At several universities, I teach communication courses such as persuasion, leadership, and collaboration, to thousands of students and professionals. To a great degree, all of those skills rely on influence. And across every audience, I keep noticing the same thing: we’re getting better at using tools, but worse at connecting with people, worse at being influential.

And the people this hits hardest aren’t students, it’s leaders. The tricky part is most leaders don’t realize what’s slipping. Influence feels harder, meetings feel flatter, alignment feels fragile… and it’s all too easy to blame people when the real issue is communication skills from the last millennia.

A big part of that shift comes from the simple fact that technology evolved faster than our ability to read the cues inside it.

We haven’t lost traditional communication because technology “broke” it, we’ve just moved into new channels faster than we’ve learned how to read them. Face-to-face conversations, real-time reactions, even a simple phone call used to carry the nonverbal cues that did much of the influential heavy-lifting for us. Now those cues are compressed, diluted or reshaped by digital tools, and we’re struggling to keep up. The tone, cadence, timing, pauses, and facial expressions that used to guide us haven’t disappeared, they’ve changed form. And until we build the skills to recognize and use those new signals, our influence slips not because the technology is bad, but because our literacy in this new environment hasn’t caught up yet.

When leaders lose those cues, they lose influence. Not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because the foundation they used to rely on simply isn’t there anymore.

We still treat technology like it’s just a delivery system, a way to move information from Point A to Point B. But that thinking is outdated. Communication and technology aren’t sitting side by side anymore; they’re fused. And the more we ignore that fusion, the more we end up with what we’re seeing everywhere: more noise, less clarity. More talking, less understanding. More messages, but less influence.

It’s why a manager can Slack or email, “Can we talk tomorrow?” thinking it’s a simple scheduling note, while the team reads it as a warning or a looming performance issue, because the medium adds an emotional charge the sender didn’t intend. And once that happens, influence drops instantly; people aren’t preparing for a conversation, they’re bracing for impact.

For most of human history, communication was physical. A leader, or anyone, tapped into this element for persuasiveness.

Our tone, gestures, and facial expressions have always carried an enormous amount of information, far more than we usually notice. In any face-to-face interaction, we’re taking in a constant stream of nonverbal data: posture shifts, micro-expressions, timing, pauses, vocal warmth or sharpness, even breathing patterns. And decades of research shows that this flood of signals doesn’t just add to the message; it shapes how we interpret it. When people are trying to understand intent, confidence, irritation, uncertainty, engagement, nonverbal cues don’t just supplement the words; they outweigh them. We instinctively believe the posture, the pause, or the eye-roll long before we trust the sentence that follows.

You don’t need a communication degree to know words aren’t the whole story. In my public speaking classes, to illustrate, I’ll randomly pick a student to ask me: “How are you feeling?”

I reply: “I’m fine,” however, I do so with a slumped posture, averted eyes, and a sigh. My body language is incongruent with my words.

My students don't believe the words, they believe the body language. They completely dismissed every single word I said. The tone, gesture, and expression are essential to understanding intent. They fill the gap between what’s said and what's intended.

And that intention is the core reason we communicate in the first place. We’re not just sharing information; we’re trying to create an effect. Most of the time, what we intend is tied to wanting someone to do something our way, maybe to take a warning seriously, to follow a recommendation, to consider a new option, to rethink a belief, to choose a new direction. Influence isn’t some special category of communication. It’s baked into why we communicate at all.

For centuries, we could rely on those nonverbal signals to help complete the message.

Before technology rewired everything, influence often started with access. When I first moved from Idaho to Arizona, I took a job dealing blackjack. Day one, not even at a table yet, just waiting for the orientation to start, I was bored and knew immediately it wasn’t for me. So I did something that relied entirely on old-school, in-the-room communication.

I leaned over to the woman behind the plexiglass window, the kind with a little slot for sliding papers, and asked if she could find me the name and extension of the marketing director, and, of course, if I could use her phone. She sized me up for half a second, dialed the marketing department, and handed me the receiver through the little slot. No appointment. No email. No permissions. Just a cold call through plexiglass on the casino phone system.

The marketing director answered. I pitched him an idea, convinced him to meet with me. The casino had a policy that you can’t transfer departments within 90 days. On the 91st day, I started a new job as a business analyst, directly because of that phone call, and the resulting meeting. I persuaded him to talk and then meet. None of that would’ve happened without tone, confidence, timing, related to the human texture of a real voice on the other end.

Try doing that today!

Cold-calling someone is practically a social violation. Office phones barely exist. Calling a cell number you found in a directory is a fast track to being labeled spam. And unknown numbers? No one answers those anymore, they go to voicemail, where your message sits under two scam alerts, an offer to buy your house, and a warranty reminder.

