Bringing Clarity to Your Organization

Mark J. Tager, M.D.

One of my favorite exercises is called the matching game. It involves asking several employees in a department to write down and prioritize the five most important tasks in their jobs. Then we turn to their manager/supervisor and ask him or her to write down a prioritized list of important tasks for these same subordinates. We then compare the lists. To our chagrin, it often appears that these people have never even met, their lists are so dissimilar in tasks and priorities. To help move an organization forward, you need clarity. Employees need to have a common focus with clear, concise and measurable goals. They need to have the tools and training to achieve the objectives. They also need to know the importance of their work and how what they do contributes to the company and how they are serving their customers.

How can you bring greater focus to work efforts? Here are some tips:

•  Be more surgical in how you listen and scan, and the good stuff will find you. Have a concise listening strategy or get buried.

•  Remember that every project—every request—comes down to bartering for people’s time and attention.

•  Step back and reassess your focus periodically. Are the things you are working on the most important items for short and long-term success? Just because people are busy, it doesn’t mean they are busy doing the right thing.

•  Get closest to the people who are closest to the action, those who can provide the best information about customer needs and market demands.

•  Make certain your plans stand the test of reality. Our biggest limitation is no longer the reach of our imagination. It’s now our inability to order, make sense of, and connect everything that demands our attention.

Achieving simplicity its hard work, in large part because it involves making the complex clear. How important is this transformation for organizations today? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best many decades ago, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I’d give my life for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” As companies work in dynamic marketplaces with increasing competition and rising client expectations, the ability to flawlessly execute plans is more critical than ever. Often the best approach is the simplest: make sure everyone is clear on where the organization is going and what they need to do to help it get there.

© 2003. ChangeWell Inc. Reprint permission granted in whole or in part when the following credit appears: "Reprinted with permission from Dr. Mark Tager, ChangeWell, Inc. wwwchangewell.com"

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