Level-appropriate communication: your team is copying you

I spent the late 1990 and early 2000s at Microsoft. The culture was rough.

VPs shouted at their directs in meetings. Not behind closed doors. In front of everyone. SVPs ran their organizations like personal fiefdoms, dressing down people in hallways and conference rooms, in front of whoever happened to be standing there. I watched senior executives chew out people two and three levels below them for the crime of presenting data the executive didn't want to hear. I watched grown adults get publicly humiliated because an SVP was having a bad Tuesday.

If an executive tried that today, there would be a lawsuit on their desk by lunch. Back then, we didn't know any different. We went along with it.

The behavior was bad enough. But what stayed with me was what happened next.

Everyone else started copying it.

Leads who had been at the company for eighteen months started barking at their reports. Directors who managed six people adopted the swagger of SVPs who managed six thousand. People with a tiny fraction of the authority performed the same theatrics because they believed that's what leadership looked like. That's what getting ahead required.

They were wrong. But they didn't know that yet.

I wrote a companion post about adapting your communication when talking to people above you. Communicating up matters. But communicating down matters more. The way you talk to the people below you on the org chart shapes everything: how they treat each other, how they treat their own reports, whether they speak up or stay quiet, and whether your organization actually functions or just looks like it does.

You are modeling the behavior your entire organization will adopt.

Why do a leader's words carry more weight?

When you become a leader, something changes about your words. You might not feel it, but everyone around you does.

A suggestion from a peer is just a suggestion. A suggestion from a manager sounds like direction. A suggestion from a VP sounds like a mandate. A suggestion from a CEO sounds like policy. Every level up the org chart multiplies the weight of what you say.

I've watched a CEO casually ask about a feature over lunch, and by the following Monday, an entire team had been pulled off their roadmap to build it. The CEO forgot the conversation happened. The team spent three weeks on something that was never prioritized, never scoped, and never approved by anyone except the CEO's passing curiosity.

You don't get to think out loud anymore. Not the way you used to. What you say in passing on a Tuesday gets repeated, interpreted, and acted on by Friday. Your "just a thought" becomes someone else's top priority. Your offhand question about why something works a certain way sends three people scrambling to change it before you ask again.

The most effective leaders I've worked with understand this intuitively. They choose their words with care. They preface genuine musings with explicit disclaimers: "I'm thinking out loud here, not asking anyone to do anything." They ask questions without implying the answer they want to hear. And when they do want action, they say so directly, so people don't have to decode their intent.

How does leadership behavior cascade?

What I saw at Microsoft wasn't an accident. It was a pattern you can observe at any company, in any industry, at any scale.

When leaders behave badly, the behavior cascades downward. Junior leaders watch senior leaders and learn: that's what success looks like. That's how you prove you belong. That's the price of admission to the next level. So they start doing the same thing. And their reports watch them and draw the same conclusion. Within a few years, the entire organization talks to each other the way the people at the top talk to them.

The reverse is also true.

When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, he replaced "know-it-all" with "learn-it-all" as the operating principle. He asked leaders to listen more than they talked. He killed the stack ranking system that had pitted employees against each other for over a decade. Nadella started with how people talked to each other. The products followed. Microsoft went from a company people endured to a company people wanted to join. Market value went from around $300 billion to over $2.5 trillion.

Your communication style as a leader is the single most visible thing about you. It sets the temperature for your entire organization. If you yell, your reports will yell. If you listen, your reports will listen. If you treat people with respect in meetings, your reports will too. If you interrupt and dismiss people, so will every manager three levels below you who thinks that's how the game is played.

Why should executives avoid skipping management levels?

One of the most common mistakes senior executives make is reaching past their direct reports to talk to people two or three levels below them. Sometimes it feels efficient. Sometimes it feels friendly. It is almost always destructive.

Here's a scenario I've seen play out more than once.

A VP drops by a junior engineer's desk and tells him she really likes his work on a project. She's excited about it. She can't wait to see it finished.

The VP feels good about this interaction. She's being accessible. She's recognizing good work. She's showing the team she cares.

But here's what the VP doesn't know: the Director who manages that engineer's team has been planning to realign the project. The objectives have shifted. The Director has context from customer conversations, from resource constraints, from cross-team dependencies that the VP hasn't been tracking. The Director was going to redirect the project next week.

Now what?

The junior engineer just heard from the VP, the Director's boss's boss, that his project is great and she wants to see it finished. The Director walks in on Monday and says "we're changing direction," and the engineer thinks: but the VP just told me she loved it.

The Director now has a choice. Redirect the project and risk looking like they're contradicting the VP. Or keep the project going in the wrong direction to avoid the conflict. Either way, the Director's authority has been undermined by a well-intentioned hallway conversation.

We work hard to prevent these situations. But prevention requires discipline.

The principle is straightforward: go through the chain. If you want to recognize someone's work, tell their manager. If you want to give feedback, give it to their manager. If you want to redirect a project, talk to the leader who owns it.

