Ambiguity Kills

Ambiguity kills. It kills deals. It kills employee longevity. It kills momentum in an organization.

If we look back at the "unexpected" issues we've dealt with this year most of them will have some kind of ambiguity at the core of the problem.

A leader's number one job is to create clarity and coach their people to create clarity in their interactions internally and externally so that ambiguity removal becomes part of the culture in their organization.

Think of the number of times we've heard a salesperson say, "oh, I plan to call them on <date>" when asked about an "opportunity" bloating the middle of their funnel. "I plan to call them" means that "prospect" isn't expecting our salesperson's call. Imagine if "I plan to call" instead sounded like, "we have a call scheduled for," which at least means there's no ambiguity about when the call will happen. Even better if "we have a call scheduled for" is tagged with "and here's what we will cover and the choices we will make at the end of the call." Now there's real clarity in that interaction which is more likely to get us a result, not a good fit or qualified prospect, than the hope inherent in "I plan to call..."

Internally, the number of team members who left for "more money" or "a new opportunity," when really the path from the role they were in to a role higher in the organization was completely ambiguous (I was one). The late Tony Hsieh wrote about this in Delivering Happiness, where he described how Zappos split the role of "buyer" into "Buyer 1, 2, 3" with clear benchmarks for advancement when they discovered a lot of turnover in their Buyer group because new hires didn't have a clear path from "Buyer" to "Senior Buyer."

Clearing up ambiguity in a career path is like extending our onboarding plan with specific, observable, measurable behavior targets that are mutually agreed on at onboarding. Sometimes a certain role may have a limited amount of progress. That's fantastic if we're clear about that up front with our team member so they have a sense of what their time with our organization might be and we have a timeline for refilling that role.

For ambiguity removal on opportunities, punting any opportunity from our sales funnel that doesn't have a clear next step in both our team member's calendar and their prospect's calendar will help our team understand that clarity is king with their prospects.

A powerful way to check the clarity in our communication is solicit feedback, in whatever form or fashion will get us the best data, from our team on how ambiguous is our vision, mission, delegation attempts and coaching. We might think we're crystal clear and our team feels like we're given them frosted glass when we're communicating.

A little ambiguity is okay. Attempting to remove all ambiguity usually causes us to run counter to David Sandler's rule "never manage anything you can't control."

By focusing on creating clarity in all of our interactions we're less likely to have head slap "why did I say/do" moments and less "unexpected" fires to fight.

Until next time... go lead.