Clear Words, Ambiguous Understanding

How many times have you provided one of your team members with directions for completing a task you needed their help getting wrapped up by a certain time, only to get something far different from what you had hoped or miss the mark entirely? I’m sure we’ve all been on both ends of scenarios like that. We knew exactly what we meant when asking for help, but somehow it got lost in translation…

Think back to the four specific values I shared before - respect, integrity, communication, and excellence - and consider how much variance could creep in, even with such simple wording and relatively clear definitions included, if every individual involved had to decide for themselves exactly how they were to apply those in their respective roles. Then add all the other daily stresses of a to-do list, plus a fair amount of pressure to drive revenue in a way that makes a stockholder happy. I have vivid memories of watching the games that were played to make the quarterly numbers look good for Wall Street, and the company I worked for never came close to having a mess like Enron had. With even a little bit of ambiguity around our values, even the fanciest definitions won’t do much to keep things from going really wrong - especially when the biggest rewards are going to the folks who are openly skirting the boundaries of those values.

To understand why so many organizations miss the mark, in exemplifying their core business values or even making sure everyone on the team even knows what they are, take a look how an article called “The Impact of Organizational Ambiguity on Performance Evaluation Metrics” opened:

Organizational ambiguity, often defined as the presence of uncertainty in decision-making processes, plays a significant role in shaping business dynamics. In a recent study by McKinsey & Company, it was revealed that over 70% of executives reported experiencing high levels of ambiguity during strategic planning. This phenomenon can affect everything from employee morale to overall productivity, with companies facing up to a 25% drop in performance when key stakeholders are uncertain about the direction of their initiatives. The story of a leading tech firm illustrates this point vividly; as they expanded globally, inconsistent messaging led to confusion among teams, resulting in a staggering $75 million loss attributed to misaligned goals and unclear expectations.

The concept of organizational ambiguity is not merely an abstract idea; it manifests itself in very tangible ways within organizations. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, organizations with high levels of clarity in communication saw a 32% improvement in employee engagement scores compared to those that struggled with ambiguity.

The organization that published this was focused specifically on the importance of providing clear feedback during performance evaluations (and how their product or service aided with that), and we’ll touch on that more soon. For now, let’s think about how unlikely it would be for folks in the organizations they studied to have much clarity when more than 70% of the executives admitted to “high levels of ambiguity”. John Maxwell’s famous quote, “Everything rises and falls on leadership,” immediately comes to my mind!

What do you think the chances are that, if you and I were operating under those four relatively simple values but felt tremendous pressure to achieve results - especially if we were aware of a “25% drop in performance” stemming from “uncertainty about the direction” of our organization’s initiatives - we’d have different ideas for how those values applied to the work we were doing? Even if your picture only varied from mine slightly, the difference in how we approached our work could be dramatic - and that’s assuming both of us actually knew what the core values of the business actually were. Since that’s nowhere close to a safe assumption to make, that’s where we’ll pick up next time…