Your Entire Leadership Team – Not Just the CEO – Is Responsible for Creating Clarity. Use These Questions to Dispel Confusion.
Communication about corporate objectives, plans, and initiatives cascades through the organization from top to bottom. But how the messaging is developed in a Scaling Up organization is vastly different than it formulates within a traditional corporate hierarchy.
In traditional organizations, the CEO speaks – and everyone else carries the message outward. The clarity of the message being delivered is viewed as the CEO’s responsibility. This is not entirely surprising, since a fundamental rule in communication is that the sender is responsible for ensuring that a message is understood.
However, in the Scaling Up world, we take a different approach. Responsibility for communication, as with so many other tasks and initiatives, is shared. Making one person solely responsible for the clarity of a message creates a bottleneck at best and predisposes an organization to creating cloudy messaging at worst. Within Scaling Up, the entire leadership team is responsible for driving for clarity.
How? By asking more – and better – questions.
Ripples Grow Into Tsunamis
Sharing responsibility and eliminating bottlenecks aren’t the only – or even the most important – reasons for tasking the leadership team with creating clarity. The real benefit is avoiding the tsunamis of confusion that result when a seed of confusion at the senior management level snowballs, picking up momentum and growing larger as it ripples outward to the frontline team.
Think for a minute of the childhood game of “Telephone.” Children sit in a circle, passing a whispered message around the group. By the time the message gets back to the original sender, it’s significantly distorted. It’s funny during a game, but far less so when the misinterpreted message impacts business results, people, your organization’s reputation, and the bottom line.
Questions to Drive for Clarity
Questions – even those deemed “silly,” “basic” or “simple” – help to extract valuable detail to paint a clearer picture of where the organization is headed and what needs to happen to achieve a goal.
Asking questions to which you think you already know the answer can be helpful, as well. You may discover that you’ve made an incorrect assumption about a situation. You may find that everyone in the room has a slightly different definition for a word or problem. You may even find that although you have the answer or know a key piece of information, not everyone does.
Here are examples of the types of questions you can ask – and why:
- “What are we doing?” (Ensure that everyone agrees about the mission, objective, or task being discussed.)
- “Why are we doing this?” (Clarify the reason for an action.)
- “What is the proper sequence or order of operation?” (Ensure that everyone is on the same page about how a task should be done. This can identify potential conflicts and/or inefficiencies.)
- “Why are we doing it this way?” (Open up a conversation to possibly find a better way to do something. Head off noncompliance rooted in “But I know a better way to do it.”)
- “What does ‘done’ look like?” (Establish an observable, measurable end to the project or task so that those responsible – and the person measuring the result – know when the work is done.)
- “What does ‘success’ look like?” (Just because something is done doesn’t mean it’s successful – and “success” can mean something different to every person.)
- “How are we measuring results – and who is accountable?” (In Scaling Up, one person needs to be identified as being accountable for a result. Everyone on the team should know who that person is and how they are measuring results.)
- “Who is responsible for what?” (Walk through the project or task and make sure you know who is actually doing the work.)
- “What approvals are needed – and who is approving?” (Spell this out up front to avoid delays.)
- “What resources do we need?” (Identify this up front to head off any potential challenges or conflicts.)
- “What do all of the key words and terms mean?” (Different words can have slightly different meanings. Make sure everyone is clear about the terms being used related to the project or task at hand. For example, “prospect” is a common term in marketing. But some companies define it as anyone who could potentially buy a product or service. Others define it more narrowly as someone who has taken action to enter a sales pipeline.)
- “What are the milestones and deadlines?” (Make sure everyone is clear on what needs to happen and by when.)
- “What potential challenges or pitfalls might we encounter?” (You might think a project will be smooth sailing, while another member of the senior leadership team foresees nothing but disaster. Know what you’re heading into.)
- “Who needs to know about this?” (People who are working on a project or task obviously need to know about it. But those who may be affected by the project – either the work itself or the end result – may need to be kept in the loop, too.)
- “How will we communicate about this?” (Work together as a team to create a plan for cascading communication throughout the organization.)
Ask Better Questions, Get Better Results
A popular personal development maxim is “the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask.” This statement holds true for Scaling Up organizations. Use the 15 questions in this article to ask questions that drive for clarity, creating the clear messages and guidance your organization needs to drive results.
