The decision was made. The work was done. And somehow, three weeks later, the team was still confused about what had been decided and why.
This wasn’t a communication failure in the conventional sense. The leader had communicated. Clearly, she thought. With context, she believed. And yet the message that arrived was not the message that was sent.
The Assumption of Shared Context
Most clarity problems in leadership are not problems of articulation. They are problems of assumption.
The leader has been thinking about a decision for days — sometimes weeks. They have processed the reasoning, wrestled with the tradeoffs, landed somewhere considered. By the time they communicate the outcome, the conclusion feels self-evident.
To the team, who hasn’t been on that journey, it doesn’t feel self-evident at all. It feels arbitrary. Or incomplete. Or — when the stakes are high — alarming.
The Missing Narration
What’s absent is not the decision. It’s the reasoning that produced the decision.
Here’s what I saw. Here’s what I weighed. Here’s what concerned me most. Here’s where I landed, and here’s why.
That narration — which takes approximately three additional minutes to deliver — changes the entire experience of the message for everyone who receives it. Not because it makes the decision more popular, but because it makes the decision legible. People can engage with a reason. They cannot engage with a conclusion delivered in isolation.
What Changes When Leaders Narrate Their Thinking
In practice, leaders who develop the habit of narrating their reasoning notice something quickly: their teams stop needing to fill the gaps themselves. The speculation that fills silence — the “I wonder why they decided that” conversations — reduces dramatically.
Trust, interestingly, goes up. Not because the decisions are different, but because the relationship to the decisions is different. People feel included in the thinking, even when they weren’t part of making the choice.
Coach’s Reflection: The next time you communicate a significant decision, try adding a sentence that begins: “Here’s what I was weighing…” It takes thirty seconds. It changes everything.
Call to Reflection: How often do you share the ‘why’ behind a decision — not just the ‘what’? And when you don’t, what do you think fills that space?
Yatish Chandrasekhar is an Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant at The Yogi Compass. He works with senior leaders across industries to help them discover their True North. If this resonated, he’d love to hear from you.