Clarity is its own correctness
Your team needs you to be clear more than they need you to be right
When we are leading a group of people in accomplishing a goal, we want to make sure things are done right.
So very reasonably we focus on first figuring out what is the correct way to do things and then try to make sure that the actions of our team are matching that model of correctness as closely as possible. The trouble is that quite often it is very difficult to determine what the “correct” thing to do is.
When we are studying a subject in school, there is a curriculum which at least provides a standard of comparison for us to measure the “correctness” of our decision making. Not so in the real world. The higher we progress, the less likely there are to be explicit standards we can measure against or step by step plans we can follow.
This lack of certainty can hold us up, what if we’re wrong about what we need to do next?
The transition from the limited but safe student domain to the unlimited but potentially disastrous real world is difficult and we never really lose this uneasiness that any decision we make may turn out to be wrong.
In fact, the more successful we are, the more responsibility we get. And when we are finally put in charge of a team, no matter how small, a significant transition must take place. Now we could not only be wrong about what we need to do but also about what we tell other people that they need to do.
The trick is to realize that the insecurity is never going to go away. We must find a way to work despite our worries about our uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate the uncertainty.
To do this we need to move from seeking the reassurance of external standards which are given to us to the self-assurance of coming up with standards ourselves. We move from the safety of a child to the responsibility of an adult.
The fact is that you as the leader are not the only one who is suffering from the stress of uncertainty. Your whole team is anxious and uncertain. But as a leader you are uniquely positioned to address that for them.
People don’t want to DO the correct thing per se, they want to be THOUGHT OF as doing the correct thing. It’s reputation not performance. They are looking to you for the standard and measure that they can use to feel more comfortable even while you are missing that very thing for yourself.
But how can you give them something that you don’t have?
The key insight is that what you don’t have, the thing you are lacking, is not a metric or standard. What you are missing is the certainty that whatever metric and standard you come up with is the right one. Your team isn’t feeling stress from being wrong, they are feeling stress from not knowing whether or not they are wrong.
What your team needs from you is clarity not correctness.
Clarity doesn’t mean that you give perfect guidance, it means that you are clear on the guidance that you do give and clear about what you don’t know.
Everyone agrees on what the decision is even if they don’t agree that it is the correct decision. Whether or not a decision is “correct” is an opinion, what the decision actually is is a fact. And we need to give our team facts, not opinions.
However clarity is not a measure of a single point in time decision, it needs to be a characteristic of your whole approach. You must give clear directions and, this is the key, consider the effect of that guidance, it’s not a fire and forget, you make the decision and then stand back to see how things fall through. You continually remain engaged.
Clarity combined with listening/measurement is the key. Clarity without input and adjustment becomes dogma and dogma is merely our reverting back to the false certainty of childhood with its attendant lack of reality.
Dogma is for children.
Having a plan is a good starting point but it is not necessarily what will carry you through to the end. Being clear and being willing to adjust is much more important than blindly following a plan simply because that is what you started with.
Not to say that you ignore it, but you don’t BLINDLY follow it. Assuming you put some thought into the plan, you don’t change it unless there is a very good reason. But again, the key is being clear about that. About what the situation actually is.
Even if you don’t exactly know all the steps, that is good information to communicate. This bit, I’m sure about, this other bit, not so much. So your team knows what to take as gospel and what to focus their initiative on.
As you begin to steer and encounter new information, you can change your directives. But being clear gives you a structure to start from. Knowing where you are helps you to figure out where you need to go.
Being smart is neither sufficient nor necessary to be a good leader, you just need the self awareness to see when you are being clear and when you are not.
