Quick snippets from our morning read on Monday, 25th January 2021
What does proper planning and implementation look like for you and your team? In today’s morning read, we look at How to lead with clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility, an article by Justin Rosenstein
When a team—a group of people working together toward a common goal—has clarity, everyone has a clear understanding of everything they need to know about the work required to effectively achieve their goal.
In an effort to cut through the chaos and confusion, teams resort to endless emails, chat threads, and status meetings. But these are symptoms of a larger issue: the lack of systematic clarity that would enable people to focus on their actual work instead of getting bogged down in the work about work of continually re-assessing what needs to get done every day.
Moving teams from chaos to clarity is one of the most vital functions of leadership. Unfortunately, leaders tend to overestimate how much clarity their team has. After all, the plan is already clear in their heads, and individual contributors tend not to surface the need for more clarity as it’s embarrassing to admit you’re not sure what you’re supposed to be doing—or why.
In my experience, I’ve found that there are three kinds of clarity high-performing teams have: clarity of purpose, clarity of plan, and clarity of responsibility. Here’s why each is important and some concrete steps to achieve them.
1. Clarity of purpose: start with why
It’s important that everyone on a team share a common purpose, a clear understanding of why they’re doing whatever it is they’re working on in the first place.
For one, this is just practical. Unless you run an assembly line, teammates will always have to make judgment calls, and the team’s purpose provides the context in which to do so effectively. A marketer with clarity on their customer’s goals will more effectively empathize with their audience. An engineer with clarity on how people will use what they’re building can make performance tradeoffs that optimize the customer experience. A VP with clarity on the company’s unique mission and vision will stay focused on the most important initiatives to accomplish that mission—instead of getting distracted by the endless list of potential opportunities or what competitors are doing.
2. Clarity of plan
With clarity of purpose, the team knows the destination. With clarity of plan, the team knows how to get there. The plan you co-create with your team defines the current best understanding of how best to achieve the mission of the team.
It typically has multiple layers, each getting progressively more detailed until you’ve connected your overall mission down to actionable steps. You can think of this as a pyramid of clarity. The exact layers appropriate to you will depend on the size and scope of your team.
3. Clarity of responsibility
A team has clarity of responsibility when each person knows exactly what role they have in the execution of the plan.
At the most basic level, this requires each part of the plan (from individual tasks to high-level objectives) to have an owner or a directly responsible individual. Generally, each item should have exactly one owner: When no one is responsible for something, it doesn’t get done. When two or more people share responsibility for the same task or objective, it may still not get done, or it may lead to people stepping on each others’ toes. (A huge amount of internal company politics is often a symptom of two people each thinking they’re responsible for the same thing.)
You can read the full and very insightful article here.
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