Welcome back to our series on Seven Ways to Build Teams That Deliver. Throughout this series, we are exploring the practical leadership habits and frameworks that help organisations build clearer direction, stronger alignment and more effective execution across teams.

In our first post, we looked at vision and direction and how leaders can translate strategic intent into something their teams can actually act on. When clear direction is paired with effective communication, teams know exactly where they are heading and how their day‑to‑day decisions move the organisation forward. 

This week the focus is on another fundamental element of leadership: effective communication, including how to make sure the message relayed to your teams actually lands, by understanding how communication works as a process.

Why Clear Communication Doesn’t Always Lead to Changes in Behaviour

A familiar pattern appears in organisations of all sizes. A leader communicates an important change clearly, reinforces it more than once, and follows up with supporting information, yet the shift in behaviour remains inconsistent.

Teams often understand the message itself. The challenge is that understanding a communication and translating it into day-to-day decisions are not always the same thing.

That gap can quietly shape how consistently change is adopted across a business, particularly when people are balancing operational pressure, competing priorities and established habits.

Where Communication Often Breaks Down 

A plant manager at a food manufacturing site is introducing a new approach to daily production planning, designed to reduce unplanned downtime and improve line efficiency.

Department managers have been briefed, standard operating procedures updated, and the changes reinforced through site-wide communication and follow-up reminders. 

Eight weeks later, two departments are running the new process well, while a third is still largely doing things the old way and a fourth is somewhere in between.

When the plant manager speaks to team leaders, they can explain the new approach clearly and understand the reasoning behind it. Yet on the line, day-to-day decisions are still being shaped more by habit and immediate operational pressure than the new planning approach. 

The message was shared, but somewhere between the briefing room and the production floor, it stopped translating into consistent behaviour.

If different teams interpret the same message in different ways under pressure, how clear and repeatable is the communication process around change within your own organisation?

How Shannon and Weaver’s Communication Model Can Help

The Shannon-Weaver model provides a useful way of understanding why communication can feel clear at leadership level yet still lead to inconsistent action across teams. As messages move through an organisation, interpretation is shaped by context, assumptions, operational pressure and previous experience. Over time, even well-intended communication can begin to drift from its original meaning.

The model breaks communication into a series of connected stages, helping leaders think more carefully about where understanding can weaken, distort or stop translating into action.

Sender

The sender starts with a message and encodes it into words, visuals, or actions. The language chosen, the level of detail, and the assumptions about what the audience already knows all shape what happens next.

Channel

The channel is the medium through which the message travels: a team briefing, an email, a noticeboard update, a one‑to‑one conversation, or a printed procedure. Different channels carry different risks of distortion, and not every channel suits every type of message.

Receiver

The receiver decodes the message they get. Decoding is never neutral. Each person brings their own experience, context, prior knowledge and current priorities to what they hear, so the same words, received by ten people, will naturally produce slightly different interpretations.

Noise

Noise is anything that interferes with accurate decoding. In a manufacturing context for example, noise is often psychological rather than literal. It might be the memory of a previous change programme that did not go well, competing priorities that make a new process feel like extra work, or the assumption that “this is just like the last briefing” so there is no reason to listen differently.

Feedback

A crucial addition in the model is feedback and this is where it becomes genuinely powerful for leaders. Feedback is the mechanism by which the sender checks whether the message has been received and interpreted as intended. Without it, communication is one-directional. Leaders speak, but never confirm. They inform, but have no way of knowing whether understanding has followed.

The most practical implication for leaders is this: treat communication as a two-way process of verification, not a one-way process of delivery. The goal is to be understood in a way that leads to the right action.

What Does Effective Communication Look Like?

Once leaders make that shift in how they think about communication, the questions they ask themselves change. It is no longer “have I told them?”. It becomes “do they understand this in a way that will change how they act?”.

That shift leads to some practical habits that can make a real difference day-to-day. 

Check For Understanding, Not Just Acknowledgement. 

Ending a briefing with “any questions?” usually produces silence regardless of how much has or has not landed. Inviting people to explain back what they have heard, in their own words and in the context of their own role, is far more revealing and far more useful.

Watch What Happens in the First Week. 

Behaviour after a message is delivered tells you more about how well it was understood than any conversation in a meeting room. If the new approach is not showing up on the line, that is a signal to revisit and clarify, not just repeat the same message louder.

Match the Channel to the Message 

Straightforward operational updates often travel well in writing. Strategic changes, new behavioural expectations and anything that asks people to do something differently almost always need dialogue. People need the chance to ask questions, raise concerns and make sense of what is being asked of them before they can genuinely commit.

Make It Safe to Say “I Do Not Understand Yet.” 

When people feel they can’t admit a message has not landed, they perform understanding instead. That is harder to spot and harder to fix than straightforward confusion. Leaders who build psychological safety into the way they communicate create teams that learn faster, speak up earlier and implement more consistently.

Three Questions to Improve Communication Effectiveness

• How do you currently verify that communication has been understood, not just received? 
• What “noise” exists in your organisation that might be distorting messages as they travel?
• Are your channels matched to your messages? 

Leaders who refine their communication habits often notice the benefits first in reduced friction: plans translate into action more smoothly, fewer conversations are spent unpicking crossed wires and teams handle more decisions well at their own level. That is the upside of approaching communication as a core leadership capability, it frees up time, energy and focus for the work that really moves performance forward.

Coming Up: Why Strategy Stalls When Resources Don’t Match Priorities

In Post 3, we will move into operational territory and look at how leaders can make sure that the right resources are pointed at the right priorities and why this is often the difference between a strategy that delivers and one that stalls.

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