What the research found
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s multi-year study of more than 250 companies and several thousand managers, published in Harvard Business Review, found that only 9% of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time to deliver what was expected of them; roughly half said they could rely on them most of the time. The researchers’ broader conclusion is worth stating precisely: in the organisations they studied, alignment on strategic direction was generally sound. The breakdown consistently happened elsewhere, in the coordination between units that needed to act on that shared direction together.
Amy Edmondson’s Harvard Business School research on psychological safety, published in Administrative Science Quarterly following a field study of 51 manufacturing work teams, found that team psychological safety predicted learning behaviour — the willingness to surface problems, ask questions and report mistakes — even after controlling for team efficacy, meaning a highly capable team without safety still underperformed a less capable one that had it. Applied to communication across a franchise network, this suggests that whether information travels has less to do with how capable or well-intentioned the people involved are, and more to do with whether the environment makes surfacing a problem feel safe or costly.
Why the franchisor-franchisee boundary is structurally harder to cross
Internal cross-unit communication, the kind Sull, Homkes and Sull studied, already faces real obstacles — different priorities, different reporting lines, simple distance. A franchise network adds a further, more specific obstacle on top of those: the boundary between franchisor and franchisee is not just organisational, it is contractual and economic. A franchisee reporting a problem to the franchisor is not simply informing a colleague; depending on the nature of the problem, they may be disclosing something that could affect how their own performance is judged, how closely their site is scrutinised, or even their standing under the franchise agreement.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research on the barriers to strategy implementation, published in Sloan Management Review, identifies poor vertical communication as one of several mutually reinforcing obstacles that block organisations from acting on what they collectively know — obstacles that, they note, are often invisible to the leadership team sitting above them, precisely because the information that would reveal the problem is the information failing to travel. In a franchise network, this dynamic is sharpened by the fact that franchisees, unlike employees, have an independent economic interest in how they are perceived by the franchisor, which changes the calculation around raising a difficult issue: the honest report and the safe report are not always the same one.
This connects directly to Edmondson’s finding on psychological safety. If asking for help or flagging a problem has, in a given network’s actual history, led to increased scrutiny, audit, or strained relations rather than support, franchisees will rationally adjust their reporting behaviour to reflect that — not because the formal communication channel is inadequate, but because the channel accurately reflects what happens to information once it arrives.
What this looks like as it develops
The pattern rarely announces itself as a communication failure. It tends to first appear as head office being surprised by a problem that, in hindsight, had been developing for some time at site level — a decline in a specific area, a local competitive pressure, an operational issue that a franchisee had noticed well before it reached the point of visibility centrally. The retrospective question is usually “why didn’t we know sooner,” and the answer is rarely that nobody knew. Someone at the site level typically did know. The question that matters more is why that knowledge did not travel.
A common misconception is that adding more communication touchpoints — more frequent calls, more reporting requirements, more scheduled check-ins — closes this gap. It often does not, because more frequent contact through a channel franchisees do not fully trust simply produces more frequent opportunities to give the safe answer rather than the honest one. What changes the underlying dynamic is not the volume of communication but what has historically happened to the people who used it to raise something difficult.
This also explains why the breakdown is often asymmetric in a specific, recognisable direction. Positive information — a site performing well, a local success worth sharing — tends to travel upward without much friction, because there is little downside to reporting it. Information that reflects poorly on the site, or that might invite scrutiny, travels far less reliably, for exactly the reasons Beer and Eisenstat’s research describes. A network relying primarily on top-line reporting to gauge network health is, by the nature of that asymmetry, more likely to hear about what is going well than what is not — which is precisely the information that matters most to catch early.
There is a related failure mode worth naming separately: information that does travel, but arrives filtered by whoever passed it along. A regional manager relaying a franchisee’s concern to head office is not a neutral conduit — they have their own incentives around how their region is perceived, and a concern that reflects on their own oversight may be softened, reframed, or simply delayed before it reaches the people who could act on it. This means a network can have a formally functioning reporting chain, with every link individually doing something reasonable, and still lose the substance of a message somewhere along a chain with several such links in it. The 9% figure from Sull, Homkes and Sull’s research describes reliance between peers in a single organisation; a franchise network’s reporting chain typically has more links than that, each one a further point where the same dynamic can recur.
Where this shows up
People working in franchise networks will probably recognise this pattern first. The wider Multi-Site and Franchise grouping and the other sectors page show how it presents elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- When a franchisee has raised a concern in the past, what actually happened next — and is that history consistent with what the network intends its process to communicate?
- Is the volume of communication with sites increasing while the substance of what sites are willing to share stays roughly the same?
- Does the network’s reporting structure make it easier to hear good news than to hear the early signs of a problem?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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