When I lived in Moscow from 1986 to 1989, I watched glasnost unfold firsthand. One thing from that period has stayed with me.
I never met a Soviet who seemed to grasp exactly what Mikhail Gorbachev meant by glasnost.
Everyone knew the word. They repeated it constantly and translated it loosely as “openness.” But what were people supposed to do differently? What could a journalist now publish? What could an employee say to a superior? Which institutions were expected to reveal information, and what would happen when they did?
The word was familiar. The behavior it called for was not.
Only recently, through conversations with psychologists, have I begun to understand why the confusion fascinated me. The brain is not a dictionary. When we hear an abstract word, we do not retrieve a single, universally shared definition. We construct meaning from experience, memory, assumptions and familiar situations.
That is not merely a linguistic curiosity. For CEOs, it is a serious leadership problem. For CHROs, it is an organizational problem: How do you help people develop enough shared understanding to act together?
Getting Heard Is Only the Beginning
Leaders routinely announce that their organizations must embrace transformation, strengthen accountability, encourage innovation, improve feedback or practice better delegation. The words sound substantial. They appear in strategic plans, town halls, leadership principles and annual reports.
Yet they often convey far less than leaders imagine. Getting employees to listen is only the first challenge. The next is ensuring that the words they hear mean roughly the same thing to them as they do to the leader.
Tell 10 executives to “hold people accountable,” and you may elicit 10 different ideas. One hears “set clearer expectations.” Another hears “monitor performance more closely.” A third hears “remove poor performers.” Someone else hears “give people greater ownership and stop interfering.”
Delegation is equally slippery. It can mean assigning a task while retaining every important decision, granting authority while requiring frequent updates or transferring complete ownership of an outcome. A manager may believe she has delegated while her employee feels micromanaged—or abandoned.
When leaders use familiar language without developing a common understanding, they create the illusion of alignment. Everyone can repeat the words, so everyone appears to agree. Beneath that verbal agreement, people may be acting on fundamentally different assumptions.
Definitions Do Not Create Understanding
The obvious response is to write clearer definitions. That may help, but it will not solve the problem.
Consider the statement, “Accountability means taking ownership of results.” It sounds clear until two people try to apply it. Does ownership mean making the decision independently? Keeping the manager informed? Asking for help before a problem develops? Accepting the consequences afterward? What if another department contributed to the failure, or the original goal was unrealistic?
Adding sentences to the definition does not eliminate ambiguity. Each sentence introduces more words that people interpret through their own experiences. A competency model or employee handbook can provide a reference point, but it cannot produce a meeting of minds.
That happens through casual, two-way conversation. One person explains what accountability looks like to them. Another describes a situation in which that approach would feel like micromanagement. A third brings up a recent decision and asks who should have owned it. As people compare examples, question assumptions and adjust their language, they begin to understand what others mean.
The goal is not a perfect definition. It is compatible expectations—enough shared understanding that people can anticipate how an idea will apply in a real situation.
What Leadership Reviews Are Really For
A periodic leadership review provides a regular forum for these conversations at the top of the organization. The name can make the practice sound more formal than it should be. This is not a vocabulary exercise in which executives work through prescribed questions and approve official definitions. It is a recurring, constructive conversation about how the organization is being led.
Leaders discuss what is happening, how employees are responding, where expectations are unclear and what they are learning. The meanings of accountability, delegation, trust and feedback surface naturally through the exchange.
A CEO might observe that a division leader escalates too many decisions. Someone else may note that the same leader was previously criticized for acting without approval. That opens a useful discussion. What authority was actually transferred? When is consultation expected? When does consultation become permission-seeking? How should a senior leader respond when someone makes a reasonable decision that does not work?
The questions are openings, not a checklist. Their value lies in the give-and-take that follows. Through that exchange, the team develops an understanding of delegation that no dictionary-style definition could produce.
Why the Emotional Tone Matters
A leadership review should not feel like a budget review. Budget reviews often carry pressure, judgment and the possibility of blame. Participants arrive prepared to defend their numbers. They choose their words carefully, conceal uncertainty and avoid exposing disagreements that could make them vulnerable.
Those conditions are poorly suited to understanding. Under stress, people become guarded. They listen for danger, prepare rebuttals and protect their position. Familiar words can become defensive weapons: “I was being accountable.” “I delegated it.” “I gave feedback.” The discussion turns into an argument over labels rather than an exploration of meaning.
A good leadership review has a different emotional tone. It is low-key, curious and positive. Questions are invitations rather than tests. Disagreement is useful information, not evidence of failure. That atmosphere allows someone to say, “I thought you meant something different,” without embarrassment or fear. Genuine alignment often begins with that modest admission.
Positivity is not softness. Leaders can still discuss poor judgment, missed commitments, weak performance and conflict. The difference is that the conversation is organized around understanding and improvement rather than accusation.
From the Executive Team to Every Employee
Leadership reviews matter at the top because senior leaders give words much of their organizational meaning. Employees watch what executives reward, question, tolerate and criticize. If executives hold incompatible views of accountability or innovation, those differences spread throughout the organization.
But the same process should happen at every level. A frontline manager does not need a formal review. A positive five-minute weekly check-in can serve the same purpose—and may be where the most useful understanding develops.
Suppose a manager asks an employee to take greater ownership of a project. During a weekly check-in, the employee explains that she delayed a decision while waiting for approval. Instead of reprimanding her, the manager explores what ownership means in this situation.
“I expected you to make that decision.”
“I thought you wanted to approve changes that affected the schedule.”
“I do want to know about them, but knowing is not the same as approving.”
That brief exchange clarifies ownership more effectively than several paragraphs in an employee handbook. It connects the word to a real decision, reveals the assumptions on both sides and aligns expectations for the future.
Over time, many small conversations build a practical shared language. Managers and employees learn what “keep me informed” means, when “ask for help” applies, how direct feedback should be, what level of risk is acceptable and which decisions truly belong to the employee.
The CHRO Creates the Conditions
The CHRO’s role is not to write an ever more elaborate corporate dictionary. It is to create the conditions in which understanding can develop.
At the executive level, that means putting leadership effectiveness on the regular agenda, keeping the conversation separate from budget and performance reviews and using recent situations to surface different assumptions. Throughout the organization, it means helping managers turn weekly check-ins into genuine conversations rather than status reports. It also means ensuring that leaders do not punish the candor they claim to invite.
Written principles, strategy documents and competency models still have a place. They provide useful reference points. But leaders should not mistake the document for understanding. Words become meaningful as people apply them to situations, compare interpretations, tell stories, resolve disagreements and revise their expectations of one another.
The lesson I took away from Moscow is that a word can become universally recognized while remaining profoundly uncertain. Organizations reproduce that problem whenever leaders mistake repetition for shared understanding.
The remedy is not a better definition. It is a continuing series of constructive conversations: low-key leadership reviews at the top and positive weekly check-ins throughout the organization.
That is how familiar words acquire shared meaning—not when everyone can recite the definition, but when leaders and employees understand one another well enough and feel safe enough to act.
