It’s one of the things that drive professional communicators crazy about working with senior leaders: trying to get them to say the same message over and over again until their people get it.

But it’s necessary. You don’t have to be a habitué of Madison Avenue to know that sharing a message one time, and one time only, makes it highly unlikely that it will stick.  Redundancy, duplicating the message, multiple times, maybe even in multiple media, is the king of strategic messaging. Say it again, and again, and again until they get it. Not rocket science.

And yet that rocket appears to rarely penetrate the highly trafficked minds of senior leaders. At some level, they know messages need to be heard multiple times to stick – if only because it was ingrained in them in their MBA marketing classes – but they all-too-infrequently act on that knowledge.  And when you remind them, they’ll listen, but sometimes, maybe too many times, they don’t seem to hear.

Some communicators believe that the fault for the failure of senior leaders to act on their advice is their own, it “lies not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings”. In other words, they worry that as a professional communicator, they don’t carry the business or analytical credibility to make a case that will compel senior leaders.  Some numbers, data, research, something concrete might help, they think.

So, imagine the “buzz” in the communication blogs and LinkedIn groups when the Harvard Business School newsletter, Working Knowledge, recently published an article with the pungent title, “It’s Not Nagging: Why Persistent, Redundant Communication Works.”

The article, a newsy summary of the results of a recent research article published in the academic journal, Organization Science, summarized the research findings this way:

Most parents understand that redundant communication, coupled with an escalating sense of urgency, is integral to communicating because it gets the job done. New research shows that getting employees to listen up and deliver isn’t so different.

Bravo! Research supporting the need for redundancy from Harvard Business School and Northwestern University researchers. And with this additional, compelling message:

The researchers also determined that clarity in messaging, while not a bad thing, was not the goal for redundant communication. Even if a powerful manager is clear and direct with an employee, it’s still the redundancy that counts. “I didn’t think we’d find this. I was stunned,” Neeley [the Harvard researcher] says.

Fascinating finding. The implication: the time some senior leaders spend ultra-fine tuning their messages for clarity might be better spent actually delivering them…. and delivering them… and delivering them.

High quality, research-based ammunition for those trying to convince senior leaders that if they’re going to engage in strategic leadership communication, they must build redundancy into their communication plans.

But, as I shall suggest in part two of “The Department of Redundancy Department,” it’s ammunition unlikely to hit its target. That is, the barriers to senior leaders consistently building redundancy into their communication have little to do with data-based decision making. The barriers are subtle and insidious, as some of the original article’s research findings suggest.

More on that soon.