Most teams today communicate. A lot. In fact, they’re swimming in words.
Meetings stack up on calendars. Slack messages multiply. Emails pile up faster than anyone can read them. And yet leaders still find themselves saying things like:
- “We just talked about this last week.”
- “Everyone heard the message, but nothing changed.”
- “We’re communicating constantly and still missing each other.”
That’s because effective team communication isn’t about volume.
It’s about
- how communication happens and
- the types of conversations teams are actually having.
The Real Cost of Poor Team Communication
When communication breaks down, the consequences rarely show up immediately. They surface slowly through confusion, frustration, rework, and disengagement.
Decisions take longer; trust erodes quietly; and team members begin making assumptions instead of asking questions. For their part, leaders often misdiagnose the problem as performance or accountability when the real issue is misalignment.
Communication isn’t just how work gets done. It’s how teams make sense of their work together.
What Research Tells Us About Effective Team Communication
Research from MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, led by Alex Pentland, offers powerful insight into what separates high-performing teams from the rest.
Pentland’s work found that team success is driven less by individual intelligence or expertise and more by communication patterns.
Across industries and roles, strong teams consistently demonstrated five characteristics:
- Balanced participation — no single voice dominates
- High conversational energy — frequent, brief and energetic interactions
- Strong engagement cues — engage directly with each other using appropriate tone, facial expression, body language
- Side conversations — information flows between team members outside of meetings
- Active external communication — teams stay connected to stakeholders
What’s striking is that the content of conversations mattered less than the rhythm, flow, and amount of interaction.
Communication functioned like a living system, shaping trust, alignment, and adaptability in real time.
Why “More Communication” Often Makes Things Worse
When performance drops, many leaders respond by increasing communication:
More meetings.
More updates.
More check-ins.
But research on virtual and hybrid teams, including work by Brad Kirkman and others, shows that frequency alone does not improve outcomes.
In fact, excessive communication, particularly task-focused communication, often leads to cognitive overload, meeting fatigue, and disengagement. This results in people receiving more information, but processing less of it.
Without intention, communication becomes noise instead of clarity.
Transactional vs. Relational Communication
Most workplace communication is transactional by default, which includes things like:
- Status updates
- Deadlines
- Deliverables
- Problem-solving conversations
Transactional communication keeps work moving, but it does not build trust.
Building trust requires relational communication, which helps people understand one another, surfaces assumptions, and repairs breakdowns before they become fractures.
Relational communication includes things like:
- Checking understanding
- Naming tension early
- Exploring different perspectives
- Reflecting on how the team is working together
When teams neglect relational communication, several predictable patterns emerge:
- Feedback feels personal.
- Conflict goes underground.
- Collaboration becomes compliance.
- Psychological safety diminishes.
Strong teams intentionally make room for both transactional and relational conversations. That is, they manage both tasks and relationships, recognizing that one cannot function well without the other.
The Conversations Teams Rarely Make Time For
Now, most teams default almost exclusively to problem-solving. But when every conversation is about fixing something, teams lose the opportunity to think, learn, and align at a deeper level.
Clutterbuck and Megginson’s research on dialogic conversations highlights the range of conversations leaders and team members need to have to stay effective.
These include:
- Reflective conversations — What are we learning from our experience?
- Developmental conversations — How are we growing capability and confidence?
- Strategic conversations — Where are we going and why?
- Repair conversations — What needs to be addressed or reset?
Thus, high-performing teams vary the type of conversation based on the moment, which is a sign of maturity, not inefficiency.
Communication Beyond the Team
When external communication with stakeholders weakens, internal team tension often increases. What looks like a team problem is frequently a stakeholder communication problem in disguise.
Deborah Ancona’s research reminds leaders that teams do not succeed in isolation.
Effective teams manage boundaries intentionally by staying connected to customers, partners, leaders, and other stakeholders.
By using team roles such as “scout”, “ambassador”, and “coordinator” to interface with stakeholders, teams can gather insight, build alignment, and integrate external expectations into their work.
What Effective Team Communication Really Requires
Strong team communication doesn’t come from scripts or slogans.
It comes from leaders who design communication intentionally and who recognize that how people talk together shapes how they think and act together.
Thus, effective leaders:
- Create space for dialogue, not just discussion
- Model curiosity instead of certainty
- Address misalignment early
- Encourage participation from every voice
When communication improves, everything else follows. Decisions accelerate. Trust deepens. Conflict becomes productive. Engagement increases.
In this way, communication isn’t just how work gets done. It’s how teams become effective.
Want to Strengthen How Your Team Communicates Together?
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I help leaders build high-performing teams. If your team’s communication is becoming mostly noise, schedule a free strategy session with me.
Or head over to my team’s page to learn more about how I help team leaders like you build a powerhouse team.
Until next time—keep leading with clarity, courage, and curiosity.