Chad Silverstein (Day 314: "The curse and cookies...") reflects on a common leadership pitfall—the "curse of knowledge"—and urges leaders to simplify communication so even the least sophisticated or newest team member can understand. He describes a company discipline of explaining things with the least sophisticated person in mind, recommends putting ideas in writing and making them clear, concise, and direct, and uses a sermon-to-radio anecdote to stress brevity and accessibility as marks of strong leadership.
Chapters
This day is so true. And if you're leading anything, then you know that there's going to be areas that you assume and you expect others to know as well as you do, but you just have the curse of knowledge and forget what it's like to not know. And trying to simplify things and make things very easy to digest and understand is. It's so important for a leader to be able to do. We used to have a discipline our company. We would talk about doing everything with the least sophisticated person in mind, which typically was the new person, because they were not as sophisticated as everyone else in regards to the way that they were supposed to do their job. So it didn't mean anything about their level of intelligence as much as it did. Can you dumb down whatever it is you're saying so that even a new person who doesn't know anything about us can understand what we're saying? And I thought that was a great discipline, and I think that helped in our way. We communicated with everybody in a very CCD way. And, yeah, you know, if you're a visionary leading anything, you have to be really careful about brainstorming in public and making sure you bring things down to that bottom cookie shelf. Make it simple, easy, put it in writing and as clear, concise, and direct as you can possibly be. You know, say the same thing plus words, then say it. You know, there's a good story about someone who put on a sermon, and it was for about 45 minutes. And there was a reporter who was in the. In the crowd, and after he spoke, he asked them, hey, I have a radio show and I would love for you to come on, but I only have about five or ten minutes for you to do your thing. Can you dumb that down from 45 minutes down to about 5 or 10? The guy says, yeah, I definitely can. He said, why didn't you? And I think there's something to be said about not overstating whatever it is you're telling, whether it's a story, whether it's situation, whether it's a challenge, or you're putting a solution on the table. But I think making it something everybody can digest so they can challenge and question it and help. And I think that's the sign of a great leader who can do that.
