Communication and Clarity: Enabling Alignment Where it Matters
On screen and in the decks, it makes sense.
The strategy is tight, and the logic is sound. The top team has spent months crafting it, working closely with a top-tier consultancy to get the thinking right. There’s a polished strategy deck, complete with the obligatory house framework. It all fits.
Now it's time to roll it out.
The communication team is brought in to provide support. They help shape a compelling narrative, prepare the executive for All-Hands, draft talking points, and possibly gather some employee questions (curated, of course). Then comes the leadership cascade: decks and briefing packs sent down the line for managers to “make it real” with their teams.
There’s a pulse survey. Some new strategy content goes up on the intranet. It’s shared on internal channels. Job done… for now.
Occasionally, leaders mention the strategy in team calls or all-staff emails. But ultimately, it's up to the teams to deliver on it.
Does it work?
In 2025, just 9% of employees say they fully align with their organization’s goals. Even among leaders, only 27% believe their people are aligned. And that’s almost half the confidence level reported just a year earlier!
The erosion is striking. And while communication is happening, understanding is not. What looks like alignment from the top often unravels in the hands of teams navigating complexity, competing priorities, and relentless pace.
It’s not only about perception; it’s about how we work, how well we perform, and how we feel at work.
So What’s Missing?
The issue isn't always what’s said. It’s where and how clarity is expected to take shape.
Traditional approaches focus on cascading messages from the top. However, today's work is distributed, agile, and increasingly complex, which demands something different: alignment as a team capability.
This is where communication can step in, not simply to broadcast, but by helping teams create the conditions for clarity, meaning, and cohesion to emerge from within.
Yet while more alignment is needed, communication itself is increasingly fragmented. According to Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025, only 7% of executives say they have clear visibility into how team-level work connects to strategic goals. Only 20% of knowledge workers feel their organization has a reliable way to share decisions across teams.
Teams are left navigating in the dark. Many spend nearly a quarter of their workweek trying to find the information they need. Half are unknowingly duplicating work. And leaders, instead of focusing on strategy, spend time clarifying objectives that should have been understood from the start.
The cost? Axios HQ estimates ineffective communication burns up to 45 workdays per employee before you even count the ripple effects of missed opportunities and disengagement.
This isn’t about noise, it’s about the absence of practice. A way of communicating that promotes shared clarity and meaning across teams.
Where Alignment Really Happens
Alignment doesn’t come from repeating strategy messages more often. It happens when teams develop a shared understanding of what matters and how their work contributes.
That understanding isn't a deliverable. It's an outcome of ongoing interaction, reflection, and dialogue.
The most effective teams don’t wait for direction. They co-create clarity in their planning, reflection, and communication. This is where communication professionals can make the biggest difference: not simply by crafting the message but by enabling the conditions for meaning to emerge.
Communication Professionals as Catalysts for Alignment
So what does that shift look like in practice? Communication teams can elevate their impact by:
Developing strategic narratives that serve as a consistent reference point, while giving teams room to adapt and apply them in context.
Equipping leaders at all levels to facilitate conversations that uncover assumptions, invite perspectives, and create meaning together.
Encouraging dialogue, inspired by David Bohm and Nancy Kline, where people feel safe to think aloud, explore perspectives, and co-own their understanding of direction and purpose.
Embedding feedback into the communication loop, so teams can surface questions, flag confusion, and reflect on what’s working (or not).
Supporting systems and rituals that make work visible and decisions traceable, helping teams connect the dots between strategy and daily action.
In short, the role of communication expands from messenger to meaning-maker and from transmitter to enabler.
From Communication to Capability
Plenty of tools promise alignment through messaging. But real alignment takes more than communication. It takes structured dialogue and sense-making.
This is where communication professionals can step in to guide and support a process that builds alignment in and between teams.
Mirror Mirror has evolved a tried and tested approach to team alignment that communication professionals can pick up fairly quickly. It is built around four domains: strategic alignment, cultural alignment, stakeholder alignment, and alignment in action.
It doesn’t assume the message is the problem. It begins with the people – how they make sense of what’s going on, what’s expected, how aligned they are with each other, and what they need to move forward together.
The process is grounded in the work of David Bohm, who emphasised the value of suspending judgment and exploring assumptions together; and Nancy Kline, whose Thinking Environment shows how the quality of attention we offer each other shapes the quality of thought, decisions, and action.
By creating space for reflection, shared insight, and forward planning, Mirror Mirror turns alignment from tick-the-box events into a team capability that’s especially powerful in fast-moving, complex, and distributed environments.
And it scales. Mirror Mirror can be used across teams, departments, or even entire organizations, while staying grounded in what matters: relationships, understanding, and practical outcomes.
From Awareness to Action
We already know that better communication correlates with stronger alignment, performance, and retention. However, to build alignment as a capability, communication needs to move from content to connection, and from clarity in messaging to clarity in meaning.
This is the next opportunity for communication professionals: To shape how clarity and meaning are built, how understanding is shared, and how teams move forward, together.
Mirror Mirror™ is already being used by teams in complex, high-change environments across industries to close alignment gaps, develop capability, and create shared clarity where it matters most: teams.