Communication Quality Checklist

Your client is a division head who needs to communicate a reorganization that will eliminate one team layer and consolidate two functions. The announcement will reach 80 people, many of whom will immediately fear for their positions. The client has drafted a message but cannot tell if it is clear enough to reduce anxiety or vague enough to protect information they cannot yet share.

Frame the checklist as a tension detector, not a polish tool. 'Some Cs will be in conflict here - being Correct means you cannot say things you don't yet know, which works against being Complete. Naming those tensions explicitly is more useful than pretending they don't exist.' Run each of the seven dimensions against the draft and identify which ones the client deliberately compromised and whether that was the right call.

Watch whether your client's draft scores high on Correct (factually accurate) but low on Complete (all necessary information present). That gap is the most common pattern in reorganization communications - leaders share what is decided without acknowledging what is not yet decided, and employees fill the gaps with anxiety. Also watch for Courteous being overworked at the expense of Concrete - messages that try too hard to soften the news often become evasive.

Start with whichever C the client rated lowest on their draft. Ask them to read the section of the draft that generated that low score. Then ask: 'What would you need to change to move that rating from 2 to 4?' If raising one C would lower another, that is the core communication design problem. The question that opens this up: 'What do you most need your team to walk away knowing - and what do you most need them to not misunderstand?'

Your client's direct reports have flagged - directly, in pulse surveys, and through their own manager - that emails from this executive are often confusing, seem to carry implications that were not intended, or require follow-up calls to understand. The client is frustrated because they feel their writing is efficient and straightforward. There is a consistent perception gap around their written communication.

Frame this as running their most recent miscommunication through the seven filters to find where it actually broke down. 'Rather than working in the abstract, let's look at a real example that generated confusion and apply the checklist to it.' The client should bring a specific recent email or message that landed differently than intended. Working from a live example is significantly more useful than hypothetical calibration.

The C that breaks down most often for executives who believe their communication is clear is Coherent - the logical flow and connection between ideas. Executives with high internal processing speed often skip transitional reasoning and jump to conclusions that feel obvious to them but require explanation for others. Watch whether the client resists the Coherent check on the grounds that their reasoning 'should be obvious.'

Read the specific communication aloud together. After each section, ask your client: 'What did you mean here - and what could someone reading it quickly have understood instead?' The gap between those two answers is where each C is breaking down. The most useful question at the end: 'If you had to add one sentence to this message to prevent the misunderstanding that actually occurred, where would it go?'

Your client is a senior manager presenting to the C-suite for the first time. They are technically credible and well-prepared on the content. Their concern is register - whether the communication will land at the right level of abstraction and whether they are pitching clarity and concision at the right calibration for an executive audience. They have not received feedback on this yet because they have not done it before.

Frame the checklist as a pre-flight tool for audience calibration. 'Executive audiences have a different tolerance for the ratio of detail to conclusion. The checklist helps you check whether what you have built is calibrated for your actual audience or for the level of the organization you're used to presenting to.' The Concise and Concrete Cs are the most relevant for this calibration - run those first.

Watch whether your client's draft scores high on Correct and Complete but low on Concise. Individual contributors moving toward executive communication almost always over-document their reasoning as proof of rigor. For executive audiences, that documentation works against them - it signals a lower altitude perspective. If every slide has a full rationale, the executive is asked to do analytical work the presenter should have done already.

Start with the Concise dimension. Ask your client to identify three slides or sections they could cut without losing the core argument. Resistance to cutting is diagnostic - if they cannot identify cuts, the presentation is built around the presenter's confidence rather than the audience's needs. Then check Courteous last. 'Does this presentation treat the audience as intelligent people who can handle directness, or does it over-hedge?'