In this video, former physician‑turned‑entrepreneur Luke Murray addresses a common piece of employee feedback – “we need better communication.” He explains how he initially interpreted this as a personal failure, feeling guilty for not being fully transparent. Through a reframing, he realizes that more information isn’t always better; effective communication requires discernment about what, when, and to whom information should flow. He illustrates the point with an ICU shift‑handoff analogy, showing how senior doctors share only the critical few issues while frontline staff need full detail. Luke recounts a real‑world scenario where his company was struggling to make payroll and he chose not to disclose the deliberation to the whole team, relieving his guilt by recognizing that over‑sharing can distract employees from their core work. He argues that full transparency and full trust cannot coexist perfectly – giving employees every detail burdens them and pulls focus away from their responsibilities. The video concludes with practical advice: leaders should examine whether requests for “better communication” actually mean more words or smarter, level‑appropriate information, and avoid dumping unnecessary data under the guise of transparency.
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If you run a company and your team keeps telling you that communication needs to be better, and part of you feels guilty about it, like you're being this shady boss hiding things from people that trust you, well, this video is for you. I'm going to tell you why we need better communication is the one piece of feedback I've gotten at every company I've ever been a part of, and honestly, companies I wasn't a part of, and why I used to take it as proof that I was failing as a leader, And now the reframe that let me stop feeling guilty about not telling my team everything. If you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Murray. I'm a former physician. I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. During that time, I've done about $100 million in revenue. My current portfolio does about $3 million a year, and I make these videos because I'd like to have ambition without the bullshit, and I'm guessing you would too. So in every business I've ever been in, when I sit down with the frontline staff and ask, Hey, what could we do better around here? The answer I always get is communication, communication, communication, communication. We need better communication. And of course, this feedback sucks because it's not very specific, but I kind of just interpret it as, well, probably just means more. Um, so I had to interpret this as like, am I just uniquely terrible at communicating? And then I found out probably not the case. Not that I'm perfect. Um, I think it's that every employee on earth, just, that's what they say. They say, I don't understand what's going on. And that makes sense. If you're part of an organization that's got more than 5 people in it, you probably don't know everything that's going on. And it's like intuitive that would be like, oh, I'd like to know what's going on. But again, it's not very specific. So when my team asked for more communication, I heard, hey Luke, you failing, you're not being honest with us. And finally, I was in this all-hands meeting about 6 months ago, and the employees were saying, hey, I'd like to know more. And I realized they didn't know this, but like, we'd lost a bunch of money. Payroll was— it like, I was struggling to make payroll. And I was like, yeah, they— we were considering maybe doing something or maybe not. I was like, I shouldn't tell them about the deliberation. So I just stood up during this meeting. I was like, Hey guys, let me be clear about something. I'm not going to tell you everything, and I don't want you to tell me everything. So if what you mean by we need better communication is like, don't hide anything from each other, I just disagree, and that's not what's gonna happen here. And I realized like, huh, it was like a weight lifted off my shoulders. There's discernment that you need, discernment that you need about what's actually worth bringing in certain people about. It would be a disservice to the company if every person at every level bubbled up every problem to me, including ones that they'd like already fixed. Just wanted to let you know. And I don't want all that in my head. I want like the 2 or 3 big problems that I'm actually working on. And honestly, like, I don't want you carrying the fact that we're struggling to make payroll like in your head. I want you to focus on your job. So I know that doesn't make me sound probably like a nice guy, or it didn't at the moment, but it was super clarifying for me. And I've watched the same thing happen in medicine. In the intensive care unit, there's like a dozen patients that a collection of doctor, you know, med students, residents, and doctor— a doctor would be taking care of. We'd take care of them for 12 hours, and then the next shift would come on and we'd have to say, hey, how are these patients doing? And the med student would only be maybe covering like 2 patients, and the they'd go into a ton of detail about every lab value, and they— but they would sit down and tell that to a med student. And then the resident who had, you know, 5 or 6 patients would talk to the resident about more patients and necessarily in less detail. And then of course the attending or the head doctor would say, hey, here's the dozen patients we have, and here's like the 1 or 2 problems you got to look out for. And that was appropriate. The job for the head doctor was not to know every detail. My job as the med student was to know everything I possibly could about what was going on on the front line. And so that's not bad communication, that's just the right communication for where you're standing, and I just hadn't made that connection. The guy at the top should not know all the details, and the people on the front lines need to know every last one. More information flowing up to me isn't actually better, and if it's the wrong information, it could be worse for the person on the front line and for me. So when the feedback comes back as like, we want better communication, the simplest interpretation is to say more stuff, and that is almost never the answer. Unfortunately, it'd be nice because you could just say more things and that would be better, but it takes discernment, and I'm not here to tell you the exact way in which it should flow up or down or sideways in your organization. I'm just here to tell you that for me, I realized more isn't always better. And that's kind of the trade. You don't get full transparency and full trust at the same time. If I tell you everything, I've handed you weight that's not yours and pulled you and your focus off the thing that you're actually supposed to be taking care of. And so if I trust you at that level, I have to let you operate without watching every move. So that's how I got the guilt to go away. I stopped telling myself I was a shady leader if I didn't say everything, and I started hearing it as like just a normal feature of any company that has more than one layer in it. So if your team keeps asking for better communication and you keep feeling like you're failing them, check what they're actually asking for. More words, or do you need to actually think of the right words at the right level. Where in your company are you confusing more communication with better communication? Or where have you been dumping more information on your team than they don't need to carry and just calling it transparency? Let me know in the comments. And again, thanks for watching.
