The Crown Is Crooked

By Cheril Clarke · Phenomenal Writing · 7/16/2026

Five years ago, more people trusted corporate leaders than the President of the United States*. Today, that corporate crown is tarnished, crooked, and dented from a thousand self-inflicted falls off the pedestal. Tech billionaires and insulated executives are now viewed by many as the main drivers of a dystopian future. Of economic dread. And even though some have backtracked their predictions on imminent job losses, they’ve now found themselves swimming in the muddy consequences of making people feel insignificant. Or worse, feeling less valued than lines of code.

Of course, we can’t broad-brush a truth for any group. We shouldn’t. But whether true or not, the waters have been sullied for everyone. Employees have lost trust. And many leaders who are neither billionaires nor headline-chasers are drowning under a massive cognitive load of their own.

The immediate operational reality of eroded trust is that skepticism chews up every message before it lands. Projects stall, stall some more, then die. The logjam is because no one believes the priorities.

Some executives are handed a multimillion-dollar budget to deploy a new system, restructure a division, or harden security protocols. But they are given absolutely zero dedicated resources to handle the human psychology of that transition. This sets them up to fail and take the blame. No one should be expected to navigate complex organizational grief with no modern change communications strategy.

So what do you do when your words don’t land anymore?

You stop broadcasting and craft separate messages that hit different nerves.

Resist the instinct to write one message, polish it to death, and send it to everyone. That strategy is part of why trust degraded in the first place. One-size-fits-all communication assumes everyone hears the same story, feels the same impact, needs the same reassurance. That isn’t true.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on business bottlenecks and suggested better listening and tailoring messages as a solution. I’m now adding that you can’t do any effectively of that unless you’ve first acknowledged the trust is broken.

The team that lost twenty-three people to the last restructuring is in a different emotional reality than the team that didn’t. The department that’s been told to “do more with less” for eighteen months hears “efficiency” as a threat. The new hires hear it as a mission statement. Same word. Different meanings. One message can’t land both.

So you write to each group separately. With different tones and different acknowledgments. With unique asks.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve built a system that turns weekly intelligence signals into audience-specific messages so you’re not guessing what each team needs to hear. Because what I’ve learned is that you cannot command execution from employees whose brains now reject all “strategic narratives.” You cannot prevent retreat when staff refuses to participate in a game where the rules are rigged against their survival. And you can’t expect the polished messages that worked in a less stressed, less stimulated environment to land when team members don’t think any abundance will make it to them.

The crown is crooked. The pedestal is cracked. And too many speeches and memos are still landing like talks from a different decade. You can keep writing to the room you wish you had, or you can start communicating with the one that’s actually in front of you.