Jeff Dudan addresses business owners about how lack of clarity creates latency — hesitation, inaction, or incorrect actions — that can cripple a company. He cites Pat Lencioni’s Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary CEO and walks through leadership responsibilities: build a cohesive leadership team, create organizational clarity, over-communicate that clarity, and reinforce it through hiring, performance management, rewards, and terminations. He gives practical leader-focused prompts (who to communicate with, what to explain, what to stop/accelerate) and a call to action to repeatedly communicate a clear future.
Chapters
Hey, business owner, is a lack of clarity killing your business, murdering it? It might be, and you might not even know it. Look, what looks like hesitation, what looks like a lack of interest or even insubordination can often be due to a lack of clarity. Here's what I mean by that. Your job as a business owner is to get the latency out of your business. When people are unclear about what to do, they do one of a handful of things. If they're unclear, what are they going to do? They're going to hesitate, they're going to do nothing, or they're going to make something up and do something wrong. All of those things are company killers. Your job as a business owner is to get as many transactions of the right type in the right order flowing through your business, because that's how you get paid. Latency comes from indecision. The moment that you know the right thing to do, from the time that somebody takes an action to accomplish that thing, that's latency in your business. And when you're starting a business, especially if you're building it in a scrum, you don't have time for that. There's a great book by Pat Lencioni called the Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary CEO. And three of the obsessions have the word clarity within it. The first one that doesn't have clarity is to build and maintain a cohesive leadership team. What is a cohesive leadership team? It's a team that trusts one another. They understand the vision and it is shared with them. They have consequences that they share together. They have a shared fate. A team can engage in healthy conflict. They know that they are in this thing together and they will do anything they possibly can to make sure that they do not let a team member down and that they hit their goals. The second one is create organizational clarity. That's what Lencioni says. Create organizational clarity. Do you agree and does everybody agree on the fundamentals? If you walk the floor and you talk to anybody in the business, what would they say? Who is our customer? What do we stand for? What problems do we solve for our customers? What are the absolute, must have goals that we've got to hit this week, this quarter, this year? And then, as importantly, what are our values? How do we make decisions in the tough times? What breaks the ties and what types of things will we absolutely not tolerate in this company? What will get you fired for doing or not doing? Once you have this organizational clarity and you've made that agreement, then it's your job as a leader. To over communicate organizational clarity, which is obsession number three. What's the cadence of your meetings? When and how do you communicate? Is it at meetings? Is it a newsletter? Is it a video recording that you as a leader do for your teammates? Look, you should record. If there's something that's unclear and you haven't made a video and posted it on your company's intranet or sent it out, then look, you're responsible for that thing that's continuing to happen or to not happen. Do you participate in the trainings? Are you checking in on the training material to make sure that the training is still aligned and relevant with the direction of the company that you and the other executives have set? Do you use stories? Look, we're tribal people. We remember stories. Do you use stories and unique language because you got to water what you want to grow? If there's a story that absolutely exemplifies the decisions, the actions, the behaviors and the outcomes that makes your company great, there should be a story around it. I'm sure there is, but. But are you telling that story? Look, one of the greatest things I've ever heard from my coach and my mentor was this. Sometimes people get paid by the hour for the work that they do. Sometimes people get commission like salespeople, but leaders get paid by the conversation. And the reason you get paid by the conversation is because you have to over communicate again and again and again what the company is up to, where it's going, what everybody's piecing it is, and what's in it for us when we get there. That's pure alignment. And it is your job to create that clarity. Now, look, I don't ask myself anymore, what do I need to do today? What are my tasks? What do I need to pop out? What do I need to do? I know that the most important thing that I can do is communicate. Who do I need to communicate with today? What do I need to communicate and what do I need to explain better? Is there things that I don't understand in the business that I need to get my hands on so that I can then direct people whether we should keep doing it or not doing it? If something's unclear to me, I guarantee you it's unclear to your team. Who do I need to influence? Who do I need to impact? What needs to go faster, slower, in a different direction? Or what do we need to stop altogether? These are the questions that I wake up with when my feet hit the floor in the morning. A leader understanding that that is my most important role in the business. Fourth and final. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems. Look. Clarity of the things that matter the most must infiltrate your hiring, your performance management, your rewards, your recognitions, promotions, and even your terminations. All alignment, all hands, all minds, all bodies, all, all the time. Now take this. Read that book. But if not, listen to this. Five times. Be a leader. Go out there and speak a bold, powerful and clear future into existence. I know you can do it.
