine what it’s like in your organization (mostly because I see it all the time in my leadership coaching.)
The average employee has 23 hours of meetings per week. That’s more than half their working time in mostly useless meetings.
On top of that, they receive 120+ emails, manage multiple Slack or Teams channels and check their project management and CRM tools.
That’s insane.
Everybody is sending, nobody is receiving.
So please absorb this important fact: “more information” is not the same as “better communication”. Stop thinking they are.
Talking Has No Limit. Listening Does.
Talking will always expand to fill the available communication channels. There’s no limit to how much information people can send.
But effective listening has a limit. When everybody talks at once, you’ll hear nothing. It just turns into noise. This is what’s happening in companies across the country.
Leaders don’t understand that the human brain can only process so much. Working memory has a hard limit.2
The Loop You’re Stuck In
When it comes to information overflow, here’s how it works:
People feel uninformed, so you add a communication channel.
More channels create more noise.
More noise makes it harder to identify what actually matters.
People tune out.
They feel more uninformed.
So you add another channel.
Return to Step 2
This is called The Behavior-Environment Loop (TM).
Your pattern of solving with “more” (channels) creates an environment where “more” (communication) becomes expected, and that creates the need for even more (channels and communication).
I see this play out in my leadership team coaching work all the time. With one recent client, the leaders were frustrated that the staff didn’t understand the new strategy. So they created a strategy deck. Then a strategy memo. Then a strategy video. The leadership team even held a panel for questions.
Four different ways to say the same damn thing.
And when I asked employees what the strategy was, they had no idea.
Not because it wasn’t communicated. Because it was communicated so many times, in so many ways, through so many channels, that it became background noise.
You’re Solving The Wrong Half
Communication has two parts: sending and receiving.
You’ve invested everything in talking. Nothing in listening.
Communication isn’t successful just because you said it.
It’s successful when someone changes their behavior based on what they heard.
If you sent the memo and nothing changed - you didn’t communicate. You just created more noise.
If you held the all-hands and people still don’t know what’s happening - you wasted an hour checking off a box on your leadership to do list.
So stop measuring communication by how much you say and start measuring it by how much people absorb.
Stop adding lanes. Start reducing traffic.
If people at your company claim to not know things even though they were communicated multiple times, the problem isn’t lack of communication. It’s too much of it.
The answer isn’t another channel. It’s fewer, better ones.
The answer isn’t more information. It’s more space for it to land.
The answer isn’t more talking. It’s confirming what people heard.
What’s Actually Going On
If you got this far, your communication problem is probably not about communication.
It’s about limited attention and an inability to absorb the information. Because you can’t process information when you’re bombarded by it, any more than you can take a sip of water while you’re drowning.
So stop adding lanes to a congested highway and wondering why traffic isn’t moving.
The problem was never that people weren’t saying enough.
The problem is that nobody can hear anything over all the noise.
P.S. Quick experiment - Count how many communication channels your company currently uses. Email, Slack, Teams, text, project management tools, all-hands, 1:1s, CRM… Add them up.
Then comment - or reply - and tell me what’s one communication channel that could disappear tomorrow and nobody at your company would miss it?
I put on free Leadership Diagnostic Workshops that help you identify all the patterns holding you back, and how to overcome them.
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“The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion” American Economic Review, Gilles Duranton & Matthew Turner (2011)
“The Magical Number 4 In Short-Term Memory“ National Library of Medicine, Nelson Cowan (2001)