Not Louder Messages, Clearer ones.

Most leadership communication problems today are not about clarity.

They’re about competitive volume. We’ve started confusing loud communication with clear communication.

By Michael Rickwood

Today, it’s a total epidemic, it’s pervasive, and it’s everywhere, especially on social networks, which have made it visible at scale.

Firstly lets define what loud communication is. We can recognise it first and foremost in social networks. Let’s take LinkedIn for example. Loud communication optimises for attention. It borrows energy from novelty, urgency, emotion, and reaction. It uses hooks, hacks, polarisation, and spectacle to cut through crowded feeds, and it works. At least in the short term. Long term it exhausts us, confuses us and at worst betrays us.

I’ve also seen this pattern in my career in companies. In leadership rooms. In pitch situations. In moments where trust is either formed or fractured. Theatre, provocation, bluff, overpromising, and self-congratulation without the stern analysis. This nearly always finishes in misalignment. Misalignment will slowly erode trust within an organisation. Loudness is increasingly mistaken for leadership. We see it everywhere.

I’ve worked on events in companies that have focused on theatricality to boost and reward their teams, only to understand that the deep structural problems remain. Silos, big personalities that don’t compromise, and mistrust. A better strategy would be to name these problems in clear language and propose a strategy to rebuild a stronger consensus. This is not easy by any means but clarity over a problem is the first step towards its solution. If you can name it, you can deal with it.

If you can simplify the communication of a complex problem, clarify it, and do it in a calm manner with repetition, something powerful happens. You seek not to trigger your audience. You seek to reassure them. It anchors. It optimises for orientation. Orientation in a collective is alignment. From aligment trust can be nurtured. An analogy that comes to mind is a metronome. Calm, rhythmic, consistent, grounding.

In social media, as AI accelerates content production, the temptation to be louder becomes more intense. There are all manner of hacks that I see people using. templates, hacks, provocation, and stark messages that speak today and then are denied tomorrow. This type of noise is very toxic for organisations.

On linkedin it might translate into more posts. More novelty. More emotional charge. Trigger your audience somehow and get them coming back for more hits.

The feed rewards it. The algorithm amplifies it. Can you build long term busness relationships within an organisation, communicating like this? I think not.

Organisations don’t run on dopamine. They run on trust, alignment, and shared understanding. Could you imagine an organisation being run where everyone is screaming for attention? Thankfully, this kind of behaviour is limited to the most toxic workplaces. But sometimes a fast, ill-conceived rollout of a new strategy can break the harmony.

A recent example would be Meta’s recent restructuring and re-orientation, and culture shift towards AI and away from Metaverse left many emplyees heads spinning. In 2023, Meta went through a year of intensity, which led to layoffs and conflicting internal signals. Employees and former staff described a barrage of shifting priorities, reorganisations, and mixed signals that contributed to confusion and morale challenges. While the intense direction change may have seemed necessary to leadership, overcommunicating raises the temperature. This causes harm to an organisation. If loundness dominates clarity, then serenity is lost. During periods of intense organisational change, even transparent leadership can create a fog of messages rather than clarity.

So again, when communication becomes too loud, the same thing starts to erode trust.

In healthy leadership environments, clarity is not a style.

It’s an ethical responsibility. Clear communication assumes the audience is intelligent but overloaded. It respects psychological safety.

It prioritises sense-making over performance.

Clear messages don’t try to win the room.

They stabilise it.

The healthiest leaders I work with are not looking for better hooks.

They’re asking for fewer distortions.

And it’s a pattern that should be encouraged in others. I implore anyone to resist the fear based tempations of hacks in their communication to somehow pitch even louder to get the attention they want. The people who do this constantly will keep moving the needle into the danger zones. And that is an ethical issue, and I’m not saying that ethical communication is just about moral purity. That is another subject, but it

is about signal hygiene.

Organisations that succeed need language that holds under pressure.

That means messages that still make sense when emotions run high and the stakes are real.

Clarity is slower than noise.

Quieter than performance.

Less rewarding to the algorithm or the trends dripping through a scaling company.

But it compounds. Drip drip, like a steady metronome.

As complexity rises, orientation becomes oxygen.

This is the work I’m committing to more fully now.

Not louder messages.

Clearer ones.