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Why Your Company's Communication is Failing (And It's Probably Your Fault)

The executive looked me straight in the eye and said, "We need better communication." I nearly choked on my flat white. This was the same bloke who'd spent the last forty minutes talking over everyone in the room, checking his phone during presentations, and using corporate buzzwords like they were going out of fashion.

After eighteen years consulting for businesses across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, I can tell you with absolute certainty that 87% of communication problems stem from one simple truth: leadership thinks communication is something other people need to fix.

The Great Communication Delusion

Here's what drives me mental. Companies spend thousands on communication training programmes and wonder why nothing changes. They'll bring in facilitators, run workshops, create elaborate feedback systems, and twelve months later they're having the exact same conversation.

Why?

Because they're treating symptoms, not causes. Your communication isn't failing because Jenny from accounts doesn't know how to write emails. It's failing because your entire organisational structure is built on the assumption that information flows naturally from top to bottom, and that's complete rubbish.

I learned this the hard way in 2019 when I was working with a construction company in Perth. Beautiful operation, great safety record, fantastic client relationships. But internally? Absolute chaos. The project managers weren't talking to the site supervisors, the supervisors weren't updating the office, and the office wasn't communicating realistic timelines to clients.

The CEO kept insisting it was a "people problem." Kept saying his team needed better communication skills. So we ran workshops. Lots of them. Communication styles, active listening, conflict resolution – the whole nine yards. And you know what happened?

Nothing.

Actually, that's not quite true. Things got worse. Because now everyone was hyper-aware of communication "techniques" but the fundamental structural problems remained unchanged.

The Real Problem (That Nobody Wants to Admit)

Your communication is failing because your organisation doesn't actually want good communication. It wants compliance disguised as collaboration.

Think about it. When was the last time someone challenged a decision in a meeting and was genuinely thanked for it? When did someone bring up a problem early and get praise instead of becoming the bearer of bad news?

Most companies say they want open communication, but what they really want is smooth agreement. They want people to voice concerns in a way that doesn't slow things down, challenge authority, or create uncomfortable conversations.

Here's a statistic that'll make you uncomfortable: 73% of employees have information that could significantly improve their company's operations, but they don't share it because they've learned it's not actually welcome.

I see this constantly in family businesses. Dad started the company thirty years ago, built it from nothing, knows every client personally. Brilliant operator. But when his daughter suggests they need a proper CRM system, or his son mentions that their main competitor is winning contracts with better digital proposals, suddenly it becomes "constructive feedback" that needs to be delivered more diplomatically.

The problem isn't the delivery. The problem is that challenging established ways of doing things feels like challenging the person who created those ways.

Why Australian Businesses Are Particularly Rubbish at This

We've got a cultural blind spot that makes this worse. Australians pride ourselves on being straight shooters, on calling a spade a spade. But in business contexts, this translates into believing that good communication means being more direct, when actually it means being more intentional.

I worked with a mining services company in Kalgoorlie where the operations manager would start every team meeting with "Right, let's cut through the bullshit." Sounds refreshingly honest, doesn't it? Except what followed was twenty minutes of him talking and everyone else nodding along.

Being direct isn't the same as being effective. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is acknowledge that you don't understand something, or that your initial reaction might be wrong, or that the person disagreeing with you might have information you don't.

But we're terrible at that. We mistake confidence for competence, decisiveness for leadership, and having the last word for winning the argument.

The Technology Trap

Let me tell you something that'll probably annoy the IT managers reading this: your communication problems got worse when you went digital, not better.

Email, Slack, Microsoft Teams – these tools were supposed to revolutionise workplace communication. Instead, they've created new ways to avoid having actual conversations. I've seen teams sitting three metres apart sending each other messages about projects they're both working on.

The worst part? Digital communication creates the illusion of transparency while actually making things more opaque. Sure, everything's documented now, but good luck finding the actual decision buried in a thread of 47 replies that started about something completely different.

