Make Your Life Easier: Ensure Clarity

How often have you come away from a conversation at work feeling like you think you know what is required, only to arrive back at your desk with a haze in your brain and unsure as to what was agreed? In fact, this can apply not just to work, but also to situations outside work: in relationships, casual meetings, social arrangements – in fact, pretty much at any time or in any scenario.

Obtaining clarity is particularly pertinent for me at the moment, hence deciding to share a few thoughts. The nature of the work my team does means that each assignment generally brings with it numerous strands and a variety of required outcomes; picking your way through that minefield to deliver what is required can be hazardous and often treacherous, to say the least.

A primary source of stress is confusion, and where you find confusion you will also find impeded productivity and inefficiency. When deadlines are missed and objectives aren’t met it is an easy response to blame the task-setter for not being clear, and often that is the case, but blame doesn’t make what has been produced right, more relevant, or on-time, so the consequences remain unchanged. In fact, blame simply increases stress and introduces despondency, as it brings with it a sense of helplessness.

There is a responsibility on those of us to whom assignments are given to take control of the situation. I am encouraging my team to ensure that they do not walk away from a meeting with a fresh piece of work without also taking with them a clearly defined, and agreed, set of outcomes – primary and secondary, and a clear deadline. While this doesn’t eliminate the task-setter deciding what has been produced is not what he or she wanted, it does ensure that the task-doer is able to deliver what the work-giver agreed he or she wanted.

One thing that obtaining clarity is not about is abdicating responsibility. Nor is it about being able to throw your hands in the air and say ‘well you said…’ in an attempt to cast blame. Of course, if both parties agree on the goal into which the ball is to be struck then it is not the fault of the task-doer if the task-setter then decides it was the wrong goal in the first place. However, having said that, the task doer can take steps to ensure that shooting into the ‘wrong goal’ is avoided; all this requires is a little pro-activity.

Obtaining clarity is not a one-off exercise – it is a process; it is about setting a route to a successful outcome. As well as achieving clarity in that first meeting, there is a requirement to proactively manage not only the task, but the person giving the task right up to the task deadline. Things can change – sometimes we need to see a draft of something to realise that what we asked for was not what we wanted – and so ongoing review is integral to clarity.

Obviously, each task needs to be assessed on its own merits, and the approach taken needs to be relevant to the scale and scope of the assignment: clearly a task requiring a couple of hours work will be tackled differently from one that will span days, weeks or months. But there are certain principles that apply across the board.

Firstly, do not leave that first meeting without knowing at least the primary objective, the deadline, the required outcome and the parties with an interest in the task. Where possible look to identify any secondary agendas and any dependencies. Dependencies are, unsurprisingly, things required to complete the task for which we depend upon others – for example data that we need to obtain from another team. Identifying dependencies is not about establishing a potential scapegoat, but rather about ensuring that the task-setter realises that the task may depend on input from other parties, and that there is, therefore, an inherent risk within the task that may or may not hinder delivery.

Secondly, set up review milestones. Whether the job is a couple of hours or a couple of months, build in review points. If, for example, a task is given to you at 11am with a deadline of 2pm, arrange to meet with the work-giver to review progress at say 12:30 (if sufficient progress will have been made by then). What this does is ensure that the originally set trajectory is still the right one, and avoids the 2pm deadline arriving and the provided ‘solution’ being thrown out as not being what was required, even though it does meet the requirements as they were originally stated. If your task spans a longer period of time then set up regular review meetings – the shape and direction of a task can change as it develops, and timelines can be affected by factors internal to the project (dependencies, sickness etc) and external to the project (additional ‘urgent’ work arriving etc).

Finally, do not leave that meeting, or any subsequent review meetings, without agreement as to the way forward, including objectives, secondary objectives, outcomes and deadlines. Ensuring that every party with an interest in the task is in agreement goes a long way to achieving a good outcome. With one particular task-setter I often say three or four times and in three or four different ways what I believe we are looking to achieve, how we are looking to achieve it and by when; and, generally speaking, this is very effective in ensuring we both stay on the same page.

Ensuring clarity will not eliminate stress, nor will it guarantee a successful outcome – anything with a human factor is inherently fraught with danger in that respect – but it will help manage stress and deliver good quality outcomes that have a very good prospect of hitting the mark.

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