The Execution Gap No One Planned For

I’m going to be vulnerable for a moment. When I was leading comms for a large organization more than once I was pulled aside by a senior leader and asked a version of the same thing:

“We need to send another comm. Employees aren’t doing X.”

“What are the analytics on the comms you sent because things aren’t going the way we want.”

“Can you redesign a cascade communication strategy so it actually lands?”

And so, my team would scramble to pull opens and clicks. Refine messages. Maybe even create a video.

But the truth is that comms wasn’t the problem.

What I saw happen in that organization was an execution gap wearing a communication costume. And I see that with companies I support today.

Cascade communications don’t break once. They break in three distinct ways.

Failure 1: Accountability is assumed.

Leadership trusts the management chain to execute work and get the job done. In the same way, they expect the chain to carry communication the way it carries execution. Leader A is expected to tell B. B is expected to tell C, and so on down the line.

But execution and communication are two different tasks. With communication, there is often no mechanism to verify the message actually traveled—or traveled intact. No closed loop. No confirmation. No consequence if it stopped somewhere in the middle.

The operational equivalent is second nature in every other context: did the orders ship? Verify the numbers when it’s done. Let me know if there are any issues. Operational process has verification built in. Accountability has consequences built in. But communication has neither—just an assumption that it will happen because it’s expected to.

When the cascade breaks, there is no moment where someone can be held accountable. No missed KPI to point to. The failure gets handed to the communications team like a baton—because who else owns communication?

Failure 2: The message keeps moving—but gets buried along the way.

This one is more insidious because no one does it on purpose. It’s similar to the telephone game but we’ll call it, you reached the wrong number.

The C-suite aligns on the business priority and passes it down. Leader A cascades to their direct report B—but adds context specific to their function. Message sent but altered. B passes it to C, who possibly adds in their own layer. By the time a message hits the frontline manager, the original message may or may not even be included in the list of six things. Everyone was doing their job. But every addition or adjustment quietly demoted the original priority. Cascade death by addition.

Failure 3: Communications band-aids the broken system

Because accountability was never assigned and the cascade is diluted, the communication function becomes a safety net. More emails and intranet posts.  Duplicating content perpetuates the noise distracting teams from what’s most important.

Because here’s the honest truth: People don’t always read your well-crafted and thought-out communications. They’re too busy trying to get the six things done they were handed in a meeting with their frontline leader! And when they do read, they see the same thing they read before, which makes them not want to read.

They look to their manager to tell them what actually matters. And their manager thinks they did what they were supposed to do by prioritizing the top four things they thought their team could accomplish. But the real message is buried in the list at number five or six.

Someone always absorbs the cost

Like I said, I watched this pattern play out firsthand. The company had a weekly Operations call for leaders. This is where they shared priorities for the week. Then my team would get comm requests.

But the comms didn’t match the priorities discussed on the call. So, I asked Senior Operations leaders to join their call so I could better support them. But over time, I got cut out. They didn’t want non-operators on their call. And the breakdowns became more frequent. Comms was asked to resend and duplicate information, adding to the noise and making it worse.

And eventually, when the frontline still didn’t know what was going on, the blame landed on comms and the frontline managers. But here’s the question nobody asked: were those managers unwilling—or were they under-informed by a system that had already broken before it reached them? We’ll never really know. What I do know is that the operational design created the problem and the people closest to the work paid the price.

What it looks like when it works

The organizations that get this right aren’t better communicators. They have a system designed for communications to support, not lead.

Priorities get set at the top. But before a single message goes out, there’s a plan for how it moves, to whom, and in what sequence. Managers aren’t just sent a deck or an email to forward. They’re brought into the conversation first—so they can engage with it, question it, understand it enough to retell it to their team. Accountability is built in before the cascade begins.

Only then, does the communications team wrap a message around what’s already been delivered—as a reinforcement, not the primary messenger. The why. The culture connection. The meaning that turns information into direction.

“Because everyone works together to ensure we all go home the same way we came in, you will now see…”

That’s not a better message. It’s a better system.

The question worth asking

When communication breaks down in your organization, where do you look first?  I recommend you resist the instinct to improve the message and instead ask:

• Who is actually accountable for the conversation(s) happening?

• At what point did the original priority get buried under someone else’s agenda?

• Where does the design problem actually live—and who owns fixing it?

If you can’t answer those questions cleanly, then you don’t have a communication problem. You have a costume to remove.