#578 When Silence Becomes the Story: The Ongoing Issue of Leadership Communication | Article by Niels Brabandt

When Silence Becomes the Story: The Ongoing Issue of Leadership Communication

Leaders are supposed to be great communicators. Ask most executives and they will agree, at least in principle. Yet week after week, business leaders, and occasionally political leaders, deliver a masterclass in how quickly a simple message can spiral out of control. The latest example comes from Germany, where Federal Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil recently found himself defending a policy he had barely announced.

An Idea, a Leak, and a Firestorm

Klingbeil floated the idea of a sugar tax for Germany. Whether such a tax is good policy is not the point of this article, and it is worth noting that the United Kingdom already has one, while Norway and Denmark experimented with theirs before repealing them. The point is what happened next. A working paper surfaced suggesting the tax could apply to products such as Coke Zero, which contains no sugar, and oat milk, where naturally occurring sugars cannot simply be engineered away without changing the product entirely.

Public reaction was immediate and unforgiving. Only after the backlash had run its course for two days did the Finance Ministry clarify that it was only a working paper and that a levy on sugar free drinks was never seriously intended. That clarification was accurate. It was also far too late to matter.

The Result Belongs to the Audience, Not the Speaker

Here is the uncomfortable truth every senior leader needs to internalise: the outcome of a communication is decided by the people receiving it, not by the person sending it. That should not be a revelation to anyone in a leadership position, yet organisations repeat the same mistake constantly. Announce that a mid sized business is struggling and is considering more sales effort, more marketing, or job cuts, and the audience will fixate on the job cuts, because that is what touches them most directly. It does not matter what the leader intended to emphasise.

Compare that with how Volkswagen's board handled a genuinely difficult message. The company stated plainly that performance was weak, that job reductions were being considered, and that a number of plants might close. Whether one agrees with the substance is a separate debate. What matters here is the delivery: specific, bounded, and unambiguous. The organisation moved directly into a structured discussion rather than into weeks of speculation.

Every Gap Gets Filled, Whether You Like It or Not

When leaders leave a gap in their communication, people do not leave it empty. They engage in what organisational psychologists call sense-making: an active attempt to complete the picture using whatever information, rumour, or anxiety happens to be available. Tell someone only that the boss wants to see them on Monday morning and wish them a pleasant weekend, and you have not said anything negative. You have also guaranteed that person a weekend of quiet dread, because the human mind abhors an unfinished narrative.

The same mechanism explains why announcing tax rises in the abstract triggers panic, while announcing a precisely scoped property levy affecting a narrow, clearly defined group produces a far calmer, more rational debate. Specificity is not a stylistic preference. It is the mechanism that prevents an audience from writing the rest of the story for you.

Communicating in Closed Circles

None of this requires every organisation to address the general public. If a business employs ten people, its communication obligation is to those ten people, not to social media at large. What it does require, always, is what can be called communication in closed circles: a message that, once delivered, leaves the recipient able to say, I understand the reasoning, whether or not I agree with the decision. A closed circle is not about secrecy. It is about completeness. When the message ends, the uncertainty should end with it.

Leaders who expect to be asked difficult questions in public, whether by journalists, employees, or stakeholders, benefit from preparing an answer in advance rather than improvising under pressure. That discipline is learnable. It is not the preserve of people born into privilege or trained from birth in media relations. Professional communications support exists precisely to help leaders build that discipline, and there is no good excuse for a well resourced organisation to skip it.

The Takeaway for Business Leaders

The next time your organisation needs to say something difficult, resist the temptation to leave options open in public. Decide what you actually mean, say precisely that, and close the circle before you open the floor to questions. Clarity, delivered early, is the cheapest crisis prevention tool any leader has.

Niels Brabandt

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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify

For the videocast's and podcast's transcript, read below this article.

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Podcast and Videocast Transcript

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Leaders are great communicators, aren't they? When you now say, "Well, I saw some leaders who were not that much of a great communicator," that's exactly why we're here today. We're going to talk about the ongoing issue with leadership communication. We again had a case where you really wonder, how can someone with that level of experience do errors on that amateur level? And very important here, because we're talking about a political issue here, we're going to talk about what Lars Klingbeil, Financial Secretary of the Federal Republic of Germany, recently did.

So, hello and welcome to this week's episode. My name is Niels, Niels Brabandt, and we're going to talk about the ongoing issue with leadership communication.

