Why Your Next Internal Campaign Fails Before Launch

I want to save you some time.

Before you build your next internal campaign — before you write the narrative, map the cascade, design the toolkit — there’s a question worth asking that most communicators skip: Do you actually know which leaders will carry this, and which ones will let it die?

New research says most of them will let it die. Not on purpose or out of resistance. They’ll just go quiet when it matters most — and your beautifully crafted campaign will stall somewhere between the executive floor and the people it was built for.

Last year, I partnered with The Harris Poll to survey more than 2,200 employed Americans about their leaders. The finding that reshaped how I think about communication planning wasn’t about messaging or channels. It was about the leaders in the middle.

Only 30% of leaders were rated “exceptional” by their teams. Sixteen percent were “outdated” — still running command-and-control in an era that demands something different. But the biggest group, 54%, landed in a category that should concern every communicator in the profession: “good.”

They’re good, competent and dependable. They hit their numbers and show up prepared. Nobody complains about them. And that’s exactly what makes them invisible as a risk — because in most organizations, “no complaints” is the same as “no problem.”

But they are a problem. A big one.

Why ‘Good’ Breaks Your Campaign

We developed a formula from the research that I now use as a planning tool before every major engagement:

Uncertainty × Leadership Quality = Employee Experience

Leadership doesn’t just add to the employee experience — it multiplies it. It amplifies or diminishes the impact of everything else, including your communications. When uncertainty is high and leadership is exceptional, people experience confidence, safety and trust. Pair that same uncertainty with outdated leadership, and you get disengagement and paralysis.

But here’s the one that matters for us: When uncertainty is high, and leadership is merely good, you get anxiety, complacency and drift. The outcomes aren’t dramatic enough to trigger alarm — they’re just slow enough to feel normal until the damage is done.

Here’s what I keep seeing, across engagement after engagement. The C-suite gets aligned. The communication strategy is strong. The narrative makes sense. And then in the middle of the organization, it all stalls. The leaders closest to the frontline — the ones people actually look to for meaning — receive the talking points, understand the rationale, and then just... forward the email and move on. They don’t translate, add context, or make it personal. 

The communication infrastructure works perfectly. The message reaches every leader. And the people who need to hear it most never really get it because nobody made it mean anything for them.

That’s the 54% in action, and that’s something a cascade toolkit isn’t going to fix.

The Gap You’re Not Planning For

When we dug into what separates exceptional leaders from good ones, the answer wasn’t strategy or business acumen. It was communication behavior — but not the kind we typically plan for.

Nine of the top 10 attributes that differentiate exceptional from good leaders are Heart attributes: gratitude, listening, empathy, trust, accountability and inclusion. Only one — transparency — falls on the Head side. And exceptional leaders outperform good ones by more than 2x on every single dimension.

The gap shows up in how employees feel. Under good leadership, 35% feel valued and appreciated — recognition of contribution, “I see what you do.” But only 16% feel that what’s important to them as a person is valued — relational depth, “I see who you are.” That 19-point spread tells the whole story. Good leaders acknowledge the work. They don’t connect with the human doing it.

Only 19% of employees feel heard. Only 14% feel they’re reaching their full potential. Often, this leads to less discretionary effort because their bosses are good. Just good.

When you launch your next campaign into that environment, you’re pushing content through leaders who can deliver information but can’t create meaning. That’s the gap no message can close.

How to Use This Before You Build

So what would it look like to plan differently?

Before designing the next campaign, what if we mapped our leaders against this research? Not formally — we probably already have a sense of where they fall. Which leaders create energy and meaning when they communicate change? Those are our 30%. Which ones forward the deck and hope for the best? Those are our 54%.

That changes the plan. Where leaders are strong, content will land. Where they’re not, content alone won’t be enough — and adding more of it won’t help either.

For the 54%, the intervention isn’t a better toolkit. It’s equipping them with the specific behaviors exceptional leaders use: 

• Expressing gratitude that’s personal and specific rather than generic. 
• Listening to understand rather than to respond. 
• Showing up to provide context even when they don’t have the full picture. 
• And doing the harder work of connecting the strategy to what each person on their team actually cares about — not just what the organization needs from them.

At its best, our role as communicators has never been just about what to say and how to say it. It’s about what to do and how to do it. That means shaping leader behavior, not just leader talking points. It means treating leadership communication capability as a prerequisite for campaign success, not an afterthought. And it means reframing that capability investment as what it actually is: risk mitigation — because when it’s called “development” or “growth,” it becomes discretionary and gets cut exactly when it matters most.

The 54% aren’t going to close this gap on their own. They don’t see it. Their organizations don’t see it. But we do — because we live in the space between what’s said from the stage and what’s experienced in the hallway. That makes this our problem to solve. And, our opportunity to lead.

This research, and what it reveals about the gap between good and exceptional leadership, is the foundation of my new book, “The Heart Work of Modern Leadership: 6 Differentiators of Exceptional Leaders.” Find the full study there.