Your Director knows things you don't. They know who is struggling, who is coasting, who needs encouragement, and who needs a course correction. They know the day-to-day realities that you, three levels up, cannot possibly track. When you skip past them, you're making decisions with incomplete information. And you're telling everyone in the org that the management chain is optional.

Why should praise flow through the chain?

Praise deserves extra attention because it trips up well-intentioned leaders constantly.

Praise from a senior executive feels great to receive. You remember it. You tell your spouse about it. You feel seen. But when that praise bypasses the management chain, it creates problems you can't see from the top.

When a VP praises an individual contributor directly, several things happen at once. The IC's direct manager becomes less relevant in that person's mind. The IC starts orienting toward the VP's preferences instead of their manager's priorities. Other people on the team notice and learn that catching the VP's eye is more valuable than doing solid work within the system. The manager's authority erodes one compliment at a time.

The fix is simple. Tell the Director: "your team did outstanding work on this project." Let the Director figure out who deserves specific recognition. They have the context. They know who stayed late, who wrote the code that unblocked the team, who kept the project on track when it was about to slip. Let them deliver praise at the right level with the right specificity.

You still get to celebrate wins. You still get to be enthusiastic. You just do it through the people whose job it is to manage the team.

What happens when middle management gets frozen out?

When executives routinely skip middle management, those managers stop making decisions. They're always looking over their shoulder, wondering if the VP already told their reports something different. They spend more time managing up than leading their teams. They become translators and traffic cops instead of leaders. Good operating rhythms, like structured weekly reviews, help prevent this by giving everyone a shared understanding of priorities. Without that structure, the frozen middle just gets colder.

Hollowed-out authority creates what I call a "frozen middle," a layer of management that can't execute because they've been stripped of the ability to actually manage.

And the cost is enormous. Organizations with strong middle management dramatically outperform those without. Middle managers are the people closest to the work, closest to the customers, and closest to the problems. They detect threats before executives do because they operate closer to reality. When you bypass them, you lose the single best source of intelligence in your organization.

Something like seventy percent of employee engagement comes down to the direct manager. Most people who quit a job point to their manager as the primary reason. Anything you do as a senior leader that weakens the manager-employee relationship, including well-intentioned skip-level interactions, directly damages engagement and retention.

Protect your middle. They're the ones actually running the place.

Are skip-level conversations still okay?

Skip-level conversations are still valuable, and the thing you shouldn't take away from this post is that they're bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. Skip-level conversations give you a pulse on the team and the work. Just as meeting with customers gives you context into the market, meeting with your team gives yo context into the capabilitites and limitations of your organization.

However, when you go into skip-levels, make sure you get a full briefing from your direct reports first. Take the time to understand the performance (or lack thereof) of the team. Often, if you have inexperienced managers on your team, you will need to help your direct reports muddle through performance issues. Getting the low-down on what those are can help you have more fruitful conversations with the team.

The other thing you're doing is signaling to the team that you and your directs are on the same page. That then enables your directs to deliver on your vision more effectively.

How do you communicate down well?

Communicating down well takes practice. After thirty years of getting this wrong and occasionally getting it right, I've landed on four principles.

Match your specificity to their level. I wrote about adapting your message when talking up the org chart. The same principle applies in reverse. When you're talking to a Director, talk about outcomes and strategy. When you're talking to a first-line manager, talk about execution and team dynamics. When you're talking to an IC, and you should rarely be doing this directly, keep it general and positive. The further down you reach, the lighter your touch should be. Understanding the language of engineering, the language of marketing, and the language of sales helps too. Each function has its own vocabulary, and speaking it shows respect.

Go through the chain. Assignments, feedback, praise, and course corrections all flow through the management chain. Every time you skip a level, you erode the authority of the person you skipped. Do it enough times and that person stops managing entirely. They become a figurehead waiting for you to tell their team what to do.

Calibrate the weight of your words. Before you say anything in a meeting, ask yourself: will this be interpreted as a casual observation or as a directive? If you're not sure, assume directive. Say "I'm just thinking out loud" when you're actually just thinking out loud. And if you want someone to do something, say so directly, so people don't have to spend three days decoding your intent.

Model the behavior you want to see. If you want your team to admit mistakes, admit yours first. If you want people to speak up in meetings, ask for dissenting opinions and thank people when they disagree with you. If you want people to feel safe enough to take risks, show them what that looks like by taking a few yourself. Your team will treat each other the way you treat them.

What happens when the leader at the top changes?

Microsoft changed when the leader at the top started behaving differently. Nadella modeled curiosity instead of certainty, listening instead of lecturing, learning instead of knowing. The entire company followed.

The only thing that changes culture is behavior. Your behavior. Every day, in every meeting, in every hallway conversation, in every Slack message.

The people below you are watching. They're learning what leadership looks like from you. Make it worth copying.