Lars Klingbeil said that he's going to introduce a sugar text to the Federal Republic of Germany, or they consider doing so. Very important now, the discussion is not against a political party. The discussion is not sugar text pro or con. You have, for example, the UK, where they have a sugar tax. You have countries that had a sugar tax, for example Norway or Denmark, who then retracted it. They revoked it. They abolished it afterwards. It is not a discussion: sugar tax, yes or no.

The problem here was, Lars Klingbeil said, "We might have a sugar tax," and the next moment a paper surfaces where they say, "Okay, you consider putting sugar tax on Coke Zero." And when now someone says, "Wait, wait, Coke Zero doesn't contain sugar," correct. Or suddenly it says, "There might be a sugar tax on oat milk." Where you say, "Well, it's in the oat. You can't remove it. It's not artificially edited. You want to genetically manufacture a new oat? Then it's not the same product anymore." And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today.

Because what happened after was massive, massive public backlash. And after the massive public backlash, the Financial Secretary said, "Look, it was just a work in progress, and it's not, and don't plan to have it on Coke Zero." Well, a bit later now that after everything came to public. So the situation here is, as soon as you bring any topic to public, any kind of topic, no matter what it is, people start to discuss about that. If you like it or not, is not the point here.

When you as a leader, and I give you a positive example, and again, I'm not going to discuss here if it's a positive thing or negative thing to do that, just the way how they addressed it. The board of Volkswagen said, "At the moment, Volkswagen is not doing well." So they consider laying off people, and they consider closing four factories. So it's clearly addressed what they do, and now they move forward from there with a discussion.

When you say, "We consider sugar tax," and then people read, "On Coke Zero," you will have a massive negative backlash. If you would say, and by the way, Lars Klingbeil said, "It was only work in progress." When you know it's a work in progress, you need to comment accordingly. When you say, "We had an expert panel of scientists and they suggested 7 different sugar taxes, we're only considering 4," because what he said afterwards, he will never agree on having a sugar tax on sugar-free drinks. Okay, that's a good statement, just a bit late after the whole nation was arguing about that for 2 days.

Because when you have something out there where people say, "Hmm, sugar tax on sugar-free drinks, what's next? Tax on tap water?" So you see that the result is not in your hands. You need to know that the result of the communication will be decided by the people receiving the message, not by the people sending the message. Which shouldn't, by the way, that should not be new to senior leaders out there.

I give you an example. When someone says, "Look, let's say you have a mid-sized business," and you say, "Well, economy bit in the dip, so it's not doing great. We need to do something." And then you say, "We consider different steps. Maybe we need more sales. Maybe we need more marketing. Maybe we need to cut jobs." And then people will discuss about all 3. Most likely, as it's closest to them, they will discuss more cutting jobs because they think, "Oh my God, this is going to happen to me by tomorrow."

When you say, "Hey, we had an expert panel. They said we need more sales, more marketing, or we need to cut jobs." And as an owner, I will tell you, I'm not cutting any jobs, but we'll heavily invest into sales more than marketing. Then people have a completely different discussion. You need to be aware, the result of the communication is the result of if you did well or did not do well. Because the problem often is that you lack clarity. And lacking clarity always leads to the same consequence.

And I give you a very simple example. Let's say you're sitting at your desk, someone walks over and says, "You know, boss wants to see you in the office Monday 8 a.m., but you know, have a nice weekend now." No one said anything negative. No one told you it could be negative. Still, you're sitting there and think, "Ugh, what is this going to be?" And of course you could sit there and think, "I think it's a promotion. I think it's a salary raise. I think finally they appreciate what I'm doing here." However, you could also think, "Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's something different, and maybe it's something really, really bad."

So you need to be aware that this could be the case, that when you communicate without clarity, people do one step. And this step always happens. It's called sense-making. Maybe you heard the phrase, "Make it make sense." People will try to make sense of what you said in their own way, on their own terms, within their means, within their probably limited amount of knowledge they have on the matter, while you have more knowledge on the matter.

This is why it is so important to do not leave any gaps. Any gap you leave will be filled by what people think should be filled in there. And by the way, they are not going to consult you on the matter.

