Logistics at a Crossroads 🎙️ Episode 46: Plain Language Is a Leadership Skill

Before anyone experiences a process, a platform, or a metric, they experience language.

And in logistics, language often carries more weight than we admit.

We’ve normalized complexity as professionalism.
We’ve mistaken jargon for expertise.
We’ve treated confusion as a personal failure instead of a leadership signal.

Plain language isn’t about simplifying the work.
It’s about removing unnecessary friction around the work.

When instructions are vague, people hesitate.
When expectations are implied, people guess.
When questions feel unsafe, silence fills the gaps.

And silence is expensive.

Clear language does three critical things:

  1. It reduces rework

  2. It shortens recovery time

  3. It makes accountability possible

Unclear language does the opposite. It shifts risk downward. It forces people to interpret instead of execute. And when something goes wrong, it leaves room to say, “You should’ve known.”

That phrase—you should’ve known—is rarely about performance. It’s about communication that failed upstream.

Leadership isn’t proven by how polished something sounds.
It’s proven by whether people understand what’s being asked of them—especially under pressure.

Plain language is leadership because clarity is care.
And confusion, no matter how professionally packaged, is still confusion.

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