When your people say, “We have a communication problem,” they’ve actually told you nothing—and that’s exactly the problem. “Communication” has become a junk-drawer word that hides real issues, keeps teams in ambiguity, and quietly kills execution.
In this video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes why top five-percent organizations refuse to tolerate vague complaints about communication—and what they do instead. They build explicit communication skill sets, set crystal-clear expectations, and hold people accountable for how they pass critical information.
You’ll discover:
– Why the word “communication” is meaningless until you name the specific breakdowns slowing your team down.
– How lazy communication shows up in missing handoffs, unresolved conflict, and fuzzy project status updates.
– What top-tier teams do differently to create authentic, credible communication that drives problem solving and results.
This isn’t about sending more emails or adding another meeting. It’s about engineering how information moves—up, down, and across your organization—so people know exactly what’s happening, what’s needed, and what “done” looks like.
Watch now.
Over twenty years of having a university-validated culture survey that we do within organizations, just guess what’s always number one in terms of the problems that people perceive to have within the organization. You guessed it: communication.
What do you mean, communication? Well, there’s the problem. The word communication doesn’t mean anything. Does it mean that information doesn’t come up through the organization?
It doesn’t go down through the organization? That people don’t work through conflicts together? That people don’t know how to pass the baton in projects? That, well, you get it.
Communication, the very word, the essence of it, lacks communication. It doesn’t say anything. When people stay in ambiguity, nothing gets done. And yet, there needs to be an answer because top five-percent organizations have one thing in common.
They have cleaned up their communication patterns. They’re no longer lazy communicators. And everyone is very, very clear about how to pass batons, how to ask for what they need, how to communicate the stage that something is at. But that doesn’t just happen with good intention.
That’s a series of skill sets that people must learn in order to make that happen.
But if somebody can do it, you can do it. And if you want to be a top five-percenter and keep that status, you’re going to need to help your team figure out how to elevate their communication skills such that they are no longer lazy communicators, but they are authentic, credible communicators that allow for a complete and clear understanding of what’s going on and bring problem-solving skills as a result of the communication. Because at the end of the day, we still got to get the results, even though there will be breakdowns, and clear communication takes away many of the breakdowns.