You and your team are speaking different languages. Unless they know how to translate, they are guessing.
Language is not as precise as we like to pretend. Meaning gets left open to interpretation, decided by context clues and connotations that every one of us reads differently. Effective communication in the workplace starts with admitting that, because if you do not know how your team encodes and decodes information, you will spend your career frustrated by misunderstandings you helped create.
Here is the strange part. Most people think they are good communicators. Misunderstandings always seem to be the other person's fault. If we are all such good communicators, why are there so many miscommunications?
What poor communication actually costs
The cost is not just stress and frustration. Business leaders surveyed by Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimated their teams lose 7.47 hours a week to poor communication, about $1.2 trillion a year across US businesses. Separately, 86% of executives name ineffective communication and collaboration as a major cause of business failure.
The damage goes past the clock:
- Trust erodes between people who used to work well together
- Culture gets watered down
- Talent walks out the door
- Effort goes into the wrong project
- Resentment builds and never gets spoken out loud
Breakdowns in communication estrange family members. Do not doubt what they can do to your team.
People say most business problems are really people problems. I will go one further. Most people problems are just communication problems.
The model: encoding, decoding, and noise
The model I use is simple. Person A encodes a message. Person B decodes it. Person B encodes a response. Repeat.
Encoding and decoding are each person running the message through their own lens: their language preferences, their history, their perception. Noise is everything that interferes along the way.
That is the whole model, and it is enough to diagnose almost every breakdown on your team.
"That's fine" and other landmines
Think about the phrases you use every day that carry a wider range of meaning than you intend.
What does "that's fine" mean to you? Ask a few people. To some it is enthusiastic agreement. To others it is a grudging yes. If someone tells me "hmmm, maybe," I assume they want to say no and are being polite. Other people encode that phrase completely differently, so I try not to judge it, but that is my read.
Now picture this. You ask someone on your team to finish paperwork for an important project. They say "I'll get right on that." You thank them and walk away.
How long until they start? Right away? After lunch? I would bet they are thinking later than you are.
Vague qualifiers are worse than you think
We have a whole vocabulary for quantity and likelihood, and those words mean different things to different people.
If you asked me to grab a few apples, I would bring back three. Ask a room and you will get two to six. Several means five to me. Other people read it as three to eight. When researchers put numbers to these words, the spread is as wide as the disagreements they cause.
The percentages are funnier. Before you read the ranges, pick a number in your head for each of these:
- Most people agree
- That is likely to happen
- That is unlikely to happen
- It's definitely possible
Here is the range I get when I run this with a team:
| Phrase | Range people assign |
|---|---|
| Most | 51% to 95% |
| Likely | 50% to 90% |
| Unlikely | 20% to 30% |
| Possible | 0% to 99% |
If you take one lesson from this article, let it be that you should never use the word "possible" when you are defining something.
This problem is common enough that plenty of organizations write rules for it. Either they define these words as specific numeric ranges, or they ban them in favor of stated probabilities. It does not matter whether the odds are truly 75% or 74%. What matters is that everyone on your team reads 75% the same way.
Miscommunication runs both directions
It is not only about their ability to decode. You have to encode properly in the first place, stripping out the language that invites a wrong read.
One of my favorite leadership lessons on this: failure to follow orders properly means a failure to give orders properly. I cannot blame my team for getting something wrong if they never understood it to begin with.
Everyone has a part to play. Ownership still sits with the leader. Leaders have to learn to communicate in a way their team understands, not in the way that feels natural to them.
Noise: external, environmental, and internal
The third variable is noise, and a leader who can spot it picks better moments and gets clearer results.
- External noise is literal. If the room is loud, I am going to misunderstand a lot.
- Environmental noise is the setting. You will get further in a private one-on-one than in the same conversation with the team nearby, even if they are out of earshot.
- Internal noise is the fear and the assumptions people carry into the conversation. If someone on your team is scared of you, a neutral message lands as a negative one.
Recognizing noise lets you shape the message so it survives the trip.
How to fix each part of the model
Encoding, so your message lands:
- Bottom line up front. What you want and when you need it, in the simplest terms, then add the nuance.
- Use analogies and outside examples for anything that could be missed.
- Ask for questions, and treat them as free quality control.
- War game it. Think about how they are going to decode this, and adjust before you open your mouth.
Decoding, so you receive well:
- Repeat back what you heard in your own words.
- Allow for broader definitions. Assume they may mean something different from your first read.
- Assume fault. Give them the benefit of the doubt and focus on the part you control, which is your decoding, not their delivery.
Noise, so it stops distorting the message:
Acknowledge it. Do not ignore the elephant in the room. If there is a distraction or some awkwardness in the environment, name it early and clear it out of the way.
Communication is the skill that carries everything else
The way you communicate shapes your relationships at home as much as your ability to lead. Great leaders keep working on it. Do not be the boss who gets stuck because they never figured out how to talk to the next generation.
I coach this every week inside the Steel Men Tribe, where the outside perspective from other leaders is usually what exposes the miscommunication you cannot see yourself. If you want the deeper version with more examples, watch my full video on communication, and subscribe to the 10x Your Team podcast for the weekly leadership lessons that come out of the Tribe.
Next up: failure and guardrails.
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How much does poor communication cost a business?
Business leaders surveyed by Grammarly and The Harris Poll put it at 7.47 hours per employee per week, which the study scales to about $1.2 trillion a year across US businesses. In a separate survey, 86% of executives named ineffective communication and collaboration as a major cause of business failure.
What is the encoding and decoding model of communication?
It describes communication as a loop. The sender encodes a message through their own lens, the receiver decodes it through theirs, and noise distorts it in between. Most breakdowns can be traced to one of those three points.
Whose fault is a miscommunication on a team?
Everyone shares responsibility, but ownership sits with the leader. Failure to follow orders properly means a failure to give orders properly.
How do I communicate more clearly with my team?
Lead with the bottom line, define vague qualifiers with real numbers, ask for questions, and have the other person repeat the task back in their own words before anyone starts work.