There’s a Richard Nixon quote I use in almost every leadership presentation I give.
It goes something like this: I know you think you know exactly what you thought I meant to say, but what you failed to realize is that what you heard is not what I meant at all.
It’s a little absurd. It’s also one of the most accurate descriptions of organizational communication breakdown that I’ve ever encountered.
Because here’s the truth most leaders don’t fully reckon with: Communication is not just what you say, and sometimes we fail to even say what we mean accurately. Communication is also what gets received. And we almost never know what’s actually been received.
We see our message through our own filter. We know what we meant, the reasoning behind it, the care we put into the framing. And because all of that feels clear to us and makes perfect sense inside our own heads, we assume it lands clearly and similarly on the other end.
It doesn’t. Not always. Not automatically.
In my experience, there are three ways a message can miss — and each one requires a different response.
The first is the most manageable: the message lands poorly, and you can see it. The look on someone’s face tells you immediately that something didn’t translate. A good leader catches that signal and adjusts.
The second is more dangerous: the message lands poorly, and you don’t read the signs. People look fine. Nobody pushes back. You walk away assuming alignment — and the misunderstanding quietly takes root.
The third is the most insidious: the message lands poorly, you know it, and you don’t do anything about it.
That last one is worth sitting with. It happens more than most leaders want to admit — sometimes because the conversation feels too hard to reopen, sometimes because it’s easier to hope it works out. Neither of those is leadership. Both are avoidance.
The fix requires a shift in how you check in. Most leaders default to asking “Does that make sense?” at the end of a conversation. It feels like due diligence. It almost never is.
When someone answers “yes” to “does that make sense?”, they’re telling you they think they understood what they actually heard, regardless of whether it’s what you said or meant. They’re not telling you what they actually heard. Those can be very different things.
A better question is “What did you hear?” or “What’s sticking with you from this conversation?” Those questions reveal what landed — and what didn’t.
There’s one more layer worth naming. Emotions don’t always surface immediately. A significant piece of news — a restructure, a personnel change, a shift in direction — can produce an “I’m fine” in the moment and something very different forty-eight hours later. Which means checking in once, right after the conversation, is rarely the whole job.
The goal of communication isn’t just to transmit a message. It’s to create a shared understanding. And you can’t know if you’ve done that unless you’re willing to check — and then check again.
Photo by Miryam León on Unsplash
