5 minutes
What it is, why you need it, how to get it
How much time do people in your organization spend each day clarifying some aspect of work that should or could have been clear to begin with? How many people seem confused about customer preferences, product nuances or compliance issues? The answer I usually hear is, “Too many!”
Organizations of all sizes operate with significant ambiguity about foundational issues ranging from the organization’s purpose and annual priorities, to the processes they use to deliver customer value. While such ambiguity is common, it comes at enormous long-term cost in the form of excess expense, faulty decisions, unnecessary risk and team members drained of the energy they need for productive effort.
Clarity is the solution. Clarity—the quality of being easily and accurately understood—provides everyone with guideposts pointing them in the same direction toward achieving the organization’s most important goals. Below I highlight five organizational Ps—purpose, priorities, process, performance, and problem solving—that are common areas of ambiguity yet which, by putting clarity first, can enable organizations to achieve outstanding performance.
Purpose. Purpose is the organization’s why. Why are you in business? Why do you deliver your particular goods or services? These are simple questions, yet many organizations wrestle with them. For some, leadership hasn’t stopped to consider, define and communicate the organization’s why. For others, an organizational focus on what they do (the good or service they provide) occupies their attention.
When leaders define the organization’s why and communicate it widely, it brings enormous results. Knowing why is definitive. It guides decisions. It helps leaders decide whether a business opportunity or a proposed partnership serves or detracts from purpose. As important, it provides the glue for employees to become and stay engaged.
To achieve purpose clarity, answer these questions: Who is your customer? What problem does your product solve for your customer? Why did your organization choose to solve that problem over another? What ultimate value does solving that problem bring? Why does that matter? Answers to those questions will reveal your why.
Priorities. Organizations need to say “no” or “not yet” to dozens of problems to be solved and ideas to explore to concentrate resources on what matters most now for achieving defined business objectives. This means narrowing organizational priorities down to the critical few, a challenge given that each leader often advocates for his or her own ideas, placing too much on the organizational plate. When that happens, organizations suffer from “organizational ADD” (attention deficit disorder) and waste resources solving the wrong problems—or starting and stopping projects as the newest idea absorbs budget and talent.
Clarity requires leaders to define and stick with a critical few number of priorities. Hoshin kanri—a management approach that originated In Japan and is referred to as “strategy deployment” in the U.S.—is a highly effective method for achieving a short list of clear priorities. Among other steps in creating the strategy deployment plan, leaders review all projects planned or underway in terms of the organizational problem they will solve and reach consensus on the most important issues to tackle now.
Process. Ask the “person on the street” what makes an organization great and the majority will name the good or service that organization offers. But without robust, seamless processes for fulfilling customer needs, products would never reach customers. It’s the processes behind value delivery that enable greatness.
Clarity-driven processes are well designed, well- executed, and well-managed. All three parts matter: design that incorporates safely, efficiency and effectiveness; execution by the right person with the right skills and right level of authority; and management by way of up-to-date, visually robust standard work and relevant key performance indicators to reveal when improvement is needed.
Performance: How is the organization doing? How much progress has it made toward realizing its priorities? Senior leaders may be able to answer those questions, but can everyone? Do senior leaders know how the organization is performing operationally—as experienced by the customer—or only financially?
Few organizations track and communicate diverse performance metrics in a way that allows everyone to understand how their work contributes to organizational goals. That lack of performance clarity creates an ambiguous environment in which people unwittingly spend their time performing at inadequate levels or doing excellent work on low-priority efforts.
Organizations with performance clarity track performance using relevant, tiered KPIs displayed on visual dashboards to communicate where the organization is now and where it aims to go. At the top-tier, organizational level, track no more than nine KPIs, which include operational, customer-oriented and financial metrics. Further down the organization, departments and work teams define more granular KPIs—also visually displayed—to focus their efforts on activities that will achieve the top tier KPIs.
Problem Solving. Organizations struggling with ambiguity can often see it in their problem solving, as people at all levels regularly jump to conclusions and take action long before they have clarity on the problem, let alone the reasons for it. In other words, they react before they understand.
Problems are inevitable in business, which makes problem-solving capabilities the most important performance enhancers an organization can have. The best results come from equipping everyone with problem-solving skills and providing opportunities to practice them with the guidance of an experienced coach.
Clear problem solving provides a structured question-based method for approaching problems with curiosity and humility, which leads to more effective results. The questions guide a problem solver through five critical phases: clarify what the problem is; learn about the problem; experiment with countermeasures; assess results of the experiment(s); and roll out effective countermeasures.
Gaining clarity in any of these five Ps will boost performance. But achieving outstanding business performance requires that you build a culture of clarity where all parties value it and are rewarded for seeking it. Building that culture begins with leaders pursuing personal clarity every day in their thinking, their communication and their actions. When clarity begins to replace ambiguity-laced norms, the organization becomes unshackled and performance at all levels begins to soar.
Karen Martin, president of the global consulting firm The Karen Martin Group Inc., is a leading authority on lean management and business performance improvement. Her clients have included Fortune 500 companies in almost every industry and government agencies at local, state and federal levels. Her latest book, Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance, has just been released by McGraw-Hill.
