Why Communication Gets Harder as You Get More Senior
- 17 hours ago
- 11 min read
James Westphal is an actor, coach, and creative development specialist with a degree and training from a leading drama school, professional stage and screen experience, and a Master’s in Psychology. His unique combination of acting craft, public speaking, communication techniques, and psychology helps people connect, lead, and speak with impact.
There’s a version of our careers that we’re sold: the longer you do something, the better you get at the work, and therefore, you rise through the ranks. With this, the more difficult parts fall away, and one of these, speaking to a room, becomes easier because you have done it more and your knowledge has grown. The confidence, presence and impact you’ve longed for arrive with the long-awaited title.
However, in reality, for a large proportion of the people I coach, the more senior they are, the more challenging they find communication. It brings more nuanced challenges, different expectations and, usually, more eyes. This article explores some of the reasons why it can feel like this and what can be done to ease the challenges faced.
What changes on the way up
Early in a career, at least historically, you are largely assessed on competence: Do you know the material? Can you do the work? Is your track record right? Communication issues at that stage are mostly thought of as knowledge and confidence problems. The more confident you become with the knowledge, the better you are able to get it across. Obviously, there are a few exceptions to this, but on the whole, communication comes second to the actual job and competence at hand.
But, as we all know, the two are not independent of one another. They are completely intertwined, I’d argue, at every stage of every single job. But it’s usually not until you progress up the seniority ladder that it becomes very difficult to separate them. An aspect of seniority that is expected is being able to share your ideas and vision with clarity, confidence and ownership. But if this hasn’t been given time, training and practice, it is something that can compound in the wrong direction.
And to make matters worse, none of that can be stated. You can’t open a board update by announcing that you have sound judgement or begin a town hall meeting by declaring that you are a great leader. They are characteristics and traits transmitted in real time through how you handle a challenge, how much space you take up, how you hold yourself physically and what your voice reflects.
The result is a strange inversion. People arrive at the level where communication matters most with the skill set they’ve built over an extended period of time, but with the least technical ability and competence in how they communicate and speak in public. This, to me, is one of the oddest aspects of business.
Three recurring habits of senior people
Some of the patterns I see most often in the senior people I work with are:
1. Playing the executive
In an attempt to show people they are deserving of the title and able to do the job, many people try to play what they think others want to see. Sometimes this can work if there is depth of understanding and the technical ability to modulate your vocal and physical presence. But a lot of the time, people are trying to impose what they think is needed while lacking foundational confidence in communication. They try to force out any sign of weakness or vulnerability. A sense of seriousness is imposed. God forbid, they aren’t able to answer a particular question.
All of this leads to a buildup of unnecessary tension. In communication, tension is your biggest enemy. It restricts your vocal clarity. It limits your ability to breathe fully and release your diaphragm. It shows up in the body as rigidity and inflexibility and creates an invisible barrier, which can sometimes make people feel like they are speaking with someone through a glass screen.
When we don’t breathe properly, we don’t feel properly. Think about it: if you are trying not to cry and someone asks you if you are okay, the last thing you want to do is take a deep breath because the feeling then has free rein. But by avoiding it, we block and harden ourselves. Showing feeling is never as bad as tensing to avoid feeling anything at all.
This comes from a good place, though. Most senior people want to do a good job and prove to others that they have earned their place. This, however, means they are trying to control a lot of things, and this is one of the ways unnecessary tension shows up.
It has been drilled into us that vulnerability is weakness in business. Whilst there can be an element of truth to that in some circumstances, this can lead people, especially within communication, to forget to be real. A real person gets things wrong, doesn’t always know the answer and still gets to connect with others on a human level. They can simultaneously be a work colleague and a leader.
2. Forgetting the joy
At some point, the story of your best piece of work or your experience and journey to where you are may have become something that has been told many, many times. Maybe it is at reviews, to new joiners, at separate off-site meetings, to your partner over dinner or to a new team. Whatever the reason, by the time it is needed in a moment that matters, you can find that the story has been worn completely smooth.
The result is often strong material with the tonal energy of a train announcement. It lacks the raw passion and energy it had when you first started out and were hungry to succeed. It is devoid of life. Familiarity has drained it, and whatever lit your fire at the start has dampened. The joy in the work, at some point along the way, has diminished.
