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,” professional communicators rejoiced.  Finally! Research supporting what communicators have been telling senior leaders for ages (with only middling effect): their people need to hear their messages more than once for them to stick.

But as the research behind the article points out, not all leaders forsake redundancy in their communications. On the contrary. According to the researchers, there is a clear differentiator between those leaders who are routinely redundant and those that aren’t:

Power, it turns out, plays a big role in how managers communicate with employees when they are under pressure.

Researchers found that managers with “positional power,” that is, the ability to control the pay and promotions of the people working for them, were less likely to engage in redundant communications than managers who had only their personal influence to rely on. More: when managers with positional power did engage in redundant communications, it was usually in a “reactive” manner, rather than proactively.  That is, they communicated more than once only when their initial message didn’t produce the result they desired. The bottom line, according to the researchers:

Power, it seems, makes it difficult for managers to recognize that they face a situation where persuasion (my emphasis) is necessary.

The researchers didn’t press their luck by straying too far beyond describing the results of their observations. Wisely so. Trying to explain whatever situational and cognitive mechanisms might make those with positional power less likely to engage in redundant communications than those without positional power is to dip one’s toe into a philosophical or psychological quagmire. So many possible explanations; so little agreement.

But most corporate leaders should know better. And do. Almost all of them have MBAs, and have been taught in marketing that frequent message reinforcement is necessary for even the most basic “top-of-mind awareness.”  Yet they don’t do it. Not often enough.

Is there a case to be made for leaders not building in redundancy into communications? What rationale might justify leaders believing they don’t need to persuade their own people?  My guess is that if you asked them, they might respond with something like this:

• Redundant communications are inefficient. Senior leaders will tell you that their most precious commodity is time; having to invest it in efforts to persuade those who work for them, (versus, say, boards, customers, peers, investors,) is an inefficient use of that precious commodity.

They might also suggest that:

• Redundant communications are unnecessary. This is a legitimate inference given the evidence all around them. After all, how many subordinates are willing to risk looking incompetent or unintelligent by asking their leader to repeat themselves, or by asking a “dumb question?” Not many. In that context, can we blame leaders for assuming that their message has gotten through and that it will be acted upon? Or for being irritated when their communication doesn’t deliver the desired results?

Which suggests another rationale altogether:

• Redundant communications don’t solve the real problem: poor performance. Given that almost any single, non-redundant communication from someone powerful is likely to produce the desired result from at least some people, can’t leaders legitimately ask, “What’s wrong with the others?”  Even if this is likely a result of “fundamental attribution error,”[1] it is not wholly without its truth, however limited.

Whatever their reasons or rationale, whether explicit or implicit, the reality, according to the research, is that those with power are less likely to feel the need to be persuasive, and to build redundancy into their communication plans, than those without power.

The good news in all this is that some leaders with positional power can be persuaded to build redundancy into their communications. And they do. The bad news is that some cannot. And the ugly, or at least potentially ugly news, is that some leaders think they’re already using redundant communications to persuade their people – they’ll swear to you that they’ve delivered the message a million times – and yet they are doing no such thing!

I’ll share a personally-lived example of that particular problem in part three of “The Department of Redundancy Department.” Coming soon.