The Message Is What They Repeat, Not What You Said

When private equity buys a company, it is buying a strategy to make it more valuable, and that strategy is inert until the people inside act on it. The CEO's job is getting them to, which comes down to three questions: did I explain it, did it reach the right people, and do they care enough to act?

You stood before the company and laid out the strategy. You talked about expanding the multiple, driving operational excellence, capturing the synergies and hitting the targets that make the whole thesis work. You were clear and precise, and you assumed that because you said it clearly, you had been understood.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about a message delivered in the language of the deal:

You do not get to decide what it means; the people hearing it do. And under pressure, with no translation in front of them, they will reach for the meaning that scares them most.

Your people will be cynical, and they are right to be. In private equity, sometimes the hard version is the true one. Sometimes there are cuts coming, and your employees are right to brace for them. This is not an argument that the fear is irrational, or that your job is to talk people out of it. It is an argument about who writes the story while you are still choosing your words.

Say "synergies" and "operational excellence," and you have not softened anything. You have handed the pen to the most anxious person in the room and let them write it for everyone.

You already know you should not talk to your workforce in investor language; every leader does. So why does it keep happening?

Because you cannot see your own jargon. Once you have lived inside the deal, the vocabulary stops sounding like vocabulary and starts sounding like plain English. You genuinely cannot tell where the line is anymore, and you reliably overrate yourself here.

Even Axios HQ, which sells the software meant to fix this, found that 80% of leaders thought their message was getting through while only half of their people agreed. The problem is not only that you are unclear; it is that you are the last person in the building who can see it.

You can't see your own jargon. You're the last person in the building who can tell you're unclear.

And the one signal that could tell you, a person raising a hand to say "I don't follow," is the exact thing jargon kills.

In a 2025 experiment with more than 1,800 people, researchers found that dense, insider language not only reduces comprehension but also diminishes people's self-confidence and makes them less likely to ask for help when they need it most.

That bears repeating. The harder your language is to decode, the quieter your people go, and the quiet feels to you like agreement. It is not agreement; it is withdrawal, and the moment the rumor mill takes the pen.

The silence you read as agreement is withdrawal. Jargon teaches people to stop asking, so the misread hardens.

The cost of getting this wrong is not subtle.

PwC, in a 2024 survey of 56,600 workers, found that 44% do not understand the purpose of the changes happening around them. Narrow the question to whether the change is explained in personal terms, and it gets worse: Gallup, surveying nearly 16,000 workers in 2023, found that fewer than one in five employees strongly agree their leaders help them see how today's changes will affect them.

That gap is most of the game: not whether you communicated, but whether you translated it into what it means for the person on the other end.

So the work is not louder, it is plainer, and plain is not soft. Taking the strategy out of deal language and putting it in operator language is how you take the pen back:

• What are we doing?

• Why does it matter?

• What does it change for the person reading it on a Monday morning?

The fix isn't louder, it's plainer. Translation is how you take the pen back.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

"We are driving operational excellence and capturing synergies" becomes "we are going to fix the handful of things that slow your team down, and we are merging two groups that have been doing the same work, so we stop tripping over each other." Same strategy, one version a person can act on Monday morning.

And plainer is only half of it. A clear sentence at the top is not the same as a clear company. That same strategy still has to reach the regional manager, the shift lead, and the new hire, and land in a language each of them can act on where they sit. That is the part you cannot do alone from a stage. One message has to travel the whole company and translate into every role, so the place runs on one sheet of music, each part playing its own line.

If there is hard news, say it plainly and say it first, before a budgeting term says it for you. If there is not, say that plainly too. Either way, you are the one deciding what the message means, instead of leaving it to whoever is most afraid.

None of this is dumbing it down. A sophisticated strategy and plain words are not in tension; translation is not a tax on rigor, it is the rigor finally reaching the people who have to act on it.

You can test whether it landed without guessing. Before your next all-hands, ask three people on the front line to say the strategy back to you in their own words. If they reach for deal language, you have your answer.

The clearest strategy and the most precise deck are still not the message. The message is whatever your people repeat to each other in the hallway after you leave the room. If you spoke to them in the language of the deal, you do not know what that message is right now, and you have left yourself no way to find out.

Getting that message to reach everyone and mean the right thing in every role is not a task you can check off. It is the daily work of turning one strategy into one voice with a thousand parts, and it is the work of leading the change you were hired to lead.