Actors encounter this problem during the long run of a show. There are a couple of ways we can look to actors to help with this all too familiar problem, and each takes a different approach.
The first is more cerebral: reminding yourself of and reconnecting with what it is about the job, company, idea, talk, pitch or presentation that energises you. When we see other people feeling something real, we can’t help but find it interesting. That is why we are drawn to streaming hours and hours of television. We are compelled to watch other people feel and experience things, whether in fiction or nonfiction.
Once you have reconnected with the joy, ask yourself, “What do I want the other person or people to think, feel or do?” When people feel, they are more likely to do.
The second is more creative and imaginative. Let’s be honest, sometimes in senior positions, or any position for that matter, you might find that you have to talk about something you aren’t particularly passionate about or don’t actually love. Maybe it is more of a commercial means to an end. In this case, you can utilise something that we were all brilliant at when we were younger: imagination.
Frame the thing you don’t care much about as if it were something you do. For example, the new policy you are trying to push because the stakeholders want it might be thought of as if it were the proposition of a great new holiday for your family. Now ask yourself how you would feel and communicate if it were that, and then apply some of this to your communication of the duller thing.
3. The echo chamber
This one doesn’t apply to everyone because some senior people are intuitively very good at seeking feedback and constructive criticism. But one aspect of business I have noticed within the territory of seniority is that it can create a vacuum in which there are minimal feedback loops.
You are usually the one who is looked to for feedback and criticism. But when you are at the top, there isn’t always a built-in structure through which you can receive the same. Or worse, you may think that you are above feedback. That is where the ego becomes the real enemy.
The liberating thing about this, though, is that as soon as you realise this could be you and your situation, you can do something about it. There are many forms this can take, including a coach, a mentor, a fellow executive or a close friend. The through line, though, is trust and respect. You need someone you trust and respect to give you honest, constructive and unbiased feedback on your communication.
If none of the above is appealing, one great, quick and easy alternative is something almost everyone in this world owns: a smartphone.
Record yourself and watch it back. This will give you real-time, unbiased data to work with. This helps close something I call the perception gap.
There is often a large distance between what a speaker intends and what a listener receives. You may feel like you are being inviting, but what is being signalled is disengagement. Or you may feel like you are bringing high energy and passion, but what is being signalled is frantic and nervous energy.
Nobody can see themselves from the outside, so this distance can survive entire careers uncorrected. It widens with seniority because fewer and fewer people are willing to tell you about it.
The game of translation
I urge all my clients to think of communication as a game of translation. As mentioned above, what you feel might not always be how you come across. Instead of finding this frustrating, with time, awareness and feedback, you can start to treat it like a game. Who doesn’t love a game?
Always ask yourself: What am I intending to do here, and how might I be coming across? There is a well-documented psychological effect at work here, known as the illusion of transparency. We consistently overestimate how visible our inner states are to the people watching us.
Research by Gilovich and colleagues found that this holds particularly true in public speaking, where speakers judged their own nervousness to be far more obvious than observers actually rated it. What is useful about this is that it cuts both ways. The anxiety you are certain everyone can see is arriving much more faintly than you think. So are the warmth, conviction and interest. This is precisely why these feelings need translating rather than simply feeling.
What can be done?
Aside from the above, when it comes to communication at any level, there are three factors at play. If you can master each one, you will find that your level of communication and public speaking begins to match the level of your title.
1. Psychological
Cognitive work matters, but thinking differently about a room you are already standing in has limited reach once adrenaline has arrived. Where it does its work is beforehand. Reframing is a useful tool. Changing the lens through which you view a situation can alter your feelings and behaviours surrounding it.
The physical sensations of anxiety and readiness can be very similar, including a raised heart rate, heightened alertness and adrenaline. What differs is the label you attach, a process known as arousal reappraisal. Reading a state as your system preparing you rather than betraying you can change a great deal about what you do next.
The other aspect is structure. Rambling tends to show up in high-stakes moments and undermines your logos, which is your logic and reasoning, and your ethos, which is the credibility you carry as a speaker. I use a framework I call OMF with clients: Objective, Message, Feeling, with the latter covering pathos.
Objective is what you want these people to do as a result of the communicative situation at hand. Not “understand the update,” which is too loose to steer anything, but something specific enough to make decisions against. Specific over vague every time.
