167: When Clear Messaging Still Misses

Good intentions can still break trust. After a crisis, many leaders speak with calm certainty, hoping to steady the room, only to discover it doesn't work the way they thought.

We unpack why offering reassurance can backfire, how timing and tone shape meaning, and what it takes to communicate in a way that doesn't unintentionally push people away. 

Guided by the lived realities of survivors and the collective memory of COVID’s early messaging, we examine:

• The moment a polished statement can be perceived as dismissal. 
• How promises create expectations--and how to meet them.
• The difference between being reassuring and being present.
• Why managing an audience often sounds like pressure to be okay when people are anything but.

We share a practical, humane playbook for post-crisis communication: trade certainty for clarity, and polish for presence. Name what’s known and unknown, set expectations with ranges not absolutes, and outline when and how updates will arrive. Acknowledge the varied layers of impact—from those at the center to the broader community—so no one’s experience feels flattened for the sake of order. Most important, invite two-way conversation and mean it; listening at least as much as you speak is how you rebuild credibility when facts are still moving.

If you lead teams or communities through disruption, this conversation offers language you can use today.

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Transcript

Visible And Invisible Leadership Mistakes

Manya Chylinski 0:00

Some mistakes that leaders make are obvious. We see them, we can deconstruct them. Others are invisible, even for very well-intentioned leaders. Welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinsky. In this episode, we're going to talk about one of the confusing situations that leaders can face when you communicate thoughtfully and with compassion and care and understanding, and the message still doesn't land the way that you want it to. You might not have said anything wrong, but maybe there was a misunderstanding of what people need to hear. After crisis and disruption, we expect our leaders to speak, to talk, to get up in front of the room and explain what happened and explain the response and reassure everybody and steady the ship, as it were, maybe even set the direction for the future. So when we're doing that, we choose our words really carefully, express concern, acknowledge that people are having difficulty, emphasize resilience and strength. And on paper, that message could be really solid, but in practice, it might not be communicating what you're hoping it communicates. So as people, and we know our leaders are people, we assume sometimes that when we're clear in our messaging, that that will be comforting. If we are calm, people will feel calm. If we express empathy, that the people who hear the message will understand that and receive what we say as empathy. And if we acknowledge that people are going through a difficult time, that people will feel seen and that absolutely can be true. But there's this belief that if we say all the right things, that's going to reduce uncertainty. But from the inside, as the people who are going through this crisis, who've lived through it, who are trying to figure out what does it mean and what are my next steps, that kind of communication might feel different. So if a leader speaks too soon in the process of recovery and response and recovery, if they speak too broadly or offer a conclusion that maybe we haven't really gotten to, people might hear that as closure. The leader saying, Yep, we're done, we're moving on, but that might not be how they're feeling. So maybe we hear it as reassurance instead of recognition of the individual struggles that we're each going through. We hear it as the leader is being confident, but are they being present? Are they seeing what's really happening here on the ground? And it comes across, it can come across, like this is the official messaging, and it's probably gone through legal and everybody's figured out exactly what to say, instead of the leader listening to what is going on in the community, in the organization. And even a well-crafted statement can feel flattening of the experience if it's trying to resolve the complex nature of a crisis too soon. And people aren't necessarily going to argue with you. At this point, right after a crisis, people are exhausted and they're probably not going to figure out or they're not going to believe that saying anything is going to make a difference. So they just disengage. So you might not even realize that people are now no longer trusting. Let's ground this in a real example. Something that almost everyone listening lived through in some way. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, public communication focused really heavily on reassuring all of us. You may remember phrases like, this is going to be a couple weeks, it's going to be short term, we're going to get back to normal soon. And those messages were delivered by our leaders calmly, confidently. And the idea was this is a big thing. There's a lot going on. We don't want people to panic on a massive scale. And I think at the time, people thought, you know, projecting that certainty was the way to help people cope. But what those messages did unintentionally was set expectations that, as we know, were not met by reality. This was a fast-moving situation, and things changed a lot. And it was difficult as a member of the public to understand how that change was happening and what that meant for us. And the weeks stretched into months, and we know the months stretched into years. And so this was this prolonged crisis that we were dealing with that affected all of us in so many different ways, depending on our living situation, our work situation, caregiving responsibilities. We were also dealing with the emotional cost of being separated from friends and family physically in many cases, and also being told that there were solutions. There was a resolution. It was just around the corner. This thing is just going to happen. So we kept thinking we were going to be okay. And then things got worse and there were new waves. And so the hardest part might not have been that initial disruption, though clearly that was very difficult. It was that repeated