Less is More Leadership Communication

Alex speaks with Tom Lemanski of Chicago Executive Coaching about why many leaders over-communicate and how it undermines their message. Listeners will learn how to identify the core point of their message and cut unnecessary words to respect the time and attention of their audience.

Tom Lemanski is an executive coach and leadership advisor at Chicago Executive Coaching. If this conversation sparked something for you, visit https://chicagoexecutivecoaching.com to learn more or get in touch.

Transcript

Speaker 0:04

Welcome to Leadership Breakthroughs, where executive coaches and leaders explore the mindsets and strategies that drive real growth. I'm your host, Alex, and today we're talking about something that quietly undermines leaders every day. Not what they say, but how much of it they say. I'm joined by Tom Lemanski, founder of Chicago Executive Coaching. Tom, welcome.

Speaker 1 0:24

Good to be here, Alex.

Speaker 0:25

Tom, you wrote a post recently about communication, specifically about brevity. And I want to start with the uncomfortable version of the question. Most leaders think they're good communicators, are they?

Speaker 1 0:36

No, and most of them have never actually asked the people on the receiving end. If you polled the people who get your emails, sit through your presentations, or listen to you in meetings, and you ask them to rate your clarity, your conciseness, your respect for their time, the ratings would be embarrassingly low for most leaders. That's not an insult. It's just a gap that almost no one has looked at directly.

Speaker 1:02

Why haven't they looked at it? Is it ego or is it just a blind spot?

Speaker 1 1:06

It's mostly a blind spot. No one pulls you aside and says, your emails are too long and I stopped reading them halfway through. That feedback almost never surfaces. So leaders operate on the assumption that because they sent it, it was received, and that because they wrote a lot, the importance came through. Neither is usually true.

Speaker 1:26

You mentioned in the post a book called Smart Brevity, and you said reading it made you aware of your own gaps. That's a pretty candid admission. What hit you?

Speaker 1 1:34

The overuse of words as a form of miscommunication, that framing landed hard. I'd always thought of miscommunication as saying the wrong thing. The idea that saying too much is its own kind of miscommunication reframed it for me. Because when you bury your point in paragraphs, you're not being thorough. You're making the other person do your editing work for you.

Speaker 1:55

That's a real shift. It's not just inefficiency, it's actually pushing the burden onto the reader.

Speaker 1 2:01

Exactly, and most people don't do that work. They scan, they skim, they catch what they can, and they move on. Professional CV writers know this. Job applications are scanned, not read, even when a human is looking at them. Email is the same, presentations are the same. The person on the receiving end is not waiting to absorb every word you wrote. They're looking for a reason to stop reading.

Speaker 2:22

Let me push on that for a second, because I think some leaders would hear be brief and think you're telling them to dumb things down or leave out important nuance. How do you respond to that?

Speaker 1 2:32

That's the wrong fear. Brevity and depth are not opposites. The question isn't whether the idea is complex, it's whether you've done the work to make the complex idea clear. When someone writes a long, dense email, it usually means they haven't sorted out what they actually want to say. The length is the symptom. The problem is unclear thinking.

Speaker 2:51

So it's less about cutting words and more about sharpening the thought first.

Speaker 1 2:56

Right. If you know exactly what your point is, you can say it in three sentences. If you need eight paragraphs, you probably don't know your point yet. Mark Twain wrote something to this effect in 1871. He apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a short one. That's not a new problem. We've just added keyboards, voice recognition, and AI to make it faster and easier to produce more of what we were already overproducing.

Speaker 3:22

The technology angle is interesting. You'd think tools that make communication faster would push people toward brevity, but it seems like it went the other direction.

Speaker 1 3:31

It always does. More capacity, more output. The friction of writing longhand used to force some natural editing. Now you can generate a thousand words before your coffee is hot, and leaders are doing it. Long emails, overloaded slides, presentations that run 20 minutes past where the audience stopped caring. The volume went up, the quality of attention didn't follow it.

Speaker 3:53

You listed a set of what you called destructive mindsets in the post, the beliefs that lead people to overcommunicate. Can you give me a couple that you see most often?

Speaker 1 4:02

The big one is the belief that more equals more thorough, more credible, more serious. Leaders often feel that if they don't cover every angle, they'll look unprepared or like they don't care. So they pile on. Another one is the sense that the length of a message signals the importance of the topic. If it's a big deal, it gets a long email. But the reader doesn't experience it that way. They experience it as a tax on their time.

Speaker 4:26

What about the speaking side? Because this isn't just a writing problem.

Speaker 1 4:31

Worse in some ways, people can skim an email. They can't skim you talking in a meeting. When a leader doesn't know when to stop, the room checks out, and they often don't notice because they're still talking. The gift of gab gets described as an asset, but when it's not discipline, it's a liability. You lose the room, you bury your own message, and the people listening walk out without retaining what you needed them to retain.

Speaker 4:54

Is there a self-awareness piece here? Because what you're describing is a pattern that's hard to catch in yourself?

Speaker 1 5:00

That's the core of it. Most leaders have never been trained to notice when they should stop. They were trained to make the case, to be thorough, to not leave questions unanswered. Nobody taught them that stopping, making the point, and getting out is itself a communication skill. And it might be the one that matters most.

Speaker 5:20

How do you get someone to develop that in practice? Because you can tell someone be more concise, and they'll nod and write the same long email the next day.

Speaker 1 5:28

You start by asking them to read what they wrote before they send it. Not to proofread, but to look for the point. Find the actual point, then ask, could a busy person extract this in 30 seconds? If the answer is no, cut until it is. On the speaking side, it's harder, but the same discipline applies. Know your point before you open your mouth, say it, then stop. Most people never practice the stopping part.

Speaker 5:52

Before we get to the takeaway, I want to name something. You called yourself a work in progress on this. You said you read this book and found your own gaps. For leaders who hear this and think, I probably do this too. How do you not make that a shame spiral and actually make it actionable?

Speaker 1 6:08

You don't fix it all at once, you just start noticing. Pick one thing, email maybe, because it's the most visible, and you can edit before you send. Ask yourself, what is the one thing I need this person to do or understand? Write that first. Everything else is optional. That one discipline applied consistently will change how you're perceived faster than almost anything else a leader can do.

Speaker 6:30

If someone's listening to this on their commute and they want to try one thing this week, what do you tell them?

Speaker 1 6:36

Before you send your next email, read it once. Not for typos, but for the point. Find the sentence that actually carries your message and make sure it comes first. Then ask yourself honestly: does everything else in this message earn its place, or am I just filling space? Cut what doesn't earn it. Do that five times this week and you will start to feel the difference. Not just in the emails you send, but in how clearly you're thinking before you communicate. Brevity isn't about saying less, it's about respecting the person on the other end enough to do the hard thinking before you put the burden on them.

Speaker 7:11

That's leadership breakthroughs. Thanks to Tom Lemanski for a conversation that gets at something most leaders won't admit they need to work on. You can find Tom's Leadership Breakthroughs blog and coaching programs at ChicagoExecutive Coaching.com. We'll be back next week.