Ask any leadership team in FE what’s holding their culture back and nine times out of ten, someone in the room will say “communication.” We need better communication. More cascade meetings. A tighter newsletter. A clearer intranet.
I’ve sat in enough of those rooms now to say this plainly: it’s almost never communication. It’s trust, and communication is just the word people reach for because it’s safer to say out loud.
Why “communication” is the easy answer
Communication is a fixable-sounding problem. You can build a plan around it, more updates, better formats, a monthly briefing. It doesn’t implicate anyone. Nobody has to sit across from a leader and say “I don’t believe what you tell us” or “I’ve stopped raising things because nothing changes when I do.”
But when I dig into what staff actually mean when they say communication is the problem, it’s rarely about frequency or clarity of message. It’s about credibility. They’ve heard the message. They just don’t trust the person delivering it, or they’ve watched three previous versions of the same message land and go nowhere.
I’ve seen this pattern across colleges, training providers and independent providers of every size: an all-staff survey comes back with “communication” flagged as a weakness, leadership responds by increasing the volume of communication, and eighteen months later the same complaint resurfaces – sometimes worse, because now staff also feel like they were fobbed off with a newsletter instead of being heard.
What’s actually going on underneath
In the 8 Levers, Communication & Voice and Leadership Behaviours sit right next to each other for a reason. You cannot fix one without the other. A communication problem that’s really a trust problem shows up in specific, recognisable ways:
Staff who used to speak up in meetings have gone quiet, not because they’ve run out of things to say, but because they’ve watched what happens to people who do. Feedback loops exist on paper — a suggestion box, a staff forum — but nobody can name a single thing that’s changed as a result of using them. And the language leaders use in public doesn’t match what people hear leaders say in private, so staff have learned to discount the public version.
None of that gets fixed by a better newsletter. It gets fixed by leaders doing what they said they’d do, consistently, in view of the people watching for it.
The uncomfortable bit for leaders
This is the part that’s harder to hear: if your organisation has a “communication problem,” the fix usually isn’t a communications plan, it’s an audit of your own follow-through. Every promise you’ve made in an all-staff meeting, every “we’ll look into that” in a Q&A, every action point from a staff survey that quietly disappeared, staff are keeping score, even when it doesn’t look like it.
I’d rather a leadership team communicated less and delivered on all of it, than communicated constantly and delivered on a fraction. Trust is built in the gap between what you say and what you do, and every unfulfilled promise widens that gap a little more, no matter how well-written the next update is.
What to do instead
If communication keeps coming up as an issue, don’t reach for a new format. Go back through the last twelve months and find every commitment leadership made to staff, in meetings, in surveys, in one-to-ones, and be honest about which ones actually happened. That list will tell you more about your culture than any engagement score.
Then pick three things you can visibly follow through on this term. Not a strategy. Three concrete things, said out loud, done on time, and named as done when they’re finished. Trust rebuilds slowly and through repetition – it isn’t restored by a better slide deck.
So before your next survey comes back flagging “communication,” ask yourself the harder question: is it really that people don’t understand what we’re saying, or is it that they’ve stopped believing it?
The Problem Isn’t Communication. It’s Trust Wearing a Communication Costume.
