“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.” - William H. Whyte
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When our company was acquired, I called an all-hands.
I had prepared carefully. I knew what my team would ask — How much money will I get? What are its tax implications? What stock options or grants will I get? What will be my role in the new org?
I had specific, quantifiable answers for all of it. The meeting went well, or so I thought. People asked questions and I answered them.
What I didn't understand was that not everyone had arrived at the same questions at the same time.
Some had already thought through everything and left the meeting satisfied. Others had focused on one or two things and missed the answers to the rest. A few heard the answers, thought they understood, and discovered a week later that they hadn't. For the next thirty days, I answered the same questions over and over as each person processed the news on their own schedule.
One senior engineer stopped me in the corridor: "What do you mean I have to pay taxes?" I started to answer. Before I'd finished, he had another question. "How many RSUs will I get?"
What should have been a moment of celebration became weeks of confusion — not because the information was wrong, but because I had treated a room of individuals as a single audience.
One message, many audiences
In my experience, most leaders, when they have something important to communicate, default to the all-hands. It is efficient, it is equitable, and it creates the feeling of alignment. The feeling, though, is often the illusion.
Mary Munter and Lynn Russell, in their Guide to Presentations (first published 2001), describe a framework called AIM — Audience, Intent, Message. The A comes first not as a courtesy but as a discipline. Before you open a slide or choose a format, you have to ask who you are actually talking to: what do they know, what do they feel, and what will persuade them? Not as a group, but as individuals within one.
The same room, whatever the occasion, is rarely one audience. A restructuring all-hands contains the person whose role is changing and the person whose role isn't — they are not having the same conversation. A strategy announcement reaches the person who shaped it and the person hearing it for the first time. Each filters the message through a completely different frame of reference.
The all-hands does one thing well: it signals that something important is happening and that leadership is willing to be visible. It rarely does the work of actually landing the message for each person. That work happens afterwards — often not by the person who presented, but by the leaders closest to the team: the ones in smaller groups sorted by situation, in one-on-ones timed to when each person is ready, in conversations that meet people where their questions actually are.
Watch It In Action
Michael Bungay Stanier's TED talk on "the advice monster" makes one precise point that applies directly to any leader preparing a major communication: our instinct, when someone brings us a problem or a question, is to jump immediately to our answer. What we skip — the moment of genuine curiosity about what this particular person actually needs right now — is exactly the thing that would make the answer useful.
Watch specifically for the section where he describes the cost of giving advice before you understand what the person in front of you is actually asking. That is the gap the acquisition all-hands opened — the answers were right, but the questions behind the questions had never been heard.
Try This Week
Before your next significant communication to a team or group for instance if you’re about to launch a new product — or roll out a significant initiative that will change how multiple teams work. Before you send the announcement or schedule the kickoff:
Map the sub-audiences before you communicate. The team building the product is not in the same conversation as the team being asked to sell it, or the team whose existing workflow it will replace. List who is affected, what they already know, and what they're most likely to be uncertain about. That map is your communication plan.
Sequence your conversations, don't batch them. The kickoff or launch announcement is a starting gun, not a conclusion. Follow it within 48 hours with smaller, targeted conversations — by function or by situation — where each group can ask the questions that are actually on their minds rather than the questions you anticipated.
A week after the launch, ask one person from each group what they understood. Not whether they're on board — what they understood. The gap between what you communicated and what they took away is the work that's left to do.
From Elsewhere
In the Andean communities of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, ayni (pronounced "eye-knee") is the foundational principle of reciprocity — the obligation to give back in kind what you have received, across the web of relationships that makes a community functional. It is not charity and it is not transaction; it is the assumption that exchange, when practised faithfully and over time, holds a community together. The Q'ero people of Peru consider ayni the most important of the five principles that guide Andean life. Read more »