By Barbara Stewart, PCC, ACTC | Accelus Partners
We were about to run the first session of a new leadership development program, and the room was going to be full of people who may or may not have known each other but definitely didn’t know us.
That mattered more than the agenda did. Before we could ask this group to do anything real together (solve a problem, disagree productively, own a decision) they needed a reason to actually engage instead of politely sitting through it. You cannot put that under ‘what to expect today.’ You cannot open a session by asking a room of near-strangers to trust you. What you can do is choose a topic that earns something close to it, without ever naming it as the goal.
We chose communication skills. Partly because people genuinely need it: our always-connected work culture has eroded basics like a clear subject line and a message built for the reader, not the writer. And partly because communication is safe ground. It’s practical enough to justify an hour of someone’s time, and personal enough to open a door.
My number one rule of communication is this: it’s not about you. It’s about your audience.
I use that line constantly, and I mean it literally. The way you’d tell a direct report something is not the way you’d tell your boss the same thing. The way you’d raise an issue with a close teammate is not the way you’d raise it with a leader in another function. Same information, different audience, different message. Most people know this in theory. Fewer people run it as a discipline, checking every email, every call, every conversation across a table against one question: what does the person on the other side of this actually need from me?
That question turned out to be the real work of the session, even though we never called it that. We walked through it in practical terms: know who you’re writing or talking to, know the purpose of the message, lead with that purpose so the reader isn’t hunting for it, name the actions and who owns them. We talked about listening as the other half of the exchange, because most people listen to respond, or to protect their position, when the more useful moves are listening to understand, to solve, or to build something together. Every one of those pieces was really the same question again: what does the person on the other side of this actually need from me?
That idea ran underneath the whole session, even when we weren’t naming it directly. Communication is not the whole story. It’s the visible behavior. What sits underneath it, clarity of roles, trust, whether people feel safe saying what they actually think, shows up in communication before it shows up anywhere else.
We didn’t need to spell that out for it to work. A group that spends an hour practicing how to consider someone else’s perspective before their own is, without being told, practicing the exact muscle that candor requires. They weren’t just learning to write a better email. They were rehearsing what it feels like to think about someone else’s experience of them, which is where trust actually starts, not in a workshop about trust, but in the smaller decisions that come before it.
That’s the pattern we see again and again with the teams we work with. The communication problem people bring us is rarely just a communication problem. It’s the visible symptom of something underneath it: unclear roles, thin trust, a strategy that hasn’t been translated into who owns what. Starting with communication skills isn’t a workaround for that deeper work. Done well, it’s the first honest step into it.
Here’s the harder version of that question, aimed at you instead of the room you’re leading. When did you last check whether your own communication has kept pace with the level you’re operating at now? The more senior you get, the less feedback you get on it. What you don’t hear directly still shows up: a team that has stopped pushing back, a report who tells you what you want to hear instead of what’s true, meetings that end in something that sounds like alignment but isn’t. If your people aren’t fully honest with you, it’s worth asking whether that’s a trust problem in them, or a communication habit in you that’s made honesty feel unsafe.
If this is the layer you’re trying to build in your own team, trust, psychological safety, the conditions that let people actually say what they think, we’re going deeper on exactly that at our next Conversation Among Leaders session on September 10, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. CT.
If you’d like to attend, please apply here for this invitation-only event: https://app.marketecsengine.com/widget/form/KjsEuyPHUxtGmPMNd7wq
Barbara Stewart, PCC, ACTC, is the founder of Accelus Partners. She works with GMs, VPs, and CFOs at mid-sized and large organizations to build the leadership capacity that supports execution, growth, and strategic capacity.
