Tsunami of Need: The Leadership Communication Crisis
Why communication coaching turns a tsunami of need into a rising tide
A prospective client enquired about coaching today. Senior, sharp, clearly good at her job. She sat down and named exactly what she believed was wrong with her. “It's my voice,” she said. “It's too soft. That's what's holding me back.”
It wasn't. It rarely is. But it's easy to see why she reached for that tangible body part. Something to point at, something that feels fixable in a way that "I lose my nerve the moment the room goes quiet" does not. So people grab hold of the thing they can name, and hope fixing that fixes everything else.
What's actually happening underneath is rarely about the voice. It's what happens the moment a leader has to speak without a script, under pressure, with people watching. The confidence goes. The posture collapses and the air stops flowing. You can’t make sound without air.
However, let’s blame that poor old voice as though it is an alien foisted upon you in crisis. It’s not. Your voice is just a beautiful tool doing its best under bad guidance from an unconscious mind that is trying to save your life.
My prospective client is not an outlier. She is a drop in the wave.
The wave is bigger than one coaching room
Walk into most executive floors right now and the pattern repeats with uncomfortable consistency. In boardrooms, in executive meetings, in townhalls, on panels, in videos, in interviews. . . (I could go on). Strong strategy, capable people. Then a tough question, a room gone quiet, a message that needs to land without a script, and something buckles. Leaders reach for their own version of "It's my voice." “It's the slides.” “I’m tired.” It's rarely the real thing.
In today’s world, we have never had more ways to communicate. We communicate incessantly through messages, meetings and interactions through multiple channels. It appears communication has never been easier to produce and never been harder to perform. And here is the diagnosis: We lack depth, attention and the ability to manage live human exchange.
For years this looked like an individual issue: a confidence gap here, a coaching need there. It no longer reads that way. It is structural, it is widespread, and it is accelerating. Not a handful of leaders needing help, but a tsunami of need building underneath organisations that have quietly stopped noticing how thin the ground has become.
Why the wave is building now
Once you are getting research data published all around you, you know something is wrong. This stuff takes years to produce, so we are well behind seeing the shore suck out from the land.
Three forces are compounding at once, and none of them is going away on their own.
We stopped blaming COVID for everything. Now we are blaming AI.
The mechanism is straightforward. AI lets leaders produce fluent, confident-sounding words faster than ever. But research published in the International Journal of Business Communication found that when you rely heavily on AI for routine workplace writing, the people receiving those messages begin questioning the sender's confidence, sincerity and competence, not admiring their efficiency. It appears a leader who outsources the thinking behind a message usually can't deliver it with conviction, and an audience can tell the difference in less time than it takes to finish a sentence.
Fewer leaders are doing the hard work of organising a thought under pressure before they say it out loud. That skipped step is exactly the muscle Presence depends on.
Then, in what the Edelman Trust Barometer called the Age of Insularity, we stopped focusing on the skills. There is little performance practice in talking to yourself. At work, hybrid and remote work have quietly cut the number of unscripted, face-to-face interactions leaders get at every level of seniority. Presence is a practised skill.
On top of that, we are building bad habits, training generations of leaders to use poorly guided frameworks such as telling everyone how excited we are, ignoring the critical ‘exordium’ (beginning) and going straight to the agenda with no message or clear purpose. Remember, a fish rots from the head, so this has major repercussions not just for the leader but for younger staff moving up the chain.
There's a name emerging, and it sharpens the picture considerably. Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Allison Shapira calls it the "believability gap": the widening distance between how polished a leader sounds and how much people actually believe them. Oops. Trouble at the mill.
And there’s more! With all of this happening, the most important thing is that the person speaking feels like they are drowning. Oops!
Here’s the good news: Communication is not dead.
We have not lost the ability to communicate. We are just deskilling and that problem is resolved by reskilling. Bingo!
What actually closes the gap
Many years ago, too many to mention, when I was getting a divorce (get in line), I sought guidance. There I was living in London, my husband had moved to another partner, I had little money, had stopped singing, had no career . . . . and my baby was six weeks old.
“I feel as though I am sitting under a dam wall”, I told a caring psychologist. “And I feel constantly as though it is going to break.” “What if I told you it has already broken?”, she answered, and that was exactly the advice I needed to take action and change my life. Remember that what does not kill you makes you strong. Happy ending. Likewise, wake up, Australia. It takes knowledge, it takes work, and it takes discipline.
A leader who has spent years leading through a screen will not rebuild it with positive thinking. And no amount of voice coaching, on its own, will fix what is actually happening underneath a voice that shakes under pressure. In fact, no amount of AI-polished language will close a believability gap that opens the moment an audience senses the words in front of them weren't really the leader's own. Bret Stephens, a columnist at the New York Times, similarly pleads that as a journalist he finds AI ‘mentally enfeebling - an escalator towards a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.’ I love a good metaphor. Thank you @ Bret Stephens.
What closes the gap is repetition, honest feedback, and a willingness to practise the parts of leadership that cannot be prompted or scripted into existence.
For individuals
If you are a leader, stop hoping it will go away. This is not your fault or lack of natural talent, but it is your responsibility. Get help. Do something. And then do it more.
Find the right teacher. Not everyone will suit you. I might, but remember, I don’t take prisoners. Just know, if you are staying in your comfort zone, you are probably not making change.
For organisations
If you are an organisation, start focusing on practical sessions. Presence, gravitas, the ability to hold a room under pressure- these are motor skills, and motor skills are built the way every motor skill is built: through deliberate, repeated practice, under conditions that resemble the real thing. No leader has ever rebuilt presence by reading another article about presence, however persuasive the article. (or online training for that matter).
And it’s not a 10-minute session. Common for me these days are 2+ day programs with small groups that allow people to get feedback, learn and practise with guidance.
This is why I have also implemented my new 2-day public program in Melbourne (for those who do not have an organisation to do it), and the response has been marvellous.
Serious organisations will also start paying attention to how they handle the unscripted moments, because that is where trust is actually won or lost. They treat communication as a trained, ongoing capability, the same way they treat financial literacy or risk management, rather than a box ticked once at induction and never revisited.
The woman in coaching today thinks her voice is the problem. It isn't. It is simply the thing she can point to. Underneath it is the same wave building in boardrooms everywhere: leaders who are working on poor advice, using tools that make them sound better and believe them less, standing in rooms where the cost of getting this wrong has never been higher and feeling dreadful doing it.
The wave is not coming. We are under it.
It’s time to learn to swim.
Love,
Dr Louise Mahler