The Cost of Silence

I was working in telecoms before the iPhone, before Android, back when BlackBerry and Windows were shaping some of the early mobile propositions. The promise was - better connection, faster access, more immediate communication. Then the iPhone arrived and everything moved - fast.

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Nearly twenty years later, we have more ways to communicate than at any point in history. WhatsApp. Email. Teams. Slack. LinkedIn. Text. Video calls. Social media. The phone. And yet I’m not convinced we’re better communicators. In fact, I think we might be getting worse.

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We can send faster, but increasingly we seem to respond slower. Somewhere along the way, we made delivery instant, but accountability optional.

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A WhatsApp “instant” message gets read but not answered, an email gets opened and disappears into the abyss. A LinkedIn message goes into what increasingly feels like an echo chamber. Someone says, “I’ll come back to you,” and days pass.

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It’s like, we’ve almost normalised silence.

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To be clear, this isn’t a moan about people being busy. We are busy. There are more channels competing for our attention and there is absolutely a place for balancing our time, switching off with family and creating boundaries. But there’s a difference between protecting your time and leaving someone else unable to move.

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Silence has a cost and I've seen this countless times in business.

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I remember joining an organisation post COVID-19 to help kick-start a digital transformation programme that had lost momentum. Some of the people identified as key stakeholders took two or three days simply to respond to an introduction.

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Think about that for a moment. A programme to create renewed momentum immediately suffered because the people required to move it forward weren’t effectively communicating. It certainly sets the tone.

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I’ve worked with senior leaders where teams have spent hours gathering information, analysing performance and developing recommendations that required a decision - only for the work to disappear into silence. Perhaps it gets acknowledged in a head office corridor days later. But by then, the opportunity to act may have passed.

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In digital and e-commerce, decisions can have relatively short windows. Changing spend, adjusting campaigns, responding to customer behaviour or changing direction isn’t something you can necessarily revisit three weeks later and expect the same outcome. In those environments, silence isn’t just a delay. It can actually mean wasted spend, missed opportunity and lost revenue.

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Poor communication doesn’t present itself as a major business problem. It quite often appears somewhere else. When a project is running late or a decision hasn’t been made. When two functions aren’t aligned or someone has duplicated work. A good person becomes frustrated – more often a customer is left waiting. Another opportunity disappears.

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Eventually some ask why the organisation isn’t moving quickly enough. Sometimes the answer is remarkably simple. People aren’t talking to one another.

Communication is one of the few investments that compounds almost immediately. Every conversation that creates clarity removes ambiguity. Less friction creates more energy, confidence and pace. And the right pace is one of the biggest competitive advantages any organisation can have.

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Important to say at this point, communication isn’t about hierarchy. There’s another behaviour I think we need to challenge. Somewhere in business, we appear to have created the idea that the more senior you become, the less accessible you should be. Although, I’ve never subscribed to that.

 

Of course, leadership involves confidentiality. There will always be conversations that cannot be shared and decisions that need to remain within a small group.​
But confidentiality and poor communication are not the same thing. As frustrating as it was at the time, I’ve seen situations where useful information has been held back when sharing it could have helped a team make a better decision weeks, sometimes months earlier.

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Worse, I’ve seen cultures where people almost wait for something to go wrong before revealing that they knew something that might have changed the outcome.

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“I knew that would happen.” Maybe. So why didn’t we talk about it?

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Leadership shouldn’t be about knowing something other people don’t. It should be about helping people to make informed decisions.

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I’ve also seen what happens when you get it right. Some of the most productive situations I’ve experienced throughout my career haven’t started with jazzy technology or another dashboard. They’ve started by getting people talking.

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I’ve run rebranding exercises with post it notes and a room full of people from across a business. I’ve brought together different functions around CRM, ERP, AI and wider transformation programmes because technology rarely affects one department in isolation.

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I’ve seen what happens when sales and marketing stop communicating through reports and start talking to each other regularly. And the difference created by bringing leaders from different countries together regularly and sharing the three or five things that matter across the business that week. Not every message will directly affect Germany, France, the UK or the US. That isn’t the point. It’s about making sure they have context. They know what is happening. They don’t discover it three weeks later through the organisational grapevine. And they can make better decisions because of it.

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We spend a lot of time studying businesses that outperform their competitors.

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What technology are they using? What is their strategy? What does their operating model look like? Who have they hired? What are they doing differently? All perfectly reasonable questions. But I’d wager that if you got underneath many consistently high-performing organisations, you’d find something considerably less fashionable sitting underneath their performance: They communicate well.

Leadership communicates with the organisation regularly. Teams communicate with each other. People know what matters and problems travel upwards rather than being hidden. Context travels downwards rather than being guarded and decisions get made.

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When communication is clear, confident and concise enough - people understand what is expected of them. That creates confidence. Confidence creates energy and pace. And pace matters enormously in business.

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I’m not saying we need to find an excuse for more communication, the answer isn’t another Teams channel. It isn’t copying another 15 people into an email. And it certainly isn’t another meeting. We don’t need more noise. We need better communication.

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Seriously, just acknowledge the message. If you don’t have the answer, say so. If you need until Friday, say Friday. If somebody needs information to decide, give them the insight. If circumstances change, tell people. And don’t make someone feel awkward for chasing something they reasonably expected you to respond to.

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None of this is revolutionary. Perhaps that’s the point.

 

Technology has transformed almost beyond recognition during my career. The devices have become faster, smaller and then larger again. The networks have become faster, and information has become instantly accessible.

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Yet somewhere amongst all that progress, our own communication habits seem to have slowed down. We’ve just gradually developed technology and behaviours that made it increasingly acceptable not to communicate.

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Maybe it’s time we unlearned some of that. Not by being available 24/7. Not by responding to everything within 30 seconds. Simply by recognising that when somebody communicates with us, what we do next can affect their ability to move, decide and deliver. Particularly if we’re in a position of leadership.

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So, before you leave that message on read, ignore the email or decide you’ll come back to the conversation when you’re “good and ready”, ask yourself one thing -

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What does my silence create?