If someone says, and I give you 2 examples here, let's say you say 2 things. You say, "As a government, we consider raising taxes." That's example number 1. Or you say, "As a government, we consider, for people who have a net worth of more than 100 million, who own more than 10 houses in London in the UK, to tax 9 out of 10 houses because they do not live in these houses because you can only live in one place, we consider raising the property tax on these 9 houses by 0.1 to 0.3%, which brings in that amount of millions into the state's income from a tax point of view." You have 2 different, completely different discussions afterwards. And this is why you need to be so specific on the commentary.

When you make any kind of public statement, and by the way, when you're not a person of public interest, you do not have to address the general public. If you have a small business with 10 people working for you, talk to these 10 people. If you care about them, they care about you. If you don't care about them, they don't care about you. Reciprocity. Very simple. Do not think that you are forced to address the general public when you are not a person of public interest. If someone says something on social media about you, that does not make you a person of general interest, except when you say something which is of high relevance for the general public, which to most small businesses does not apply.

So you see, if you now want to implement this, when you say, "How can I make my communication better by tomorrow?" So very important. Step number 1 is, there is a ton of help out there. And I mean a ton of help out there. So there are so many professional services companies out there that can help you with corporate communication. There's absolutely 0 excuse to not make it well. If they had a good consultancy company, the Financial Secretary would have taken the expert's paper, gone to a professional services company, and say, "How to communicate this."

And they probably would have told him, "Look, there are 8 different sugar taxes mentioned. You need, of course, for clarity, to mention they suggested 8 different sugar taxes. However, 3 of them are already off the list because you will never support them." So the resting, the rest of 4 or 5 sugar taxes, you might say, "That tax, when it's more than this gram of sugar, that tax when it's this gram of sugar, and never a tax when it's artificial sweeteness." Except, of course, when you want to have artificial sweeteness tax.

However, the more tax you put on drinks, calling it a sugar tax when there's no sugar in there, people also will do sense-making from there. So they say, "Okay, you get a sugar tax when there's no sugar. So maybe I get a property tax when I have no property, but I'm renting a property. So maybe they will consider that also having a property. So I pay property tax on not owning anything." Or maybe I have to pay a consumption tax because I consume things like eating food. And even if I don't eat food, there's a flat fee on that. People will do sense-making. And by the way, the whole meme factory and comedy world is already jumping on that kind of sugar tax here. It's very important. Professionalism needs to be maintained at all costs, at all times. And by the way, help is available.

At a certain point, you need to be able to do it by yourself, if you like it or not. I give you a very simple example. As you know from a former episode, I was in Berlin when the terrorist attacks happened. And that wasn't a great time in my life. I could tell you. However, when I went to the memorial the next day, I knew that 2 groups are going to prop up there. One is journalists who can hold a microphone into my face and then I have to say something. Or I have to run off, which I usually don't like to do. Or, and that's the other thing, or you have populists saying, "Oh, terrorism is all about immigration." All these populists. So you need to get in front of this microphone, because otherwise, when you walk away, you leave the stage to these populists.

So on my way to the memorial, I thought about, "What should I say when this happens?" And I thought, "The chance I get interviewed is really, really minimal, but when it happens, I am prepared." So I went to the memorial. I'm 5 minutes there, and a journalist holds a microphone straight to my face. They interviewed, I saw them running around, probably 80 to 100 people in due course of this 4-hour whole memorial thing. And they probably picked, I think, 5 or 6, and my interview ended up on national TV. So be prepared. As a leader, you need to be prepared. As an employee, you don't have to be prepared because you're not in a position of power or accountability. When you hold any kind of accountability, directly or indirectly, be prepared.

And by the way, I learned it. I don't come from privileged backgrounds. I grew up in a small village in northern Germany. No private school, no private education, nothing. I went to a public comprehensive school in a social hotspot city. And the rest of that is just learning. Anyone can learn it. But what you have to do is, you have to communicate. It's called communication in closed circles. And closed circles does not mean you cut people off. But closed circle communication means when you start to communicate and you talk and you talk and you uh-huh, and you talk and talk and talk and talk, and then you explain, talk, talk, talk. When the message ends, people must sit there and say, "Okay, I get it. I might disagree with the message. I might not like the message. And I might not like anything I just heard. However, I get the argument. I get the reasoning. I understand what you're saying here."

And then we can debate or discuss or argue from there. A closed circle means that the message itself stands and anyone knows what to do with it from there. And when you communicate in closed circles professionally, your whole leadership communication will be way better compared to what you did before. And I wish you all the best putting that in practice in your organization. And if you now say, "I think I have a couple of questions here," feel free to contact me anytime.

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