One of the most difficult tasks for any leader is effective communication. It is vital to get your message across to everyone in the company – or country – in a way that encourages agreement, acceptance of the task and a commitment from the person hearing it to contribute. While consensus is rare and much has to be carried out by majority acceptance, or even executive decisions, understanding is vital – and hard.
None of us should need reminding of the perils of mansplaining, but many of us missed the memo on execusplaining – dodging the real issues with excuses and half-truths. The dangers are just as great: the real risk of infantilising the very people you are hoping to inspire to help you take the company to new heights.
But how do you give enough information to carry on with a sense of purpose?
It’s a conundrum that has vexed me for some time. At the business school where I am dean, we pride ourselves on killing clichés and junking jargon, but it is all too often far too easy to slip into those cultish and expensive mantras dreamed up by advertising executives.
If we are honest, we are either all doing it, or we’ve experienced it.
There’s the strategy which we get by doing the traditional SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), which will then be fleshed out by KPIs (key performance indicators) for the people we hope are going to translate this wonderful vision and mission into boosting the bottom line.
The problem is that when those of us in the C-suite were having our visions on our missions, we probably excluded the people we need to do the work.
The word vision comes from the Latin Videre to see. Mission comes from Mittere to send. You must be able to visualise this great future to be properly prepared to be sent on this journey to achieve that.
The people who set the strategy and then draft the KPIs don’t tell the recipients how to do the job, they tell them what to do. It is a major stumbling block.
As business leaders it is our job to inspire people to share the vision and be excited about the mission, but we can get it very wrong in the process if we don’t get them on board – relying on charisma rather than comprehension.
An example I came across recently was where a company did a SWOT analysis and thought their greatest strength was their IT system – but no one asked their clients.
It turns out the clients couldn’t care because the IT systems made no difference to their lives, but what did make a difference was that few of the company’s employees were pleasant, few smiled when they dealt with their clients or could explain things to them in a simple way. What the newfangled IT system had done was to take the human out of the equation, which had been the main attraction for the business relationship in the first place.
KPIs are the next crisis point, they are supposed to be designed to get the outcomes, but they end up as injunctions to the people who have to meet them. The people who set the strategy and then draft the KPIs don’t tell the recipients how to do the job, they tell them what to do. It is a major stumbling block.
No one owns up to the fact that the KPIs are a guess. Human behaviour is incredibly complex, but the anxious drivers in middle and senior management will ignore this as they do their best to align the unalignable, totally ignoring the reality that high-performing individuals don’t align around one thought, they coordinate around a rich picture. We shouldn’t want them to homogeneously align; they should be too busy thinking out of the box to get into corporate lockstep – sitting in the box.
KPIs are like telling staff to rely on paper maps, rather than a GPS.
KPIs aren’t truth – they are an experiment, a hypothesis. KPIs can easily slip into a dogma – and that generally leaves you with two options as a business leader: you have either ended up dumbsizing your managers and their staff or you’ve lit the touchpaper to a quiet revolution by turning them into secret dissidents.
You could have unlocked a brand-new Pandora’s box of half-truths and subterfuge as they try to explain how they missed their KPIs because of someone else’s failure, and end up throwing their colleagues under the bus in the process.
The other problem is that the feedback loop is too long, so even if the answers are honest, by the time you’ve gone through the process of reviewing the KPIs, the oil tanker has steamed on regardless, ever closer to the uncharted rocky reefs ready to rip its keel out.
KPIs are like telling staff to rely on paper maps, rather than a GPS. The GPS allows you to get to your destination the best way possible, taking into account roadworks, traffic congestion and new developments.
Old-fashioned maps, on the other hand, are effectively out of date the moment you buy them. But if you don’t allow anyone the latitude to deviate, then you can’t get cross when they get stuck because there’s a storm drain that’s being dug up across the road or load shedding has knocked out the traffic lights at a major intersection.
We must give people the choice to live and learn, we must trust them to do the best they can to bring all of themselves to work and achieve the higher overarching strategy.
We need honesty to be able to face up to our mistakes, the vulnerability to accept them, and the absolute determination afterwards never to repeat them.
We need corporate warriors, but all too often our very best intentions are creating entire cohorts of anxious corporate worriers ticking boxes and living from payday to payday without being caught out.
We can fix this by communicating clearly and working to instil a “just culture” in the workplace. Fear drives mistakes out of sight. Mistakes are inevitable and we make it possible to talk about them openly. Mistakes out of sight metastasise into bigger ones.
For most businesses that’s slow poison, but in the aviation world, where I worked before teaching strategy and running a business school, hidden mistakes end up with pilots flying into mountains – with a catastrophic consequence.
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In the New Zealand mountains, where I was flying as a charter pilot, the answer was to bring all the pilots together in a no-holds monthly forum, face-to-face, to discuss problems they had experienced. Once, one of my mistakes on a newly learnt procedure was the focus of the conversation. The experience was simultaneously one of the most humbling and the most exhilarating I have had. Learning on steroids.
We need honesty to be able to face up to our mistakes, the vulnerability to accept them, and the absolute determination afterwards never to repeat them. It’s all about creating that just culture, empowering people from the ground up, and simplifying the strategies – not by infantilising the people you are speaking to, but by explaining what it is you want and letting them find a way to help you achieve that. That way you build the people who will build your business, which in turn will build South Africa.
Simple, isn’t it? Except it’s not, but we can start by stopping the execusplaining and dumbsizing, because we all deserve far better. DM