“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter, it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Mark Twain
A recent study I read about inspired me to write about a new development in communication and leadership impact.
Researchers analyzed 22 studies and found a striking change in spoken communication over time. Between 2005 and 2019, the average number of words people spoke each day declined from roughly 16,000 to approximately 12,700. The researchers estimate that this represents about 338 fewer spoken words for every year that passed during that period. Among adults 25 and under, the decline was even greater.
The researchers describe the decline as being distributed across the small interactions that fill our days: conversations with neighbors, exchanges with strangers, brief conversations with people around us. There isn’t one enormous conversation missing from our lives but rather hundreds of little moments, each one almost imperceptible, that gradually add up. For senior leaders, I think it opens up interesting questions for reflection.
We Have More Ways to Communicate Than Ever
Senior leaders can reach hundreds or thousands of people before breakfast as a single email can move information across an organization. A LinkedIn post can put an idea in front of people we’ve never met. Slack, Teams, Zoom, text, video, voice messages and digital platforms allow us to communicate across time zones and organizational boundaries with extraordinary speed.
We have become exceptionally good at communication at scale sometimes losing sight the human impact. We measure the reach of our communication constantly in terms of open rates, attendance, sales, engagement, impressions, followers and response times. These measures tell us whether our words traveled but I they tell us considerably less about what happened when they arrived. Some words become information while others become part of someone’s story.
Why Leadership Communication Is More Than Information
What are some words you still remember because of their impact on you?
Perhaps there was a note tucked into your lunchbox as a child. Maybe someone called you on a rainy Sunday when a text would have been easier or a teacher may have recognized something in you before you recognized it yourself. A manager may have said, “I trust you,” at precisely the moment you were questioning your own judgment. A loved one or a stranger may have simply noticed in a way that you felt seen.
The circumstances are different for each of us, but I suspect most of us can identify a handful of sentences that have remained with us for years.
What makes this interesting is that these words were memorable because they were personal to us not because they were beautifully written or particularly profound. Someone had been paying attention in a way that communicated they had a thought about us, and they decided it was worth expressing.
The meaning came from the words, certainly, but also from the relationship, the timing, the context and the fact that someone had taken the time to speak.
The Senior Leader’s Communication Advantage and Risk
As leaders become more senior, communication becomes increasingly efficient.
We learn to synthesize complexity as we become better at distilling a message, framing a decision and communicating direction. We develop an instinct for what needs to be said and what can be left unsaid and these are important leadership capabilities except when they are not.
Efficiency makes it easy to communicate at people when the moment calls for communicating with them. A company-wide email may be exactly what a strategic update requires but reading the temperature of how key stakeholders feel about the strategy deserves a conversation. Difficult feedback benefits from presence and gratitude can become something more meaningful when it is handwritten. Many Senior Leaders do these things with grace and graciousness but with the fast pace of the world of work today, recent studies show employees feed disconnected from leadership. CNBC reports, “Forty-six percent of employees across the U.S. say their bosses only somewhat or rarely understand them and their contributions at work, according to the April 2025 Workplace Perception Gap Survey from HR platform The Predictive Index.”
Why Leadership Words Have a Longer Life Than We Think
As we have each experienced, there is an asymmetry in leadership communication that is often overlooked. The person speaking may experience a sentence once while the person hearing it may experience it many times, sometimes for a lifetime.
Our words, as leaders, may become part of someone’s internal narrative and can influence whether a person speaks up in the future, takes a risk, raises a difficult issue, applies for a new role or believes they belong in the room. This gives leadership communication a longer life than the moment in which it is delivered and is what I thought of when I saw the study about the decrease in spoken words. If we are speaking less face to face, then how can we make a positive impact when we do connect in this way with those we lead.
How to Scale Leadership Without Losing Human Connection
The culture of an organization is shaped by the messages we carefully prepare and by the thousands of interactions that happen around them in the form of a question in the hallway, a moment after a meeting, a voice of encouragement or a thoughtful acknowledgment.
- Think about the words that have stayed with you. What did they give you at the time – confidence, perspective, courage, belonging, permission, or the opposite?
- What do the people you lead consistently hear from you, and what might they need to hear more often?
- Who has heard from you because you needed something from them?
- Who have you contacted simply because you were thinking about them?
- What do people hear most frequently from you: direction, correction, information, curiosity, encouragement, appreciation?
- Whose contribution have you noticed but never acknowledged?
- What might someone need to hear from you that you have assumed they already know?
- Which conversations have you turned into email or text because it was more efficient for you?
Think about 3 things people have said to you that you still remember that have had a positive impact on you and your path.
- Who said them?
- Where were you and how were the words delivered?
- What was happening in your life?
- What gave those words their staying power?
The Words That Stay
Extending the researcher’s estimate of roughly 338 fewer spoken words per day for each year that passes would put the extrapolation at approximately 10,300 spoken words per day in 2026, nearly 6,000 fewer words than the estimated average in 2005. The direction of the trend raises an important question for senior leaders: what happens to our organizations when the small, everyday moments of connection, the exchanges with colleagues, the informal questions, the spontaneous ideas and the brief human conversations become increasingly scarce?
I will close with the same quote I opened with that now may land differently, and more profoundly, at the end of this article. On October 15, 1888, in a letter to George Bainton, Mark Twain penned , “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter, it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
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