As I work with management teams who want to successfully execute a change…
Or to get their organization to step up to a more strategic or scalable way of working…
They often tell me, this is not a new idea, but we need to make it stick this time.
I have been thinking a lot about this lately – Why is it so hard to get organizations to stop doing what they are currently doing, and to start doing what the need to be doing?
Here’s the thought: Clarity is the secret sauce for execution, but clarity causes conflict, and most people don’t like conflict. So execution stalls.
You need to be comfortable with the fact that creating real clarity is going to expose disagreements. It’s going to expose gaps. It’s going to expose things that you need to deal with.
It can be much more comfortable to just leave everything fuzzy so you don’t actually have to address these things. This is one of the key reasons why so many change initiatives fail.
Any successful business agenda or initiative needs a tremendous amount of clarity to succeed. First you need to be really clear about the desired outcome. What is expected?
Then:
But getting clarity on any one of these points opens the door to conflict.
For example if you say: We need to improve the quality of our products. The priority of the next product release is quality.
That may sound like a clear statement, but…
Or if you say: We need to sell higher up in organizations
Discussing the answer to all these kinds of questions out loud, with your team, opens the door to conflict.
Once you get really clear, people will not agree.
But that’s the important part.
As I bring teams through this process of getting real clarity, taking the time to hear the opinions and debate, we reach a point where everyone can see what to do differently, specifically.
It becomes clear what everyone needs to do personally to achieve the big goal. Everyone leaves knowing exactly what is expected, and how they will be measured on what they do moving forward.
If you are not clear enough to cause and then work through conflict, I call this being fuzzy. Being fuzzy may be more comfortable in the moment but it causes several problems.
Don’t settle for shallow team pleasantness, or avoid performance management at the expense of getting your business strategy implemented.
As a leader you need to create clarity and navigate through the conflict it causes, if you want to get anything important done.
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