resetting of expectations. And we didn't get the message early on that there was nuance to this and that it couldn't be resolved as quickly as we wanted it to. So each time we got some kind of reassuring message, recalibrated, right? We were hopeful. We thought, okay, I only have to do this for X number of days or weeks more. And that also changed how a lot of us trusted the people and the system that was delivering that message. Now, from a leadership perspective, I think people were doing what they thought was best, communicating what they knew in the moment. There was limited information, there was so much fear about social stability. I think leaders felt pressure to be certain and to offer certainty where maybe there really wasn't any. And so from the inside, think about your experience. It felt different, right? There was this gap between what we were being told was going to happen and what we were living. And that eroded trust. And there was a point when a lot of people stopped believing what leaders were saying. And it's not because they were lying, it's because the story kept evolving and the science kept evolving. But maybe the language wasn't as open, or maybe it was closing off the story before the story was really closed. And that's a classic example. Leaders were saying what we believed to be the right things. They were calming, they were responsible, but it still caused harm. And not because offering people reassurance is the wrong thing to do, but when you offer reassurance and you don't leave room for the complexity of a situation or the uncertainty, people feel gaslighted. Like, oh, you you're saying that my experience of this, which is uncertain and fearful, is not real because you're saying I should be okay. So when we feel pressured by leadership or someone in a leadership position, almost like telling us we're supposed to pretend we're not feeling what we're feeling, or we're supposed to override it, or we're, you know, we're supposed to be strong when we're not feeling it. We don't usually protest things like that. You disengage, you stop listening, and you stop believing future messages. And you stop believing that anything they tell you is going to really match with your own lived experience. And that is the cost of communication that prioritizes stability over being truthful about very real uncertainties. Survivors, people who've gone through crisis, gone through tragedy, gone through a natural disaster, can be highly attuned to language and word choice. Not just the words that you say, but when you say it and how you say it. So reassuring people too early can feel dismissive, like you're not counting everybody's experience. If you're offering optimism, but you're not giving space for the reality of people's different experiences, that feels like pressure to conform, to believe the thing that the leader said we're supposed to be feeling. And as a survivor, I can tell you, I listen to leaders when they're talking in the aftermath of crisis. Are they making room for the uncertainty and the confusion and the fear? Or are they trying to manage the situation and pretend that those things don't exist? And I notice when that messaging closes a door instead of saying, hey, we're here, we're open, we're listening. And this isn't intent. In a crisis, everybody's dealing with their own emotions and their own feelings and their own experiences. And as leaders in an organization or community, you are expected to deal with those personal things as well as protecting your citizens or your workforce and communicating with them effectively. So the issue isn't intent. Leaders can absolutely want to do the right thing. Sometimes it's simply timing or it's simply word choice. When leaders over-index on the messaging, they often under-index on listening. And for the person who is being spoken to, you can feel managed rather than understood or met where we are in that moment. So I'm not going to talk to a leader who makes me feel managed, who makes me feel like I'm supposed to be over whatever it is. Because if I'm not and I'm still uncertain, I don't trust that that's going to be met with care and empathy. I'm not going to ask questions. And it's going to feel like, okay, this complexity that I'm dealing with, these difficult emotions, this confusing time, it's inconvenient for you, the leader. So I don't want anything to do with it. I don't want anything to do with you. You might think the communication succeeded because you said the message. You said the things that you felt you needed to say in the moment, but it might cause people to disengage. So effective leadership communication after a disruption is less about resolving everything. There certainly maybe some things that you can decide and resolve, but there are other things that are more, you need to just hold them and let them be and sit with the discomfort. So leaders who can do that, who can sit with that discomfort and build trust, they talk about the uncertainty. They talk about the different levels of response and they don't rush to fix it. And they leave space for whatever people are feeling. They don't close the loop and say, this is how we're feeling or this is what we believe. They understand that people's reactions are going to vary, and that you don't have to have been standing in the place where the thing happened to be impacted by it. That there are a wide range of individuals, witnesses, family members, friends, colleagues, the community at large. And leaders who build trust invite ongoing conversation and a two-way conversation, a two-way street, rather than just offering reassurance one time and moving on. So in this world where we like to be certain and we like to say we know things, and we feel that the only way to be trustworthy is to say that you know something. Sometimes the most important message you can say is we don't know everything. We're still learning about what happened. We are still learning what this means for us as a community. We are still learning what this means for us as an organization. Yes, it's possible to use the wrong words. Absolutely. But you don't really need to have all the right words. What you need to have is the right posture, the right belief when you come into this. That presence and that openness build trust, and that's going to last longer than a polished message ever will.