I don’t listen to this kid’s podcast. It’s just a bunch of screaming about Lucky Charms.
He really wants them. Like… badly.
Anyone who knows me knows that I listen to podcasts almost constantly. I listen for about 75 minutes each morning when I exercise, whenever I’m doing yard work or mowing the lawn (sidenote: if you don’t have ear protection that covers earbuds or that you can pair with your phone you’re missing out on some prime listening time), whenever I’m in the car – which admittedly has been a lot less for the past seven months, and when I get a few moments to just chill out in the hammock during the three weeks it’s nice enough here to do that. The point is I get a fair amount of time to listen, especially since I tend to listen to everything at 1.8x normal speed.
I listen to several different shows that drop weekly, biweekly, or monthly and out of pure coincidence three separate shows recently featured similar discussions revolving around the importance of clarity in a team, be it between a manager and employee or in a relationship. I decided to take the hint and write about some of my experiences and thoughts about clarity that I learned the hard way. If this entry starts off more disjoined than usual, it’s because I’m going to try to use a lot of examples to ensure I get my point across, so bear with me.
I think being clear when you’re communicating is an essential skill regardless of your position within your organization. Clearly, I have a strong affinity for IT and so we’ll look at this from the lens of an IT shop, but this is true of any role in any discipline in any organization. Clarity in communications is like having a well-documented blueprint in the construction industry. Imagine if you worked for a building firm and you were supposed to build a garage without blueprints – you’d never get anything even close to what the architect or owner wants! That’s why things like blueprints and design documents exist, to ensure there is clarity between all parties engaged in a project. In fact, it that blueprint is communication in that industry.
Indian is possibly my favorite cuisine, but my taste buds still haven’t recovered from that first time.. Wowza!
In IT, we don’t always have blueprints (apologies to Visio), but we do have the important tool of our words. If you aren’t being absolutely clear, there’s far too many opportunities for you to get into a situation where both parties think they have a good understanding and are working towards the same goals, but they’re actually on different wavelengths entirely. This happened to me the first time I went out for Indian food. I ordered it “spicy” not at all knowing that Indian food has a spice scale that far exceeds that of the burrito place I used to frequent. I should have asked some clarifying questions to make sure we were on the same page as to what “spicy” meant.
When I was an individual engineer, I occasionally ended up getting myself in a jam because I lacked clarity when I was working with colleagues. One time, I was working on a file server that an end user couldn’t access from their laptop in a satellite office, but they could access it from a desktop computer in their main office. The lead network engineer and I were looking into this because it was absolutely not expected behavior and had been escalated from the field support team. I had asked him to look to see if there were any ACLs in place because it didn’t make sense that this one laptop couldn’t connect. He assured me it wasn’t the case and so we wasted several hours trying to figure out what was wrong – until I said something about heading over to see the laptop in person and he realized they were in separate offices. He saw the issue immediately and fixed it on the spot. If I had been clear about what the problem was, we both would have saved multiple hours that neither of us had.
If you’re a manager or leader in any capacity and aren’t striving for almost perfect clarity when communicating to your team about projects, you’re probably falling far short of your potential impact. Early in my management career I was guilty of this almost every day. I had someone on my team that had very different standards of organization than I do, and so when I said I needed the front office area tidied up, he did tidy it up. What I should have done was been very clear about what my standards were. Instead, I got frustrated because the area never met my standards and he was frustrated because I kept telling him to clean something up.
My organization aesthetic and philosophy is a lot like Apple’s: if you just get rid of everything there’s nothing to be disorganized. Problem solved!
I eventually learned the hard way that the best way to ensure that something is clear is to overcommunicate. Frankly, if I were still responsible for the front-end of the IT area, I would have written a checklist for each area and a description of what it should look like. Alternatively I could have worked to get organized the way I wanted it, and then taken a picture. You don’t have room for misinterpretation of a picture or a detailed checklist. This may seem like overkill, but if you absolutely cannot afford deviation from what you need then it’s a sure-fire way to ensure it works right. This is why the Dominos in my town has pictures of how much of each ingredient to put on above the toppings area. I almost always get exactly the amount of pineapple I expect on my pizza.
