Communication Is a Loop

"It is often far more important to have questions for your answers than to have answers to your questions."— James McPartland

Every leader believes they're communicating clearly. Few go back and check whether it landed that way.

A leader delivers a message, whether in a meeting, a memo, or a hallway conversation, and walks away confident it came across the way they meant it. Meanwhile, the person on the other end walked away with a version shaped by their own workload, their own anxieties, their own read of the room that day, close to what was said, but not identical.

Nobody notices, because nobody goes back to compare notes.

A loud disagreement gets resolved because someone has to deal with it. A quiet misunderstanding just sits there, shaping decisions and slowing execution, and nobody ever traces the friction back to its source.

• When was the last time you asked your team to repeat back what they heard, not what you said?

• How confident are you that your top priority this quarter is the same priority your team would name, unprompted?

• If you surveyed your leadership team and your front line separately, would their answers about how things are going match?

Most leaders assume everyone's on the same page until the evidence says otherwise; a project misses, and a good employee quietly checks out. Or someone acts on information that was accurate three conversations ago.

Verification is what closes the gap. Talking more doesn't help if nobody's confirming that what people heard matches what was actually said.

The habit that works is asking, not telling. "Does that make sense?" just invites a nod. "Tell me what you heard" can't be answered on autopilot. Sometimes the answer confirms you're aligned.

Sometimes it reveals that the priority you've talked about in every meeting for the last six weeks still

isn't showing up in how people are spending their time.

The leaders who close this gap have built the habit of confirming what was heard, without treating misalignment as a problem. It's just what happens when communication becomes a loop instead of a broadcast.

You said it. Whether it came across the way you meant is a separate question, and it's the only one that matters.

Mac 😎