Poor Communication: The Biggest Threat to Your Bottom Line Now

🔥 By Lisa Goldenthal | The High-Performance Edge

 

👋 Hey, I’m Lisa — welcome to The High-Performance Edge.

 

Every week, I drop battle-tested insights for CEOs and executives who want to lead with clarity, energy, and confidence — without burnout or team drama.

 

Today, we’re talking about the profit killer that never shows up on your P&L but wrecks it anyway: bad communication.

 

⚠️ The Silent Assassin of Profit

 

Every CEO worries about AI, interest rates, or competition.

 

But you know what took down more companies than any recession? Misunderstandings.

 

NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because one team used imperial units while the other used metric. Price tag: $327 million.

 

In 2017, British Airways lost its IT network after a simple email miscommunication during maintenance — cost: $100 million in one weekend.

 

And the classic: Blockbuster had a meeting with Netflix in 2000 to discuss a partnership. They laughed them out of the room. Now Blockbuster is a meme.

 

👉 Moral of the story: you don’t go broke because you don’t work hard enough. You go broke because your team didn’t understand what you meant.

 

📉 The $420,000 Per-100 Employees Problem

 

Project.co found that poor communication costs companies $420,000 a year for every 100 employees.

 

That’s not a typo — that’s your profit margin evaporating because someone didn’t clarify a Slack message.

 

Ask yourself:

💬 How many hours a week does your team spend clarifying unclear emails or fixing misunderstood requests?

💬 What would happen if you turned that noise into clarity?

 

💡 The Strategy-Execution Gap

 

Strategy is sexy. Execution is messy.

 

You can unveil a billion-dollar plan, but if your team can’t repeat it without notes, you just held a very expensive pep talk.

 

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw

 

Pro move: Repeat key priorities until your team can recite them in their sleep. That’s when you know they’ve landed.

 

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🏎️ When Speed Becomes Sloppiness

 

Every leader wants to “move fast and break things” — until what breaks is trust.

 

Meta learned this the hard way when a rushed internal memo sparked a week-long PR firestorm. Clarity is not a luxury — it’s a seatbelt.

 

Tip: Slow down to align. Speed without clarity equals chaos.

 

 

📧 Email Isn’t Communication

 

If your alignment plan is an email chain with 37 cc’s and one passive-aggressive “per my last message,” you don’t have a communication strategy.

 

You have a confusion pipeline.

 

Fix: Use shared tools (Slack, Notion, Asana) and set a “one topic, one channel” rule.

 

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🧨 Meetings That Kill Momentum

 

Here’s a fun fact to ruin your Monday: executives spend 23 hours a week in meetings. Half are pointless.

 

Peter Drucker said it best: > “Meetings are a symptom of bad organization.”

 

Pro tip: Every meeting must have a goal, owner, and outcome. If not, delete it like spam.

 

 

🤐 The Cost of Unspoken Conflict

 

Disagreement isn’t dangerous. Silence is.

 

Boeing’s 737 Max crisis wasn’t a tech issue — it was a communication failure. Engineers saw the problem but didn’t feel safe raising it. Result: 346 lives lost and $20 billion in damages.

 

Tip: Build psychological safety. When people can’t speak up, systems break down.

 

🧩 Culture Eats Misalignment for Breakfast

 

Brian Chesky of Airbnb said, > “Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.”

 

If your culture is a mix of buzzwords and burnout, your people aren’t aligned — they’re just tired.

 

Fix: Clarify your values in plain language. If you can’t explain your culture to an intern in under 60 seconds, it’s too complicated.

 

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🔎 Measure Your Message

 

You track sales, cash flow, and margins — but when was the last time you measured clarity?

 

Run a quarterly “clarity audit.” Ask your team:

 

Do you know our top three priorities?

 

Do you know why they matter?

 

Do you know how your work fits in?

 

If you get blank stares, you just found your leak.

 

💥 Final Thought

 

Poor communication isn’t a people problem — it’s a leadership blind spot.

 

Fix it, and everything else gets easier: alignment, culture, profit, peace of mind.

 

Because clarity doesn’t just save time — it saves careers.

 

🎯 Your Next Move

 

If you’re ready to find the hidden communication and energy leaks hurting your profitability — start here:

 

🚀 Take the “From Burnout to Bulletproof” Quiz and discover your leadership energy type plus a custom roadmap to fix what’s quietly draining you and your team.

 

👉 Take the Quiz Now https://swiy.co/beat-burnout-guide

 

💬 Question for You:

What’s the worst communication fail you’ve seen at work — and how much did it cost?

Drop your answer below (you’ll be in good company).

 

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Lisa Goldenthal

Top 15 Executive Coach | LinkedIn Top Voice

Creator of the BOSS Method™ | Host of The High-Performance Edge

Helping elite CEOs multiply profit and performance without burnout.