Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 025
Fluent does not mean effective
Executive effectiveness depends on knowing what is feasible, appropriate, and actually workable in a specific communicative community
Premise
Organizations frequently classify communication failure as a language problem. Dell Hymes’s concept of communicative competence shows why grammatical correctness is necessary but insufficient. A perfectly formed sentence can fail because its timing, genre, relationship, setting, or social convention makes it inappropriate or unusable.
For executives, competence is situated participation: knowing what can be said, what can be performed under real conditions, what a community regards as appropriate, and what people actually do. This wider lens exposes unwritten rules that shape meetings, intercultural work, onboarding, and professional authority—and makes those rules available for both learning and critique.
What the model is: Communicative Competence in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryConcepts & Constructs
- DomainConversation & Relationships
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Concepts & Constructs
Delimits an entity, property, relation or condition relevant to understanding communication. Its principal contribution is to clarify what something means, which features constitute it, and how to recognize or distinguish it.
- KnowledgeCommunicative Competence