And don't get me started on video calls. Half the participants are on mute, a quarter are multitasking, and the rest are trying to figure out why their camera's showing their ceiling. We've convinced ourselves this is equivalent to face-to-face communication.

It's not. It's performance theatre.

What Actually Works (Based on Evidence, Not Hope)

After nearly two decades of this work, I can tell you exactly what improves communication, and it's probably not what you expect.

First, you need to get comfortable with conflict. Not the shouty, personal kind – the productive kind where people disagree about ideas without taking it personally. Effective communication training should teach people how to argue well, not how to avoid arguments.

Second, you need systems that reward early problem identification. When someone spots an issue three months before it becomes critical, they should be celebrated, not treated like they're being negative.

Third – and this is crucial – leaders need to model the behaviour they want to see. If you want honest feedback, you need to demonstrate that you can receive it without becoming defensive. If you want people to admit mistakes early, you need to share your own failures openly.

I remember working with a logistics company where the general manager started every monthly meeting by sharing something he'd gotten wrong or learned recently. Seemed weird at first, but within six months, the whole culture shifted. People started bringing up problems earlier, offering suggestions more freely, challenging assumptions constructively.

The Feedback Fallacy

Here's something that might shock you: most feedback is useless.

Not because people don't know how to give it, but because the entire premise is flawed. We've built these elaborate feedback systems – 360 reviews, regular check-ins, anonymous suggestion boxes – that treat communication like a skill deficit rather than a trust deficit.

When someone says "I don't feel comfortable speaking up in meetings," the problem isn't that they need assertiveness training. The problem is that speaking up in meetings has proven to be unsafe, unrewarding, or pointless.

You can't train people to be more communicative in an environment that punishes communication.

I've seen companies spend twenty grand on communication consultants when the real issue was that the sales director interrupted everyone, the finance manager shot down every new idea, and the CEO only asked for input after decisions were already made.

Fix the environment first. Skills development second.

The Measurement Mistake

Companies love measuring communication. Email response times, meeting attendance, survey results about communication effectiveness. All completely meaningless.

You know what actually indicates good communication? Decisions getting made faster. Problems being solved before they become crises. Teams adapting quickly to changing circumstances. People staying at the company longer.

But these outcomes lag behind the communication improvements by months or sometimes years, so we end up measuring the wrong things and drawing the wrong conclusions.

I worked with a tech startup that was obsessed with response times. They measured how quickly people replied to messages, how fast tickets were resolved, how rapidly information moved through the organisation. Great metrics, right?

Wrong. They had fast communication about unimportant things and slow, painful communication about everything that mattered. People were responding quickly to avoid getting flagged in the metrics, but the substantive conversations were happening offline, informally, or not at all.

Why This Keeps Getting Worse

The real tragedy is that communication problems compound. Poor communication creates confusion, confusion creates conflict, conflict creates defensiveness, and defensiveness kills communication.

Most organisations are stuck in this cycle and don't even realise it. They think they're dealing with individual performance issues when they're actually dealing with systemic communication breakdown.

And here's the kicker: the harder you try to fix communication problems with communication solutions, the worse they get. More meetings to discuss why meetings aren't working. More emails about reducing email volume. More training about skills that people already possess but can't use effectively in the current environment.

It's like trying to fix a broken engine by repainting the car.

What You Should Do Instead

Stop trying to fix communication and start fixing the conditions that make good communication possible.

Create decision-making processes that actually involve the people who'll be affected by the decisions. Build systems that reward bringing up problems early rather than solving them heroically later. Design meetings that require input rather than just attendance.

Most importantly, accept that good communication often looks messy, inefficient, and uncomfortable in the short term. The alternative – smooth, polished, "professional" communication that doesn't actually communicate anything – is what got you into this mess in the first place.

Your company's communication isn't failing because people don't know how to communicate. It's failing because the organisation isn't designed to handle honest communication effectively.

Fix that first. Everything else will follow.

The rest is just expensive decoration on a fundamentally broken system.