For more complex projects, I try to be careful to make sure that I describe the desired end-state and have gone so far as to write a short narrative about what a customer experience should be like when using a product or service we offer. That way, we have time to discuss what it should look or feel like before we move too far down a project. You’d be surprised at how powerful a one page narrative about a user interaction with the end-state can be to getting people on the same page. I’ve used this particular trick time and time again, and have started having the managers that report to me use this to ensure that I fully understand something they’re trying to pitch to me.
The idea of overcommunication and clarity also translates to team behavior and performance. When I’m having performance planning conversations with my team, I try not to dance around a topic. If someone is having trouble with something easy to explain, I try to use as few words as possible so there’s no ambiguity. Something like: “You are not following the change management and I expect you to submit RFCs before noon on Monday for proper review before a Friday change” doesn’t leave much room for debate or confusion. It’s clear and to the point. For more complex topics, I try to make sure that I’m being direct and clear in what the problem is and what the expectation is and ideally when I need to see it fixed by.
When I’ve been coaching some folks around how to drive towards more clear conversations, I’ve heard resistance from folks that are afraid of being viewed as “too blunt.” While I may be guilty of utilizing straight-up bluntness too often, I honestly think you can do more damage by being too subtle when you’re trying to get a point across that is related to project or individual success. For instance, I would much rather my boss say “The cabling in this rack looks awful, you need to fix it” than she say “Well, I can see you put in a lot of effort here. There could be some areas that could be tweaked if you wanted to.” In the second example, she was so concerned about hurting my feelings that I’m not sure she got the message across or if I really need to fix something, but the former is unmistakable.
It’s important to note that clarity doesn’t just go in one direction. If someone is asking you to do something or asking for your assistance with a problem or project, you have a responsibility to make sure that you understand what they are asking – even if they aren’t putting in a ton of effort to make it clear. When someone is asking or telling me something, I try to make sure I can restate it back to them in my own language to show that I really understand what we’re talking about. If I don’t think I can, I ask questions – possibly an annoying amount of questions – to make sure that I really do understand the ask. In this way, I take responsibility for the clarity of the conversation even if I didn’t initiate it.
Clarity is like a box of donuts - you never appreciate how great it is until it’s gone.
Also, I very badly want a donut.
In the end, clarity means knowing what you want to happen and being able to convey it in a way that the person you’re talking to understands it the same way you do. Sometimes the first part is just as hard as the last step. You have to make sure that you can articulate what you’re trying to get done. I’ve sometimes practiced this by writing out what I want to say to someone ahead of time if I’m going to have a verbal conversation with them. I don’t read off the page, but it helps me make sure that I am able to articulate what I’m trying to get across before I have to do it. If I stumble through explaining what I need or want, I do both of us a disservice. Clearly, if I’m communicating over email I have the luxury of being able to edit my message a few times to make sure that I have it right. Sometimes it takes longer and multiple edits before you get to something that explains what you want really well. It is for this reason that I almost never try to communicate something important over text messaging from my phone. It’s just too painful to write anything on it, so anything other than “call me” is too fraught for misinterpretation. Just ask my wife.
Ultimately, driving towards clarity isn’t easy and it requires humility and frankly some courage to get right. You have to be willing to have some difficult conversations and tell people when they don’t understand you. Even with all of that said, it’s critically important to making sure that you and whomever you’re talking to are heading in the same direction. It can be hard, but it’s absolutely worth it.
Is that clear?
Some questions for reflection - let me know what you think in the comments!
Have you ever spent time and effort working on something only to find out that you were doing the wrong thing? Could it have been avoided?
Is there someone you work with who you routinely have trouble getting on the same wavelength as? What can you do to improve clarity between the two of you?
The next time someone asks you for something, do you feel comfortable asking for clarification? Why or why not?