Week 5 Day 5: When the Path Is Unclear Because You Made It Unclear

Leaders create confusion more often than they realize. You say 'let us explore that direction' and three people start building something. You mention an idea in a meeting and someone takes it as a priority. You give feedback that is vague enough to be interpreted five different ways. The path is not always blocked by external forces. Sometimes you are the one who made it unclear, and your team is too polite to tell you.

The most common way leaders create ambiguity is through what I call 'maybe directives.' These are statements that sound like ideas to you but sound like instructions to your team. 'We should probably look into migrating that service.' 'It might be worth exploring a different vendor.' 'I wonder if we could automate that.' To you, those are musings. To your team -- especially junior members who are trying to read your signals -- those are marching orders. I spent six months confused about why my team kept working on things I did not prioritize, until someone showed me their task list and pointed at three items I had 'wondered about' in passing. The fix is being explicit about the weight of your words. When you are thinking out loud, say so: 'I am thinking out loud here -- this is not a request.' When you are giving direction, be clear: 'This is a priority. I need this by Thursday.' The space between those two modes is where ambiguity lives, and ambiguity in a power dynamic always gets interpreted as instruction.

Research on communication in hierarchical organizations by Detert and Edmondson (2011) demonstrates that employees systematically over-interpret statements from leaders. This effect, called 'authority amplification,' means that casual comments from senior leaders carry disproportionate weight. A study by Morrison and Milliken (2000) on organizational silence found that 85% of employees reported withholding information from their managers at least some of the time, with the top reason being 'fear of being seen as negative or not a team player.' These two findings create a dangerous combination: leaders' words carry more weight than intended, and the team is unlikely to push back or ask for clarification. The result is what Beer and Eisenstat (2000) call 'silent killers' of strategy execution -- misalignments that persist because nobody surfaces them. The antidote is not speaking less -- it is speaking with more explicit framing, consistently distinguishing between direction, exploration, and speculation, and creating regular check-ins where the team can surface confusion without penalty.