Good Morning,
In my current read “Simple Church” by Thom Rainer & Eric Geiger (http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Church-Returning-Process-Disciples/dp/0805447997/) one of the points of the book covers clarity. Clarity in mission as well as clarity in process and clarity in execution. The other three points are Movement, Alignment and Focus.
One of the key points of clarity is that it is better to understand, but not necessarily agree with, the mission, than people who are committed to it, but do not understand it.
Why?
Without understanding, people try to find the reasons why. And where to they find the understanding if they don’t have it? One would hope from the leadership team, but that is sadly not always the case. Worse yet, when people cannot find the understanding for the mission, they sometimes just make it up, often with justifications of why they are doing what they are doing..
That may not sound like a problem, but wait. When people are creating their own understanding of why the company is on some sort of mission, they often come up with a different understanding than other team members.
What happens when you have a room full of people who all have different understandings of why something is the way it is?
In a word… chaos.
For the leaders of that team, welcome to ‘herding cats’.
If leaders plan on keeping their people in the dark, how to they expect their people to see?
By sharing the reasons why a company, a team, an organization is taking on a mission, or starting some sort of project, the team can get behind it with the SAME understanding. They may not like it, or agree with it, but they will understand it.
With the same understanding (Clarity) across the team, group or organization, work gets done (Movement), that is in (Alignment) with the mission and the overall organization is (Focused) on the same goals and results.
Looking at it from the front lines; if you were to ask an average team member why are they working on some project, don’t you think that having that person KNOW why, would help them do a better job?
Unfortunately, that is not the case. The norm is that we are told what to do, and expected to do it. Maybe somewhere down the line we are shared a reason why we did what we did, but our efforts to get the job done were often disjointed. You know, with the folks who have no clue why they do what the do just doing the needful for no other reason they were told. In this scenario, there is often a need for course corrections, coaching, retraining and motivation to get the cats all going in the same direction.
It might just be simpler, and more beneficial to just share why.
Give Clarity to why a project is needed, and repeat that same message as needed (and it will be needed) and the results could be amazing.
Enjoy!
Sanford Berenberg
Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net
http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
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