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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

In that sentence, employees is the subject, and managers is the object. It's the employees who are doing the misinterpreting of the managers. Only a manager would think that the title sounds like owning up to a mistake. :)

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I reinforce this comment. The title "When Employees Misinterpret Managers" at best very weakly implies that the managers are doing something. It plainly states, in normal English, that employees did something (they misinterpreted) to managers. Only by the most convoluted thinking could you remove that plain meaning and substitute in "managers gave instructions excessively prone to misinterpretation" or something similar. `bryanlarsen`'s point is absolute bullshit.

Now: reading the article, that does indicate that it's the managers' fault, and it's a bang-up job of doing that. But the headline - oy!

In business communications the onus is usually on the speaker to frame things in such a way that the audience can understand them. When employees misinterpret managers then it can be assumed that managers misspoke.

"When managers fail to communicate" would be a better way of framing the topic.

The headline could've been better, no question.

Except you're missing out the crucial employees part, and it's hard to add without making the headline long and unwieldy. And misinterpret has fairly significantly different loading than "fail to communicate". I still think the original headline is better than yours. The target audience is managers, and will implicitly understand that a it's the managers fault when an employee misinterprets the manager.

Headline writing is hard.

It is my experience that employees who hear it phrased that way, though, will from painful experience assume that they're about to be blamed for something.

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