The Best Leaders Edit What They Say Before They Say It

Harvard Business Review

07-08-2025

In many organizations, transparency is held up as a leadership virtue. Open communication fosters trust, signals authenticity, and helps employees feel informed and included.
But as leaders step into executive roles, the context changes. Casual remarks often carry the weight of a mandate. What once felt like honest candor can become counterproductive. A passing comment may be interpreted as a directive. An offhand thought can trigger unnecessary confusion or anxiety. Instead, you have to master executive presence, where how you speak matters as much as what you say.
That's why strategic editing is a critical senior leadership skill. It's knowing what to say (and what to leave out), how to say it, and when silence is more powerful. First-time CEOs and other new C-level leaders often find that the communication habits that served them earlier in their careers don't scale well at the top. To communicate more effectively, leaders need to develop the skill of saying less with greater impact.
Five Types of Overcommunicating Leaders
In high-stakes environments, people look to senior leaders for clarity, confidence, and stability. When communication is unfiltered or unclear, it creates confusion or fear, even if the intent is transparency.
Through our work coaching C-suite clients, we've identified five common overcommunication styles. Importantly, these aren't personality flaws; they're signs of a missing skill: the ability to communicate with executive-level precision.
1. The Straight Shooter
This leader shares unfiltered thoughts in the name of honesty. They value candor and believe in 'telling it like it is.'
But without thoughtful framing, blunt statements can damage morale and shut down growth. Especially at the executive level, how comments about the business or people are delivered is just as important as what's being said.
A CEO one of us (Jordan) worked with had a tendency to share direct, unbuffered thoughts about segments of the business at all-hands meetings. While on one hand the team appreciated his candid style, on the other, certain people felt taken for granted and disrespected. Through coaching he learned to pause before saying what was on his mind and consider how he wanted his audience to feel. He maintained his direct approach but got better at framing comments more constructively.
2. The Idea Generator
This leader shares too many early ideas without strategic framing. They thrive on creativity and innovation, but teams can become overwhelmed or confused when new ideas are shared without context or when priorities are already in motion.
One founder frequently pitched new innovation projects during team meetings. While imaginative, the constant influx of new initiatives diluted focus on the company's core advertising business. Through executive coaching with one of us (Tutti), he introduced a structured '5% innovation time' and began clearly distinguishing between exploratory concepts and strategic priorities. This shift preserved his creative energy while enabling the team to stay focused on execution.
3. The Anxious Communicator
This leader overshares uncertainty in the name of transparency. They want to be honest and real but often broadcast indecision or internal anxiety too early. During organizational change, this can leave teams feeling unmoored rather than informed, contributing to change exhaustion when repeated ambiguous updates erode employee confidence and clarity.
One CEO Jordan coached wanted to be transparent as he navigated shifting return-to-office plans. With his executive team, he often shared his evolving thoughts—and worries—in real time, sometimes leaning toward full-time return, other times suggesting permanent remote work. The frequent reversals were meant to keep people in the loop but instead left his team confused and anxious, which made it harder for them to communicate effectively with their own teams. By pausing to finalize his thinking before communicating and aligning his tone with a sense of direction, he helped his team and the organization relax and regain clarity.
4. The TMI Leader
This leader blurs personal and professional boundaries. Especially in organizational cultures that emphasize authenticity or 'bringing your whole self to work,' some leaders overcorrect. While empathy is a critical leadership skill, blurring boundaries by oversharing personal stress, doubt, or emotion can erode credibility and create discomfort.
Consider a founder Tutti worked with, who regularly opened team offsites by sharing personal struggles, hoping to foster connection. Instead, team members began questioning her steadiness and judgment. She needed to better balance her authenticity with the intention behind why she was sharing, and pick what and when to share and not to share.
5. The Detailed Over-Explainer
This leader overloads meetings with unnecessary complexity. They equate thoroughness with clarity, offering too much context or diving into technical details. In executive or board settings, this can lose the audience, triggering side conversations about minor points and becoming a distraction that derails meeting focus.
One functional leader we worked with lost credibility in cross-functional meetings by diving into minutiae, explaining every nuance before arriving at a recommendation. We suggested he shift his style to lead with a clear synthesis of the issue and offer detail only when asked. He practiced providing his headline recommendation first, followed by the top three or four concise reasons why. As a result, his colleagues were more engaged and clear about his point of view, and the conversation stayed on track. And, of course, he still had the details in his back pocket if questions came up. Colleagues reported that his communication style became sharper and more impactful.
How to Hone the Skill of Strategic Editing
Strategic editing is the skill of adjusting your communication to match your role. It's not about withholding information; it's about choosing what's most essential to say, how to say it, and when it'd be more effective to say nothing at all. Here's how:
