The Keynote Season Part 3: Create Clarity
As a leader and chief clarity officer, the whole idea of creating clarity has a seductive simplicity about it. My experience is that there is a very long gap between knowing and doing. And if it was simply about being clear as a leader, then why are there so many breakdowns in communication and understanding between leaders and followers?
If we take one step further back and look at leadership as being about creating performance through other people, then an interesting way to look at performance is to simply look at what hampers performance and gets in the way. In another case of “just ask the audience”, the single best piece of research that I’ve found around answering this question comes from the researcher Ferdinand Fournies, who set about the mission of understanding what is it and why is it that people don’t do what they’re supposed to do and what should you do about it.
He surveyed over 25,000 people and he came up and tabulated with the top 13 reasons why people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, i.e. underperform, and here are the top four.
The first reason is that they don’t know what they’re supposed to do.
The second is they don’t know why they’re supposed to do it.
Thirdly, they don’t know how to do it.
And fourthly, They thought that they were already doing it.
You’ll notice that in all four cases, the source is attributable to a breakdown or a lack of common clarity. In my experience of working with leaders and managers globally, the number one enemy of performance in a team is ambiguity because when there’s ambiguity in Theodore Hesburgh’s words, you can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.
When there’s ambiguity, people don’t act. They hesitate, they delay making decisions, they take the safer option. So therefore the number one contribution of the leader is if you can be nothing else, be clear, but create clarity in a way that’s understood mutually on both sides. Clarity is important in all times, including peacetime, but it’s absolutely critical in times of chaos, disruption, and change.
And if you want a very simple high-level roadmap for where you need to create clarity most as a leader, it’s in these four areas. Where are we going? What’s our destination? What’s the end game? Why are we doing it? What’s the purpose? What’s the mission? What are our priorities? What are the things that we need to be doing strategically that are going to get us to the destination? And finally, who’s doing what, what are our roles, what are our responsibilities, and what are the differences or the lines between all of those things?
Our entire business at Flow Group is based or founded on helping organisations and helping leaders to create the sort of clarity that’s going to unblock any ambiguity so that people can act and move towards high performance. And it either fits into the category, the work that we do, of helping to create that or trying to unscramble and untangle the mess that has been created through the lack of any or all of these.
In my experience, there are two things that lead to the downfall of clarity. I simply call them the clarity traps. The first is the assumption trap. This is based on the idea, or the assumption, that message sent is equal to message received. Meaning, just because I sent the memo, just because I shared the strategy, just because I gave the instruction, just because I sent you the deck, the assumption is, You’ve received what I’ve intended. And as George Bernard Shaw famously said, the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it’s taken place.
When this happens, there’s obviously an immediate impact on efficiency. The first trap leads into the second trap. And the second trap is the intention trap. The assumptions trap is something that is basically at the core of human nature between any two people. It’s going to happen because we’re human, and we just need to be vigilant against it. Okay.
The intention trap, however, is when the miscommunication happens, as it inevitably does or will, no matter how vigilant we are. The moment of truth is what happens next. A very common reaction from the leader is something like this: well, I clearly said, or what I obviously meant was, or I didn’t expect that, or I never intended that.
You’ll notice that in these cases, the leader is simply Resting on their good intentions. And here’s another truth about life. We go through our lives and the way in which we measure or judge ourselves in our daily interactions and routines; the truth about life is that we judge ourselves based on our good intentions.
And in this instance, the leader had good intentions. And also, they have rights. But by resting on our good intentions, and using those intentions as a defense lawyer, we fall into the right wrong trap, which only creates tension in the relationship.
You see, the world doesn’t judge us by our good intentions. The world judges us based on our impact, and the impact of this has been poor. No one intends to be a bad leader, yet we know there are plenty of bad leaders out there. And I’ve seen consistently many leaders pay a very heavy price in their ability to lead and manage a team for the sake of being right.
The moment of truth and the real question is, which do you prioritize, being right or being effective? And the effective leader will always acknowledge the good intention, but take ownership for the impact of their communication or miscommunication or where it led.
And the underlying truth is that the leader didn’t work hard enough to create a sufficient level of mutual understanding. Where my understanding of the message is the same as your understanding of the message before you execute in order to be effective.
And it’s really hard, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes, for lots of reasons, for many leaders to own up to that.
As a leader, in summary, if you own the outcome and prioritize being effective with the outcome and own your contribution to that outcome, if it isn’t the one that you want, you will go an awful long way to being a better, more trusted leader.
Related Episodes
Episode 57 – Keep Your Focus – Avoid Procrastination
Episode 32 – Planning and Prioritising in Chaos
