In The Room #25 – When everyone agrees but nobody means the same thing

I was working with a leadership team this week and asked them a straightforward question.

What is the one behaviour you consider non-negotiable in this team?

Communication won by a landslide. Unanimous, immediate, and completely unsurprising. It's the answer most leadership teams give. I've heard it hundreds of times.

Then I asked a different question.

I went around the room and asked each person individually: what does good communication actually mean to you?

Six people. Six answers.

Transparency. Context. Listening. Honesty. Consistency. Being heard.

Every answer was reasonable. Every answer reflected something genuinely important. And none of them were quite the same.

The room had just done something that leadership teams do constantly, in organisations of every size and sector: they had unanimously agreed on an expectation while holding six different definitions of what that expectation actually required.

Nobody was wrong. Nobody was being difficult. They had simply never been asked to make their definition explicit — and so the assumption had formed, quietly and naturally, that everyone meant roughly the same thing.

They didn't.

This isn't a communication problem. It's a definition problem. And the distinction matters enormously for how you try to solve it.

If you diagnose it as a communication problem, you send people to a workshop, encourage more transparency, run a team-building exercise, and wonder why things don't meaningfully change. The behaviours remain vague. The expectation stays undefined. The same conversations keep occurring.

If you diagnose it as a definition problem, you do something different. You slow down and make the implicit explicit. You ask people to articulate, specifically and behaviourally, what the expectation actually looks like in practice. You surface the gaps between different interpretations before those gaps become conflict, confusion, or performance issues.

That's a harder conversation to have. It's also a far more useful one.

The pattern extends well beyond communication.

Accountability. Culture. Leadership. Performance. Respect. These are words that appear constantly in team charters, organisational values, and leadership competency frameworks. They feel meaningful because everyone agrees on them. That agreement, though, is often agreement on the word rather than on the behaviour the word is supposed to represent.

Ask a leadership team what accountability means and you'll hear answers that range from "owning your outcomes" to "following through on commitments" to "being willing to have hard conversations" to "not making excuses." All of those are defensible definitions. But a team operating from four different definitions of accountability doesn't actually have a shared standard — it has a shared label attached to four different expectations.

That gap is where performance leaks. Where frustration builds. Where the same issue keeps surfacing in leadership meetings because the underlying expectation was never actually aligned, just assumed to be.

There's a practical exercise embedded in this problem, and it's one of the most useful things a leadership team can do.

Pick any value, expectation, or non-negotiable that your team claims to share. Ask everyone to write down, independently and without discussion, what that expectation looks like as a specific, observable behaviour. Not a principle. Not a value statement. A behaviour — something you could actually see someone doing or not doing.

Then compare answers.

The overlaps tell you where genuine alignment exists. The gaps tell you where the real leadership conversation needs to happen. And there will always be gaps, because people bring different experiences, different reference points, and different assumptions to every word that carries meaning.

The goal isn't to land on a single correct definition and enforce it from the top. The goal is to make the conversation explicit, so that the team is genuinely working from shared understanding rather than assumed agreement.

Those are very different things. And the difference shows up in how a team performs when it matters most.

The honest question: how many of your team's shared expectations are actually shared — and how many are agreed-upon words that each person quietly interprets in their own way?

Dan Kuss is the founder of Strengths Academy, an Adelaide-based leadership development consultancy specialising in strengths-based leadership development and team performance. The "In The Room" series shares observations from inside real rooms and leadership conversations.

Just joined us? Find the full series at dankuss.com/in-the-room