Message is the single line you would want to remain in their heads a week later. It is almost a tagline of sorts.
Feeling is what you want them to experience while you speak, and it is the element almost everyone skips. It is also not fixed. It travels across a talk: uneasy in one section, reassured in the next.
You plan in that order, and you deliver in reverse. Feeling lands first, meaning second, and the action follows from both. Lead with what you want someone to feel in each section of your pitch, speech or presentation.
2. Physiological
You cannot always reason your way out of an adrenaline response, but you can intervene in it directly, which is what makes this the fastest acting of the three. One useful tool is the physiological sigh: an inhale through the nose, a second shorter inhale on top to inflate the lungs further, and then a long, slow exhale through the mouth. Repeating this two or three times may help reduce physiological arousal.
The mechanism is not mysterious. A longer exhale can support the body’s parasympathetic response, which acts like a brake. It can be done in a lift or corridor in less than a minute. This one isn’t particularly discreet, though. If you want something more subtle, you can check out my other articles.
The second piece is breath as fuel rather than regulation. Voice is powered by the breath. Shallow breathing high in the chest can give you a thin sound, sentences that run out of support before they end, and a pitch that climbs and gets stuck. It can also keep your body in a heightened state of stress. Allowing the lower ribs to expand and the diaphragm to work freely gives you range, volume and the ability to land the end of a sentence rather than let it drift.
This brings us back to tension. The same tension described earlier is what stops the breath from dropping in the first place. Everything in this layer is connected to everything in the first habit. All communication work is interconnected.
3. Physical
This is the layer people are least aware of and the one that others catch on to the quickest, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Start with the basics: weight through both feet or distributed evenly on the chair, shoulders released, and an open and aligned posture.
The instinct under pressure is to protect the chest and close down by folding the arms, gripping a lectern or turning slightly away. Under pressure, people tense. Their shoulders lift, their stomach is braced, their weight may lean back, giving the impression of someone wanting to escape, and their breath becomes shallow. The correction is to send the weight downwards. This is a physical action that observers can also read as steadiness.
Beyond that, this is where acting craft becomes directly useful. Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis examines physical expression through space, weight, time and flow. Once you have language for those elements, you have choices. This was built upon by Yat Malmgren to create a system of movement psychology and character analysis.
Are you moving directly or indirectly? Is your energy strong or light? Sudden or sustained? Most people have one default setting they use for everything, which is why some senior speakers come across as relentless and others as weightless. The same words delivered with different qualities of weight and time carry entirely different meanings.
Then there is the space around you. Actors may refer to this as the gestural sphere, the area your gestures occupy. Held tightly to the body, your gestures can make you look contained, and the room may read uncertainty. Opened out, they allow you to occupy the room. Occupying space can be a clear signal of authority, and it is trainable in a way that confidence is not.
A good exercise is to experiment with different tempi while delivering a passage of text and record yourself. Watch it back to train your understanding and use of how you move through space, weight and time. You will reach a point where you intuitively begin to match what you do physically with how you want to come across.
Final thoughts
In my experience, people think that all of this is a natural talent that you are either born with or not. This isn’t the case. As with any skill, this work is trainable and can be improved.
It takes time, practice and dedication, but it is worth it. Many people give so much time and dedication to reaching the level they want in business and work hard to ensure they acquire the knowledge and competence required to do the job at a technical level. It seems nonsensical that a similar amount of time isn’t given to communication and public speaking because these skills can elevate or undermine the work you have done up to this point.
For some, it is not enough to read the tools in an article. If you would like to explore any of this practically, I work one-to-one and with groups on communication, presence and performance under pressure.
Read more from James Westphal
James Westphal, Actor & Public Speaking and Communication Coach
James Westphal is an actor, coach, and creative development specialist who works with professional actors on their acting and audition technique and provides public speaking and communication coaching for individuals and groups across business, leadership, and public-facing roles. With his first-class degree and training from a leading drama school, ongoing stage and screen work, a Master’s in Psychology, and extensive teaching experience at top drama schools and conservatoires, James also coaches internationally for leading companies. Founder and CEO of James Westphal Creative Development, providing effective help and guidance for people who speak for a living, his mission is to empower people to connect, lead, and speak with impact.
