Key Takeaways:
- The way people hear important news is part of the message. Timing, messenger, channel and audience order all shape whether an organization is seen as credible.
- Trust doesn’t come from one-size-fits-all messaging. The facts and values should remain steady, while the context and proof points should reflect what each audience actually cares about.
- Before trying to improve the message, find out whether trust is slipping because of perception or because the experience is not living up to the promise. Better messaging cannot repair a problem it’s helping to expose.
At 7:15 on a Tuesday morning, an employee sees a news alert on their phone. The company they work for is closing a plant.
The organization has a media statement ready. Legal has reviewed it. The required facts are there. A spokesperson is prepared to respond to questions.
And yet, before the employee’s manager has had a conversation with the team, the employee is learning about a decision that will change their life from an external source.
The statement may be accurate. It may be necessary. But in one important way, the communication has already gone very wrong.
That’s what can happen when a company treats a difficult announcement as a single message to distribute. The focus narrows to what has to be said, what has to be filed and what the media may ask. Meanwhile, the people most directly affected by the decision are left to find out alongside everyone else.
Franco CEO Tina Kozak says it this way:
“The right message delivered the wrong way can still be the wrong communication.”
A communication strategy is not just the words on the page. It’s who hears the news first, when they hear it, how they hear it and who delivers it.
The Way People Hear the News Tells Them How Much They Matter
When a high-stakes decision is coming, organizations typically focus on the formal announcement. The timing can be sensitive. There may be legal, regulatory or competitive reasons to be careful with what’s shared and when.
That doesn’t remove the need to think through the experience of the people who will feel the impact most directly.
Employees shouldn’t learn important news from outside of their organization. When they do, the organization has missed the chance to give them context, clarity and the confidence to answer questions that will likely come from customers, family, friends and one another.
An inside-out approach starts with the people closest to the impact. Before the message reaches customers, media or the broader public, employees and the leaders who support them need enough information to understand what’s happening and what comes next.
The same thinking applies beyond employees. A customer who hears through an industry contact that their account team is changing may wonder about continuity. A partner who learns from a public statement that a company is shifting direction may question whether commitments will still be met. A community that sees activity around a site before leaders explain what’s being considered can reach its own conclusions about the organization’s intentions.
Every situation has different constraints, but the practical question is this:
Who will feel this decision first, and how might they hear about it if we do not reach them directly?
One Organizational Truth. Different Reasons to Trust.
A common mistake is to treat consistent communication as identical communication.
The organization’s facts and values should not change from one audience to the next. But different audiences are listening for different things, and they decide whether to trust an organization based on what matters to them.
Employees are often trying to understand what a decision means for their future, from the biggest implications to the smallest changes in their day-to-day work. They need context, transparency and a candid explanation of what they can expect.
Customers tend to be listening for something else. Will the quality, reliability and continuity of the product or service remain intact? Will the organization continue to meet the needs it has promised to meet?
Partners may be asking, “Can we still count on you?” They are looking for signs of stability, integrity and the organization’s ability to fulfill its commitments.
Media are looking for a clear story: What happened? Why does it matter? What are the facts, and can they get a timely, credible response from someone who can explain them?
Investors, community leaders and regulators have their own measures of confidence, from performance and risk to local impact, accountability, compliance and transparency.
Doing the work to understand what each audience needs to know before it can fairly evaluate the truth is not the same as changing the truth for each audience. As Tina puts it, the facts and values should stay the same; the emphasis, context and proof points should change depending on who you’re talking to.
Before You Improve the Message, Understand the Gap
When trust begins to decline, it’s easy to assume the organization has a communications problem. Sometimes it does. Stakeholders may not know what the organization is doing, why it’sdoing it or what evidence supports the claims it’s making.
That’s a perception gap, and better communication can help close it.
Sometimes, it’s not a perception gap at all. The organization may be saying one thing while people are experiencing something else.
Leadership can say employees are valued while making decisions that consistently suggest otherwise. It can promise exceptional customer service while customers repeatedly encounter a poor experience. It can describe itself as transparent while the people most affected by a decision keep hearing important news secondhand.
In those circumstances, a more polished message does not solve the problem. It can actually make the trust problem worse by drawing more attention to the gap between the promise and the experience.
That’s why Tina advises leaders to separate the perception gap from the performance gap. The question is not only, “Do people trust us?” It’s, “What are they experiencing that may be causing them not to?”
PwC’s 2024 U.S. Trust Survey reminds us not to assume leaders and stakeholders see trust the same way. Ninety percent of business executives said customers highly trust their companies, while 30% of consumers said they highly trust companies. On employee trust, 86% of executives believed employee trust was high, compared with 67% of employees who said they highly trusted their employer.
Those numbers show why a leadership team should test its assumptions before deciding a message alone is the answer.
Listen for Patterns, Not Just Sentiment
Just like a single negative comment doesn’t tell the whole story, a positive employee survey score or a strong customer-satisfaction result doesn’t either.
Instead, look for patterns across the places people already tell you what they’re experiencing: employee feedback, customer complaints, conversations with partners, social discussion, media coverage and the questions raised with leaders and customer-facing teams.
Are people confused about the same thing? Are customers describing a gap between what was promised and what they received? Are employees asking a question leaders thought had already been answered?
Those patterns help separate an issue with awareness from an issue with the experience itself. They also help leaders identify which audiences need attention first, rather than treating every stakeholder group as though it has the same concern.
This is where communications can bring a valuable dose of courageous truth to the room. A strategic communications counselor needs to be willing to say, “We don’t have a message problem. We have something else we need to fix.”
That may be difficult to hear, but it’s more useful than producing a better statement that asks people to believe something their experience keeps telling them isn’t true.
Plan for the Moment After the Message Goes Out
The job doesn’t end when the statement is published, the email is sent or the spokesperson finishes an interview.
People will interpret the news through the person who delivered it, the experience they have already had with the organization and the questions they still carry afterward.
That’s why feedback loops matter. They help leaders understand what people heard, what they didn’t hear and where clarification or reinforcement is needed.
Before the next important communication, try a simple first-hear check with the people responsible for the decision:
- Who is most directly affected, and how will they hear this first?
- What does that audience most need to have confidence in us?
- Who is the right person to deliver the message or answer the next question?
- What experience or evidence needs to support the promise we’re making?
- How will we know what people heard, and what still needs attention?
The answers may show that the organization needs a different messenger, a different sequence, clearer proof or a change in the experience itself. That’s the point of the exercise.
Trust does not come from getting a message out. It grows when the right people hear something that’s relevant to them, at a time they can use it from someone they believe…and when the organization’s actions give them a reason to believe it.
Communicator takeaway:
Before you spend more time refining the words, find out where confidence is breaking down. The right message matters, but it cannot do its job if it reaches the wrong people, too late, through the wrong channel or ahead of the change the organization actually needs to make.
If confidence is slipping and you aren’t sure whether the gap is in the message, the experience or both, we can help you understand what your priority audiences are hearing, seeing and expecting before the next communication makes the problem harder to solve. Reach out and let’s have a conversation.
