What Leaders Can’t Say Out Loud: The Narrative Gap That Stalls System Change
By Genelle Aldred
I work with leaders who have great vision, strategic minds, slick slides and they know where they need to take the work. The board has signed off on the strategy, the numbers have withstood scrutiny. And yet, somewhere between the all-staff email and the first quarter of delivery, the change they have spent months designing simply stops moving.
When I ask them what they think is happening, they almost always know. They can describe the resistance. They can name the workarounds. They can usually point to the moment where they realised something hadn’t landed the way they thought it had. What they cannot easily say out loud is: I am not sure how to fix it. Because that sentence feels exposing, especially when you are leading on system change.
To say it to a peer can feel like an admission of weakness, telling your boss can feel like an invitation to be replaced, mentioning that to HR can feel like adding something to your file that you might not be able to take back. So they say it to no one, and they carry the problem alone. Mainly because we still think of communication as a soft skill, when in this working era it’s a structural one.
Strategy Doesn’t Move on Its Own
Most strategies are designed to make organisations become better. But, the main bulk of the strategic thinking goes into making sure the logic is sound, the financials work, the priorities are sequenced and the risks are managed. By the time a leader stands up to share it, they have spent weeks, sometimes months, becoming intimate with every assumption underneath it. To them, it is obvious. Of course this is the right direction. Of course this is what the organisation needs.
But there is often a big gap between where they are and where the team it has just landed with are. They have not been on the journey. They have not heard the conversations that shaped it. They have not had time to process the quiet, instinctive question that everyone asks when change is announced: what about me? This is the question that determines whether a team executes or avoids the strategy, and it is the question that most internal comms teams’ plans skip past entirely.
Most people don’t opt out because they are selfish, or resistant, they are simply having a very human moment. When someone tells you the system is changing, the structure is changing, the technology is changing or the operating model is changing, your brain is not parsing the strategic logic. It is asking whether your role is safe, whether your team is intact, whether the way you have built your competence and your reputation still counts, whether the future being described includes you in it or leaves you behind.
If a leader has not answered the questions people are silently asking, by the time the rollout begins, a slow march to nowhere has begun. The strategy is not stalling because it is wrong. It is failing because no story has been built around it that the people doing the work can understand and get behind.
Workarounds Are the First Signal
The trouble is that this kind of failure is like a whisper. People who have not been brought along rarely say so directly. They do not stand up in town halls and announce that they are unconvinced. They do not write to HR explaining that they are ignoring the new system. They simply work around it.
The new platform goes live, and the spreadsheet stays open in a parallel tab. The new process is rolled out, and the old WhatsApp group keeps making the real decisions. The new framework is mandated, and three months later half the team is back to doing what they always did. The change is technically in place, but the behaviour underneath it has not moved an inch.
When leaders see these workarounds they often interpret them as a problem of compliance or capability. In my experience they are often a problem of communication. People work around what they do not believe in and belief is not built by an announcement, it is built by a story they have been invited to take part in.
This is a pattern my colleagues at Tektology see constantly in their own work in the messy middle between strategy and operations. What slows the work down, or stalls it altogether, is small accommodations, parallel processing and quiet workarounds that nobody flags until they have already become the new normal.
By the time the leadership team realises adoption hasn’t landed, the workarounds are already entrenched, and people have created their own story in the narrative gap that leadership left.
The Communication Hierarchy Leaders Rarely Design
When I sit down with a leader to look at how they have been communicating a change, the first thing I usually find is that there is no hierarchy at all. There is an announcement, with a deck, perhaps a town hall, with a stilted Q&A. From that there is then a hope that the message will somehow cascade and people will just do what they’ve been asked. What is needed is planned, deliberate, sequenced messaging to every layer of the organisation.
Your direct reports are asking one thing and their teams are asking another. The people two steps removed from the decision are asking something different again. The communication that works for the executive team will rarely work for the people doing the operational lifting, and the communication that works for them will rarely work for the clinical or technical specialists whose adoption you most need.
There is no single message that lands cleanly across all of those audiences. There is only a hierarchy of messages, sequenced and tailored, each one designed to move a specific group of people from where they are to where they need to be.
Most leaders have never been taught how to build that hierarchy. It tends to be picked up through painful experiences that loses you goodwill and sometimes a leader’s confidence in their ability to get things done.
You Can Still Be Honest When You Cannot Be Fully Transparent
One of the things leaders sometimes fear, when they start thinking about communication as strategy rather than announcement, is that it begins to feel like spin. As if they are managing people rather than levelling with them. But you have to take the long view; leaders cannot always be fully transparent in real time, decisions are made privately and negotiations happen behind closed doors. Information is sensitive, timing matters and sometimes plans have to change. To pretend that you must share everything or nothing at all is naïve and, in many cases, harmful.
