Only 4% of managers can pass your message down
Workshop's 2026 Internal Comms Trends Report has a number we need to spend more time with. More than half of communicators (56%) say manager communication is their top focus this year. Only 4% believe managers are actually effective at cascading messages.
Read that again. The thing most of us are building our 2026 strategy around is the thing almost none of us trust to work.
A 52-point gap is hard to argue with, and it matches what most practitioners already see on the ground.
Image generated with AI, prompted and directed by the author.
The usual fix treats the symptom
The standard response is to build a better cascade. Ragan published a full guide on it in January: decide whether a message even needs a cascade, segment your audiences, prep leaders before you go broad, hand managers an FAQ so they can hold a real conversation, then listen for fatigue and course-correct. All of it is sound advice. None of it is wrong.
But it skips the question the person on the receiving end is actually living with. Why does whether I hear something that affects my job depend on whether my manager remembered to tell me, understood it well enough to repeat it, and didn't quietly soften the parts that were hard?
A cascade is a relay race where you don't get to choose the runners. You hand off the baton and hope. When three-quarters of employees still miss a message that went through the "proper" channel, that's not a fluke. That's the design doing exactly what relay designs do.
This isn't a manager problem
It's tempting to read the 4% as managers falling short. They're not.
We keep loading more onto managers, then act surprised when the newest priority falls off the stack. They're running one-on-ones, covering staffing gaps, absorbing their own bad news from above, and somewhere in there they're supposed to translate your change-management message with enough clarity that nobody's confused. Most got no training for that part and no time carved out to do it.
So the message arrives late, or watered down, or not at all. The employee fills the gap with a hallway conversation, a Slack rumor, or a guess. And the trust you were counting on, the trust that made managers the channel in the first place, takes the hit instead of you.
What to do with it
Stop treating "we cascaded it" as proof that "they got it." Those are two different claims, and only one of them is measurable.
Separate the messages that genuinely need a manager's context from the ones that just need to reach people. A new system that changes how someone does their job needs a manager to explain what it means for the team. A company-wide policy change, a benefits deadline, a safety update: that information should not ride on whether a relay runner is having a good week. Reach people directly, then let managers add context on top. Don't make them the gate.
And give managers less, not more. If everything is a cascade, nothing is. The teams getting this right are cutting the volume so the messages that actually matter have room to land.
The 4% isn't telling you your managers are bad at their jobs. It's telling you that you built a system that fails quietly, and then named the people standing closest to the failure. Worth fixing before you make it next year's top focus too.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.