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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Timing, focus, and setting clear expectations are the keys to good communication.
When you think about communication, you might think about status updates, replying to too many emails, the feedback that isn’t landing where and when it’s supposed to, or that next meeting where you need to share bad news.
When we think about communication, we think about relay races. We think about the baton that’s handed off from one runner to the next.
Timing is key
The precision, timing, and focus needed to hand it from one runner to the next perfectly represents how communication should work. When timing and execution are just right, the baton flows from one runner’s hand to the next without a hitch.
When it’s dropped, precious time and energy can get lost. In a race that’s lasting mere minutes, one false handoff can mean winning or losing the race. In a business setting, dropping a baton once is usually not that big of a deal. But when you think about all the places and times where batons get dropped – within teams, across teams, from one individual to the next – the time and energy wasted on picking it up grows quickly.
Turns out, just like communication, batons can be dropped all over the place. Let’s look at a few of those patterns.
It’s unclear why things are happening
Assuming decisions are getting made and some direction is clear, it’s frustrating for an entire organization if it’s not clear why these things are happening. Decisions without context are closer to mandates or orders. They can appear arbitrary, hard to buy into.
It’s easy to make a decision and tell people that this is it. It takes work to explain why something is happening. Foregoing that work, however, may seem like saving time for one person (usually the boss) but instead wastes a lot of potential energy for an entire group of people.
Important feedback isn’t flowing upwards
As the boss, it can be equally frustrating when you’re not getting information about how work is progressing or when it’s blocked, when committed dates aren’t going to be met, or when something’s happened. Leaders don’t like surprises, being constantly updated is better than information arriving too late.
Decisions aren’t getting made
Decisions are what pushes an organization forward. When they’re not made, things come to a standstill. That is equally true for leadership lacking decisiveness as it is for teams not having the ability, tools, or context to make decisions on their own.
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Setting expectations
This is but a sample set of scenarios where batons get dropped regularly, across organizations of all stages and sizes. What they have in common is that they lead to frustration for everyone involved. They waste a lot of kinetic energy that could instead be put to much more productive use. In the end, they all hamper the business.
What these scenarios all have in common is that information didn’t end up where it was expected or where it was needed. Which then usually leads to actions not being taken, good decisions not being made, or necessary changes not being implemented.
When you dig further into how a baton got dropped in the first place, you typically land on mismatched or unspoken expectations. Without a protocol for handing off pieces of information from one part of the organization to the next, all we’re left with is a set of assumptions and biases that keep us from sharing information with the people who need it most.
It’s not easy talking about expectations. They can feel like we’re imposing our own assumptions on someone else. But it doesn’t need to be a one-sided discussion. The goal is to have a discussion about how these individual expectations can be turned into shared understanding and commitment.
You can talk to your manager about your feedback cycle when you’re not getting critical feedback until it’s too late. You can talk to your reports to understand what’s keeping them from sharing bad news with you. You can reflect on how you’ve responded to such feedback in the past that may have influenced their behaviors. You can think about how often you communicate the organization’s direction so that people can make better decisions about where to focus their efforts. Or reflect on whether you might be switching direction too often, confusing and demotivating your team and rendering past work meaningless.
Berlin • November 3 & 4, 2025
Emma Bostian, Bruce Wang and James Stanier confirmed 🙌
Work on your handoffs
Improving baton handoffs over time requires a cycle of reflection, learning, and improvement. It requires putting aside time in your retrospectives or team meetings to continuously ask the question: Where did we drop a baton in the past couple of weeks? What needs to happen to improve our handoffs from here on out?
A baton might still get dropped here and there. But ideally you move closer and closer to a place where handoffs are fluent and effortless. When that happens, everyone can focus more on the work, rather than spending energy being frustrated with each other about information they didn’t get.
This is a condensed version of a chapter of Mathias’ and Sara’s recently published book The Intentional Organization.