But a leader can be honest about what kind of journey the organisation is on, about what is at stake, about what the change will ask of people, and about what they are committing to in return. They can give people enough of the story to recognise themselves in it. They can be honest about uncertainty without losing momentum. They can acknowledge what is hard about the change as well as what is exciting about it, none of that is spin.
Strategic communication is not about hiding the decision. It is about preparing the ground, so that when the decision arrives, it has somewhere to take root. It’s giving people what they need to know, when they need to know it, in a way they can receive it and put it to good use.
Steady Pivots Over Handbrake Turns
The instinct, when a strategy has been signed off, is to move quickly by announcing, mobilising, and then onto delivery after all everyone is now watching, expecting success.
But people do not pivot at the speed of slide decks. The leader has been on the journey for six months and the team is hearing about it for the first time on a Tuesday. The gap between those two states is enormous, and you cannot close it with one or two emails.
The leaders I see succeed with significant change are the ones who start the story long before they need to. They seed the questions before they offer the answers. They have one-to-one conversations before they have all-staff ones. They put words around the discomfort of the current state before they describe the better future. By the time the decision is formally announced, half the work of bringing people with them is already done, because the people in the room have been thinking in the same direction for months.
This is not slower. It is faster, because what would otherwise have been six months of resistance becomes six months of momentum. But it requires a leader to plan their communication with the same discipline they bring to their strategy, and many don’t think about this until after it hasn’t gone well.
The Story Is the Investment Strategy
When you commit an organisation to a transformation, you are making a significant investment. The technology, the capital, the consultants, the change programme, the time of every person in the building. The thing that decides whether that investment delivers a return is not the quality of the strategy. It is whether the people who have to live the strategy are willing to make it work.
A great story is not a marketing exercise sitting on top of a real strategy. It is the protection of the investment underneath it. It is how you make sure the eighteen months of effort and the millions of pounds of capital actually translate into how people actually work.
Transformation that holds, that hides in plain sight even, tends to be incremental, embedded, and owned by the people doing it. And they do that because the strategy has a story.
A strategy without a story is a balance sheet exposure. The funds have been allocated, the work is in motion, but, the conditions for the change to embed do not exist. And in eighteen months, you will be doing it all again.
You Are Probably Not the Problem
When I work with senior leaders who are struggling with the communication of a change, they almost always become convinced that the issue is something about them. They are not charismatic enough, or articulate enough and sometimes just feeling disrespected by their team.
In almost every case I can think of, the leader was the right person, with the right vision, in the right role. What was missing was a deliberate, structured, well-designed approach to taking the people around them on the same journey they had already been on themselves, not their capability. The preparation for communicating their message in a way that would land well was insufficient.
You need a communication hierarchy designed for where your audiences are, instead of where you want them to be.
It is uncomfortable to talk about, because it feels like admitting that the gap is somehow personal. It is not, bu it is one of the most consistent gaps I see in senior leadership, and the leaders who close it are not the ones with the most natural communication style. They are the ones who treat communication as part of the strategy itself, rather than something that happens once the strategy is done.
What my colleagues across Tektology share is a view that ambition isn’t the missing piece, it is often the strategic messaging. Whatever story that leaders are, or aren’t, telling matters, because teams will fill in the blanks if things are unclear.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The work we do with leaders is usually quiet. We sit down together, look at the change you are trying to lead, the audiences you need to move, and what you have communicated so far. We build a story that connects your vision to the lived reality of the people who will have to deliver it. We design the hierarchy of messages and the sequence in which they need to land.
That work has its own discipline, its own craft, and a long history of leaders quietly being supported through it by people whose job it is to advise them.
If you are leading a change and something about the way it is landing is not quite right, that conversation does not have to be a difficult one. Get in touch. The investment you are making in the transformation deserves the investment of a story strong enough to carry it.
Genelle Aldred is an Associate at Tektology and an advisor with two decades of experience in strategic communication, narrative development and leadership architecture.
She has worked across the full spectrum of the communication landscape, from the beginning of her career as a broadcast journalist with the BBC, ITV and ITN, to leading teams across digital and communications, to running a television channel and a P&L. Today, Genelle advises senior leaders through high-pressure moments. Her work at Tektology focuses on the strategic leadership communication that turns transformation from a plan into something the organisation is willing to deliver, and that the people leading them are equipped to carry.