You’re walking into the third meeting in as many months focused on your business’s pillars, values, and strategic approach. As you dust off the same PowerPoint deck you’ve used for the last year, you gird yourself for the inevitable blank stares and bored expressions. “This stuff is important!” you think to yourself. “Why doesn’t my team think so? Why don’t they get it?”
The problem, whether you’re aware of it or not, is one of clarity. Leaders, by definition, tend to be more immersed in their organization’s strategy and objectives than the people they support. They are privy to information and decision-making and context that isn’t available to everyone else in the business. Moreover, a leader’s incentive to deeply understand what makes the business tick is different from that of their colleagues’ by the nature of their position.
This disparity of information and incentives creates very real—and very harmful—barriers to clarity. Without clarity, trust isn’t cultivated, and the overall health of your organization suffers.
The curse of knowledge
Stanford, 1990. A group of people, divided in two. One half “taps out” famous songs and the other half attempts to guess the reference from their partner’s sparse taps. Despite the listeners’ familiarity with the songs, they invariably fail to match the song. This experiment, conducted by Elizabeth Newton, is known for demonstrating the curse of knowledge – a cognitive bias that occurs when you know something and you assume that others have the necessary background to understand you. In subtle and consequential ways, you don’t provide what the listener needs. To every person tapping out a song, humming a melody in their head, it was clear as day what they were communicating. The assumption that you’re being clear creates the problem.
A moment of clarity
Imagine a team made up of people that are totally aligned with every single one of your organization’s priorities. They deeply understand not only what needs to get done, but their role in making it happen. They know who to turn to for help and what tools are available for them to do their jobs well. And not only do they have a clear path for helping the business succeed, they can see their own path for growth along the way.
Who wouldn’t want to work on a team like this?
This kind of collaboration doesn’t have to be imaginary. But it’s dependent on your leaders’ ability to think about their approach to communication in news ways. Like any other aspect of organizational health, clarity has to be intentionally, thoughtfully cultivated. And it’s a lot easier said than done.
Clearly, this is tricky stuff
Fostering organizational clarity is tricky work. It helps to have a partner that can help you see the forest for the trees, that has deep experience in navigating the ways organizations communicate.
We’d love to hear about the ways your team thinks about clarity: what are the areas in which your team has struggled to get on the same page? What changes have you made recently to help clarify your strategy and goals? Reach out to us today to grab some time to talk.