Are you asking for things clearly?

For leaders who feel chronically in a rush.

It takes effort to be clear in what you’re asking for. And yet...it is always worth it.?

So, you have a project that needs delegating out to the team. You know what ‘done’ looks like and you know the best way to do it, right? Great. Great,?however…knowing that and communicating it to your team can be two very different things.

Let’s jump ahead for a moment and talk about what happens in our brains when we don't have the information we need. Our brains are?pattern recognition machines. They are constantly scanning for information to build out our internal model so we can understand what is happening in the world. Historically, this is of course so we don’t get eaten by lions. So far, so awesome.?

Today, most of us have fewer lion-related risks in our lives, which frees up our brains to look for other patterns (with one eye out for lions still, of course - our brains are not fools). When we don’t have the information we need for a task or project, our brain doubles down on finding that pattern and finding that potential danger, so it can keep us safe. Relentlessly, our brains will ask, ‘Is this it? Is that it? Maybe it’s this? IS IT THIS?’...until our grey matter feels it has the facts needed to understand and, thus, to keep us alive.?

Great resource for lion situations. Exhausting resource for everyday situations. Our brains eat so much of our body’s fuel when we’re on high alert in this way - it is a tiring and stressful mode to operate in.?

Coming back to the present, I need to break some bad news here: This is your team when you haven’t briefed them properly.?

Don’t worry, you’re not the lion. But if you haven’t clearly explained what you need, you have most likely left your team in a quiet spin, brains on overdrive, scanning for the missing pieces of the pattern and expending precious brain energy on trying to understand what has been asked of them. Rather than using those creative juices on solving the problem you attempted to task them with.?

It can be extremely hard to shift out of operating like this when you have (as so many leaders have in the last few years) grown accustomed to feeling overstretched, looking at the hours in the day and wondering how to crowbar things into those hours. But nobody wins in this scenario. You may have saved some minutes as you raced onto the next thing, but you’re setting up subpar work and unnecessary cognitive strain for your team.?

Let’s use a really simple example to illustrate. Here is the same task, asked for in two ways:?

• Please update the language in the proposal to say 'problem-solvers' instead of “agents of change”.

and

• I want to change some of the language in the introduction of the proposal we are working on for Acme Corp. Where we use 'agents of change' to describe ourselves in paragraphs two and three, I would like to say 'problem-solvers' instead. Please update this.

The first one took you no time at all to tell your team, but probably left someone looking through documents to try and find what you are referring to. The second took you longer to articulate, and may have used more of your focus than you'd like but…it says what you mean.?

It does take longer to ask for things clearly, and that’s hard when you feel like you have an active time deficit. However, by not asking with clarity, the job will take your team longer, be more tiring, and may well chip away at their confidence.

We could talk about this for hours but we know you’re in a rush ?? So here are a few swift things you can implement to make sure you’re tasking with clarity. And, if you’re reading this and think the problem runs a little deeper at your organisation and can’t be fixed with these little habits,?drop us a line. We can definitely help with that.?

Tasking with clarity: A quick how-to

• Start at the start, not in the middle. Don’t brief people like they know what you are talking about already.
• Make it normal and safe for your team to feel comfortable asking clarification or ‘detail’ questions - and even just saying ‘I don’t understand’.
• Teach playback habits, so your team has an easy mechanism to confirm they understand next steps: ‘What I am hearing is you want X thing, for X purpose and X outcome - is that right?’
• Remember you’re not tasking yourself. Does your team member know everything you know? Probably not. So, knowing that, what do you need to tell them?
• Situate what you are asking for with simple specifics. Are you talking about a video? If so, name it (and where it makes sense, give its location). Don’t just say ‘the video’.
• Do you know the team member you’re delegating to? If you know them well, maybe you know they work better if they have time to reflect and come back with questions to interrogate a problem? Accommodate this when the project allows.?
• Make time for this upfront, so you don't have to make *a lot* of time for it later.?