Bumblebees Don’t Wait for the Storm
I have an enormous English lavender plant in my garden. On a sunny day it is covered in bumblebees: some banded in bright orange, some the classic yellow and black, all of them happily working the same patch of purple, oblivious to me.
One afternoon the sky went overcast. Then it started to spit, then drizzle. Somewhere in the time it took me to register the first drop, every bee lifted off at once and disappeared into the tree line.
It looked instantaneous. It wasn’t.
Bees are remarkably sensitive to shifts in barometric pressure, wind, temperature, and light; changes that register with them well before they are obvious to a person standing nearby. Entomologists have documented this since A.E. Lundie’s 1925 study on honeybee flight activity. By the time I felt the rain, the bees had already been reading a dozen small signals I could not perceive at all. What looked like one sudden, collective decision was the same decision, made independently and almost simultaneously, because every bee had access to the same information.
Employees are as sensitive, to shifts in pressure, pace, expectations, mood, and tone inside an organization. They notice long before an executive team starts communicating. Too many communication plans still operate as though these shifts are secrets (or assume employees are tucked away somewhere underground like little gophers, waiting for the official word). They are not. They are standing in the same garden, feeling the same change in the air. Is anyone giving context to the signals; helping them get their heads ‘round what they’re already sensing?
The Current Weather Systems
Recent studies of CEO sentiment by PwC and EY-Parthenon show leaders naming trade policy and tariff exposure, macroeconomic volatility and margin pressure, geopolitical, and rising cyber risk among their top concerns. They’re expected to manage all that across two time horizons: protect the company now + reinvent the future organization.
Employees feel that shift long before anyone names it. The question is whether they are being given anything to read it with, or left to run from the rain after it starts.
The work of Internal Communications now is to make sure your employees aren’t caught in the rain. It is amplifying and contextualizing the right signals so any pivots, budget cuts, strategy shifts, or other more dramatic changes are expected and accepted before they happen. That work happens in three places.
Trusted CEO Advisor
Your CEO does not need another polished line or jargon or platitudes for the town hall. They need a thinking partner for the conversation before the conversation. Push them to talk openly about what is happening in the business right now: what environmental factors are of greatest concern, where the greatest opportunities lie, what is being protected in the short term, what trade-off considerations that requires, and what they are weighing for what comes next.
One CEO I worked with called this floating balloons. Not one grand reveal, but a series of small, signals released consistently, so people are already reading the weather before the moment arrives.
That works only if the CEO is willing to say “we’re still deciding” out loud, and if every one of those balloons is anchored to something durable: the company’s purpose and values. People will forgive uncertainty about the plan when the reason the company exists remains the anchor. They will not forgive a leader who pretends everything is fine.
Know More Than Your Lane in the Boardroom
Do not stay in your lane. Know the landscape cold before you sit down. Understand how your industry is behaving, what your customers and clients are worried about, what the media are saying about your company and your sector, and what your competitors are doing, saying, and conspicuously not saying.
Bring that knowledge to the table through three lenses at once:
what a decision does to risk exposure,
what it does to results and productivity, and
what it does to trust and engagement.
And before any pivot gets signed off, ask the question nobody else at the table is paid to ask: does this still sound like us? Purpose and values are not a slide leaders show once a year. They are the test every decision should pass, and it is Communications’ job to insist on the test, out loud, in the room.
The Cascade: Every Layer, Especially the Middle
An employee communications plan built only for “leadership” and “the front line” has a hole in the middle. Look at how the CEO is engaging their own direct team, how that team talks to the layer below them, and, critically, how front-line managers are being engaged. That last group is where most plans fall apart.
Managers are the largest communication channel in your organization, and the least equipped one. They are expected to explain a decision, answer hard questions, and connect a company-wide shift to what their team does on Monday morning, often before making sense of it themselves.
Give them the context before their teams get it, not after. Give them the why, not just the talking points. And give them the same anchor you gave the CEO: purpose and values, repeated in language they can use with their own team, so people have something steady to hold onto while the weather turns.
I didn’t see the front edge of that decision on the lavender. It had already been made, drop by drop, signal by signal, while I was busy admiring the flowers. Stop treating your employees like underground gophers. Treat them like the attuned bumblebees they are.
They’ve been reading the sky the whole time, they just need someone willing to name the most concerning signals. Give them that, and they won’t just survive the storm; they’ll be moving in the right direction before it lands.
Originally Published in Strategic Global