Bridging the Communication Gap: Leanne Bridges on Why ‘Tighter Proposals’ Miss the Mark

In a recent LinkedIn post, Leanne Bridges delves into a common workplace communication breakdown, illustrating how well-intentioned feedback can lead to misinterpretation and stalled progress. Bridges highlights a specific scenario involving a consultancy’s managing director (MD) who requested that proposals be “tighter,” only to find that the team’s execution fell short of expectations.

The Perils of Vague Instructions

The core of Bridges’s analysis centers on the ambiguity of the term “tighter” in a professional context. The MD’s request, seemingly straightforward, was interpreted by the delivery manager and the team in a way that did not align with the MD’s underlying intent. Bridges points out that the MD was concerned with superficial errors like stray lines from previous documents or minor grammatical mistakes – details that detract from the perceived precision of a technical consultancy.

As Leanne Bridges notes:

“But you’re selling technical work on being precise, and that document is the first thing a client sees of how you work.”

This highlights the critical importance of proposals as a tangible representation of a company’s attention to detail and professionalism. Bridges explains that the delivery manager initially seemed to grasp the request, taking it to the team who agreed to the changes. However, weeks later, the proposals continued to be issued with the same “small errors” and a single, insufficient paragraph added for “tightening.”

Differing Interpretations of ‘Better’

Bridges argues that the disconnect stemmed not from a lack of listening, but from fundamentally different understandings of the feedback. The team, believing their proposals were already strong and detailed, interpreted “tighten them up” as a directive to simply “make them a bit better.” In their view, this meant adding more detail, which is often perceived as a positive attribute in technical proposals.

Leanne Bridges elaborates on this perceptual gap:

“To the team, that was it done. He put it down to them not listening properly. What had actually happened is the team thought the proposals were fine. Detailed enough, plenty in them, better than most of what they’d seen.”

This illustrates a crucial point: when feedback is not specific and actionable, employees will often default to their own understanding of what constitutes improvement, especially if they believe their current work is already of high quality. The team’s agreement to “tighten” the proposals was genuine, but their subsequent actions reflected their own definition of the term, leading them to “do their own version of it.”

Root Causes: Lack of Specificity and Perceived Value

According to Leanne Bridges, the underlying issue is a failure to communicate the *why* behind the request. The MD’s focus on precision and the client’s perception of the proposal was not effectively conveyed. Without understanding the rationale – that these minor errors undermined the core message of technical accuracy – the team saw no compelling reason to deviate from their established process or their definition of “better.”

Bridges concludes:

“So when what comes back looks like what they were doing anyway, they weren’t ignoring you. They didn’t think you had a point.”

The consultancy leader’s experience, as shared by Bridges, serves as a potent reminder for leaders to be exceptionally clear and specific when providing feedback, especially concerning quality and detail. Simply asking for something to be “tighter” can lead to wasted effort and continued misalignment if the underlying expectations and rationale are not explicitly communicated and understood by the team.