The Conversation You Think You’re Having Vs The One Your Team Is Experiencing.
There’s a story I often think about when leaders tell me, “I thought I was being really clear.”
It involves a senior leader who genuinely believed they were an excellent communicator. I know they cared deeply for their team, and they had thought things through. They prepared before conversations, so in their head everything was beautifully organised.
The problem was that none of that thinking ever fully made it out of their mouth.
Inside their mind, there was a constant, fast-moving internal dialogue. They were thinking about what needed to be said and what couldn’t be said, as well as what the implications might be. They were brilliant at connecting ideas, and complex thinking.
They thought about how people might react to what they had to say.
Yet by the time they had the conversation, the message came out in fragments. There were half sentences, assumptions about what the other person was taking in. Their ideas were compressed. Yet to them, it all made perfect sense.
To the individuals in their team, it felt confusing, tense, and unpredictable.
What the senior leader experienced as “clarity”, the team experienced as:
mixed messages
emotional whiplash
and a lingering sense of “I’m not sure what they actually want from me”
This meant that individuals in the team went over their boss's head and complained to more senior leadership. Things became very tense, and the culture eroded. And that team ultimately disintegrated.
This is far more common than most leaders realise.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Your team doesn’t have access to your inner monologue.
So they don’t hear your good intentions.
They hear your words, your tone, your timing, and make up what you leave unsaid.
Oscar Timboli's impactful book 'Deep Listening' quotes the statistic that we speak between 125 to 175 words per minute, yet we listen at 400 words per minute. So no matter how fast we speak our mind can process three to four times more words.
So not only does this gap cause you to drift off and be distracted, it also means that you add your own words (meaning) to what you are hearing from the other person. And back to our senior leader: they are speaking at 125 or so words per minute, and they assume the other person is picking up all the other 300 words spinning around in their head, which, in their head, makes complete sense.
And in difficult conversations, that gap gets even wider because when you are under pressure, language compresses, and your nerves speed everything up. Which is why so many capable leaders avoid difficult conversations, not because they’re weak, but because they don’t trust how the message will land.
Confidence in these moments isn’t about courage, it’s about preparation.
This doesn't mean you are rehearsing the conversation in your head. It does mean thinking about the conversation you have to have, and practising it out loud with someone who can help you:
slow your thinking down
find the clean message
and say it in a way that matches your intent
This is exactly what we do in my Level Up Focus Sessions.
One conversation.
One outcome.
Real practice.
You don’t need to be braver. You just need a clearer path. Let me help you.
Borrow my brain. One coaching session to set you up for conversation success.
Maree