1. Recognize that everything you say (or don't say) carries weight.
Executive communication is always amplified. A passing comment can redirect strategy. A sigh in a meeting can spark anxiety. That's why being intentional about what you communicate and how you deliver it is critical for creating the impact you intend.
Practice being explicit about what you're communicating and what you do and don't know:
'I'm just thinking out loud right now…'
'I have feedback from the board that I want to share and discuss. We're not going to make a decision today; I want to explore the issue with you first.'
'I've had some ideas on ways to adjust our strategy that I'd like to discuss with you. To be clear, I'm not saying this is a new direction. Today I just want us to consider where we are, the shifting environment, and what might make sense going forward.'
'We had a tough quarter, and we may need to shift our go-to-market strategy. I don't know if that's true yet, but I want to discuss it.'
2. Clarify your audience and outcome.
What do you want your audience to think, feel, and do after hearing you? Make it a practice to ask yourself three simple questions before communicating widely:
Who is my audience?
What do they care about right now?
What do I want them to be thinking/feeling/doing as result of my communication?
This may sound obvious, but in our experience, far too many senior leaders forget to take this critical step and ultimately impact people in a way they didn't intend. Strategic editing starts with clarity of intent.
Jordan worked with a tech CEO who was perceived as insensitive. His team was under a lot of pressure and driving hard in a competitive market. The team felt that he always wanted more without acknowledging their hard work, struggles, and accomplishments along the way. This led to venting between team members outside of team meetings.
After receiving feedback, the CEO started to make a point of asking himself how his team was feeling before he stepped into a meeting to share his perspective with them. He got better at acknowledging the team's concerns, needs, and successes—not just challenging them. As a result, the team felt like he understood the difficulties they were facing, cared about their well-being, and genuinely wanted to help them to be successful. This created a more motivating environment for all concerned.
3. Prepare or pause.
A lot of executive communication happens in real-time exchanges when you don't have time to prepare. Good strategic editing also means developing strong impulse control and recognizing, in the moment, when an idea surfaces that's half-formed or emotionally charged. In this situation, it's critical to pause. Write the idea or thought down. Give yourself a few minutes to consider if sharing it will distract from the core topic and cause unhelpful ripples, or whether it would be better to discuss it later when you've had time to think through the best approach.
We saw one first-time CEO at a large, facilitated gathering of senior leaders take the whole meeting off track. The CEO wasn't happy with the focus of the conversation and in the middle of the meeting insisted on a complete change of direction. The result? Awkward confusion, a lot of startled side conversations, and a poor meeting result.
We've also seen C-level leaders in startups, where the environment is more casual, have had a hard time keeping significant structural changes such as reductions in force or reorgs to themselves, resulting in a lot of internal angst and distraction.
Sometimes the most strategic move is to say nothing. This can be challenging for extraverted leaders used to thinking out loud, or highly driven leaders who like to move fast. But timing matters. What you share now versus next week or next month can significantly affect how a message is received. Embrace the pause. The rule of thumb is that if you're at all unsure of whether or not you should say something in real time, don't.
4. Frame your message strategically.
How you say something shapes how others interpret it. Behavioral economics research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman shows that people respond very differently to the same information depending on how it's framed. For example, presenting a medical treatment as having a 90% survival rate feels very different from describing it as having a 10% mortality rate, even though the data is the same.
For leaders, framing is especially important when communicating ambiguous, messy, or evolving information. It helps create structure and signals confidence. One startup CEO Tutti worked with received a request from a major customer for more direct access to the core product. While this move could have created doubt among her employees, the CEO framed it instead as an experiment to test a new service model in the spirit of customer learning. This message preserved confidence in the company's direction while creating space to explore.
5. Pressure-test your communication.
Especially now with so much change, uncertainty, and ambiguity, senior leaders need safe spaces to process their thoughts confidentially. Whether with a coach, mentor, or trusted advisor, find someone who can help you think through your evolving ideas and messages before you share them more broadly. You'll especially want to pressure-test and refine your message before a high-stakes setting such as an all-hands meeting, a contentious performance review, or a major client pitch.
Ask a trusted advisor:
How does this message land with you?
What do you take away from it?
What needs to be changed, clarified, or simplified?
How can I make it more inspiring and impactful?
Pressure-testing helps you distill your message, reduce noise, and walk into the room with clarity and confidence.
. . .
At the executive level, your words carry more weight and come with greater responsibility. Strategic editing is about being more deliberate, not less transparent. The most effective leaders don't just share what they know or think; they share what their teams need to hear in order to act with clarity, confidence, and focus.