“Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” Amos 3:3 asks a deceptively simple question. Agreement, however, does not appear by magic. People reach understanding by communicating. This is true of marriage, friendship, families, business partnerships and organisations. Two people can love each other deeply, share resources and genuinely want the same future, yet still find themselves drifting apart because important things were not said, misunderstood or assumed. In the workplace, the consequences can be even more immediate because one person's information often becomes another person's ability to act.
As a CEO, I therefore see communication less as the ability to speak impressively and more as the ability to keep information moving to the people who need it. An organisation is a network of interdependent activities. Someone receives an order, someone processes it, another person delivers it, another person accounts for it and a customer eventually experiences the result. If information stops somewhere along that chain, the organisation can begin making decisions with an outdated picture of reality.
Consider Ruona and Ochuko. Ruona is responsible for coordinating a client's delivery. At 10 a.m., the supplier tells her that the delivery will be delayed until the following day. Ochuko, who is handling the client relationship, is still telling the customer that everything will arrive that afternoon because nobody has informed him. By 2 p.m., the customer has arranged people and resources to receive the delivery. By 4 p.m., the company is now dealing with an angry customer, an embarrassed account manager and an operations team trying to explain a problem that could have been managed calmly that morning. The original problem was a delayed delivery. The larger problem was that the information about the delay did not move.
This is why one of the most important communication habits I expect from a professional is simple: report important information early. You do not need to have solved the problem before telling the person who needs to know about it. In fact, waiting until you have exhausted every possible solution can sometimes make the situation worse. “There is a problem, this is what has happened, this is what I have tried, and this is what I think we need” is often far more useful than appearing confident until the problem becomes impossible to hide.
Research on employee voice and silence supports the importance of this behaviour. Morrison's 2023 review of a decade of research distinguishes employee voice, the expression of information, concerns, suggestions and ideas that may help the organisation from silence, where potentially useful information is withheld. The important lesson for an employee is that knowing something useful and communicating it are two different acts. An organisation cannot act on information that never reaches it.
But communication is not only about reporting bad news. It is also about asking questions before bad news is created. Imagine Ochuko receives an instruction from his manager that he does not fully understand. He does not want to appear inexperienced, so he says, “Understood.” He then spends the next four hours producing exactly what he thinks was requested. When he eventually submits it, the manager explains that the objective was completely different. Ochuko has now lost four hours, the manager has lost time correcting the work, and perhaps another employee has been waiting for the correct output. One uncomfortable question at the beginning could have prevented all of that.
This is why prospective employees should learn to communicate uncertainty rather than disguise it. Asking, “Just to clarify, do you mean X or Y?” is not incompetence. It can be evidence of professional judgment. The more complex the work becomes, the more dangerous silent assumptions become.
Communication also includes the ability to receive information. A professional who can explain everything but cannot listen is only half-communicating. Liu and colleagues' research found that what happens after employees speak up influences whether they are likely to speak up again, demonstrating that communication develops through repeated interaction rather than isolated conversations. For an employee, the practical lesson is equally important: when someone gives you feedback, your first task is to understand it before deciding whether you agree with it.
A workplace will inevitably contain corrections. Someone will tell you that your report was unclear, your approach was inefficient, your timing was poor or your communication with a client could have been better. The mature response is not to treat every correction as an attack. Listen, clarify, adjust and apply the lesson. Feedback is one of the mechanisms through which professional competence develops.
Communication therefore begins with a basic discipline: do not allow important information to become trapped with you. If there is a problem, report it. If you are unsure, ask. If circumstances change, update the people affected. If you receive information that changes your work, acknowledge it and act on it. But that is only half of the skill.
Because communication is not complete simply because information has left one person's mouth.
The next question is whether the information was clear, understood and actually useful.
That is where the communication gap becomes more interesting.