How to Distinguish Requests From Requirements

“With a request, you can decline freely. With a requirement, you can decline, but there will be a significant cost.” – Kari Granger 

To listen to this and other episodes of the Leadership Impact podcast: https://grangernetwork.com/28

The Recap

Fundamentally, humans are not awesome at distinguishing between requests and requirements. That point of miscommunication easily erodes trust in relationships and undermines a team’s focus on priority projects. When we begin to see where the wires get crossed (and the huge impact that causes), new pathways for circumventing these problems become apparent. Join Kari Granger and Paul Adams as they unpack this ubiquitous breakdown and give us conversational doorways to getting onto the same page with our bosses, colleagues, direct reports, spouses, and children.

Tweetable Moments

“Early in my career, questioning whether the boss’s directives were really requirements made me VP of distribution in six months.”

“When you open the conversation about requests and requirements with your team, you can create enormous new space within your organization to generate the future you are after.’”

“When her boss said it wasn’t needed it for two weeks, she almost fell over. Had she not clarified, she would have stayed up all night and moved everything else aside to those things done.”

“It’s valuable for bosses to realize that the propensity people have to do a good job — to please them and to advance within the organization — can cause people to hear each thing they say as a requirement that must be done right away.”  

“If we are relating to something as a requirement, there is very little room to say ‘no’ or to counter-offer. But, when we’re clear we’re dealing with an actual request, we can negotiate, we can counter-offer, and we can say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

“When people hear everything as a requirement, they often don’t take the action and then they hide out about what they didn’t complete and/or they make the boss wrong for issuing too many requirements.”

To listen to the episode in its entirety and read the show notes, visit https://grangernetwork.com/28. There you will find additional episodes from this series and links to continue engaging with us!

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