It’s not that influence disappeared.

It’s that the channels where influence used to happen, spontaneous conversations, hallway moments, quick reads of tone, have been replaced by tools that flatten, obscure or distort those cues. We’re still influencing; we just have to do it inside systems that don’t ricochet our intent into something unrecognizable.

Because the moment the tools changed, the nature of communication changed with them. We are experiencing the the great rewiring: modern communication technology. At first, technology was simply a vehicle for communication, the medium of which we transferred data. A letter. A phone line. A TED Talk. But now, it’s something else entirely.

Today, technology isn’t beside communication. It’s inside it.

We don’t just use technology to talk, we communicate through it, with it, and around it, often at the same time.

You might be on a phone call about a project, catching the urgency in someone’s tone, the clipped words, the tension, the speed. Before you’ve even processed that emotion for yourself, you’re already relaying it to a coworker in Slack, filtering their tone through your own and compressing it into text, punctuation, and maybe a smiley emoji to soften an edgy part. And in real-time, someone else reads your Slack message while they’re mid-Zoom, juggling two other conversations, decoding not only your words but the emotion you interpreted from the original speaker, through your filter, through the app’s tone, through their own assumptions:

All these choices from the timing, to the medium to the tone have meaning.

And that meaning doesn’t travel in a straight line anymore; it ricochets. Every channel it hits, Slack, email, Zoom, or text, adds its own angle, tone, and interpretation, sending the message in a new direction.

By the time the message lands, the words are still yours, but the intent and influence has thinned out at every bounce. Because every platform has its own emotional physics, its own way of shaping tone and meaning:

These signals are the small ways technology reshapes intent. But persuasion isn’t only influenced by tone, it’s influenced by attention. And today, attention is split. This is the part most leaders underestimate: influence ricochets the same way meaning does. It changes direction every time it hits a new channel, and without realizing it, leaders lose force at every bounce. Leaders often think people are simply “reading their messages,” when in reality everyone is decoding those messages while juggling three other channels. Communication isn’t happening in one place anymore; it’s happening in motion.

Marketers have named this dynamic for years: they call it the second screen. Someone is watching your ad on TV while scrolling Instagram, half-listening to a podcast, and replying to a text. And because their attention is divided, the ad has to compete for meaning, not just visibility. The message has to be designed with the assumption it’s sharing space with something else.

Now take that same reality and drop it into the average workday, the emails, texts, Slacks, Zooms, and the constant split-screen life we all operate in. Every message you send is fighting for interpretive bandwidth. The real leadership question becomes: Are you crafting your intent for the environment it has to survive in, not just the environment you’re sending it from?

You see the same disconnect in academia. Many intro to communication courses still treat Computer-Mediated Communication as a single chapter, a neat, little module called “CMC.” When I used to teach it, I was a bit embarrassed as it felt it way outdated. I was telling Gen Z that digital communication was an “off-shoot” of human communication when, for them, it is communication. It’s not a special topic. It’s not an elective. It’s the environment they live in.

Technology used to be the place where communication happened, “I sent an email” or “I made a phone call.” Now it’s part of how communication feels. The tools themselves shape tone and meaning. They’ve become the new nonverbal. A platform can turn warmth into distance, certainty into hesitation, or enthusiasm into pressure, even when the words stay unchanged. Send the same sentence through text, email, a phone call, or face-to-face, and you won’t get four versions of the message. You’ll get four versions of its meaning.

That’s the shift leaders often miss. Technology didn’t just become the vehicle for our intent, it became part of the intent itself. And the challenge isn’t whether we’re communicating, we’re all drowning in communication. The challenge is whether the technology, this new form of digital body language, carries any of our intention and influence or just strips it away channel by channel.

For leaders, this shift changes everything. Influence no longer depends on what’s said in a meeting, it depends on how meaning survives across platforms, visual tools, media rich or media poor tools, and between people. One of the more important courses I teach is persuasion. But in today’s tech-driven world it isn’t just about choosing the right framing and psychological levers to tap into; it’s also about the systems those words travel through, without losing tone, trust, or intent. That’s where modern leadership begins, at the intersection of persuasion, leadership, and technology.

The leaders who influence in the next few years won’t be the ones who master more tools; they’ll be the ones who master meaning across them. Communication and tech are no longer parallel, they’ve fused. Once leaders understand how influence ricochets across platforms, they stop relying only on the strength of the message and start managing the path it travels and the context it lands in. And that’s the turning point: leaders stop sending messages through systems and start influencing through them.

This is the heart of my work with leaders (and teams): training them to influence, and to carry that influence through the digital ricochet that reshapes every message.