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Enhance your leadership skills through being explicit

Written by: Ali Stewart

Article Overview: Explicitness is part of the leader's toolkit, it is very important, under-estimated skill. Understanding and using it will make a significant and powerful impact on a leader's effectiveness. It is rarely taught however, and often leaders are assumed to have this essential skill .... few have.

Enhance your leadership skills through being explicit



A rarely taught skill which leaders can develop to increase their success

The skill is Explicitness ... the context and how do you do it is explained here

Setting the scene for Explicitness

There is a right way to lead! Having understood this, the depth and nuances come through each leader's own unique quality and flair.

To what extent has your own style and flair helped you, and when has it let you down?

Typically it will let you down because you haven't yet found the process and the particular skills ....

... or if, as I'll demonstrate later, you are caught off guard!

There is a right order for things to happen, a right way to go about them, and usually difficulties occur when a stage in the process has been missed out, or when the right skills have not been mastered.

The greatest leaders are those who intuitively understand the mindset, the process and the skills to make it work. And interestingly anyone can do it - you do not have to be a 'charismatic hero' - anyone can be a leader. By understanding the right mindset, process and skills, then rigorously learning and applying them will set you on the path to success.

What if you applied the same process to leading people as an engineer might apply to the refining of machines, buildings and structures? Not a comfortable thought perhaps, we are after all infinitely more complex and wonderful than mere machines. But, what if there was a way of leading people with such precision and order that everything would simply slot into place? What if applying this order would set you apart as an inspirational leader? Now, that would be worth doing, would it not?

This analogy will set the scene ...

You are a leader, you take your team to the top of a tall building, a skyscraper in fact. It has a flat roof, it is dark, there is no barrier round the edge of the roof .... and the team members have roller skates on. You ask them to skate around, but they huddle together in the middle not daring to go far - it is very scary for them. But now, if you floodlight the roof and put railings round the edge then the team will skate to the edges, using all the space, they will put on a magnificent display exceeding all your expectations.

If you fail to shine the light, which is your vision, or fail to put up the right railings, which are your boundaries, or fail to spot when some members of your team are skating exactly the way you want and are encouraging it, that's when things go wrong. It is hard work and stressful.

To achieve this clarity of purpose, to authentically shine the light and set the boundaries, a leader needs specific skills. And one of the most under-emphasised skills to keep everything fluid and working, like in any good engineering process, is explicitness. It sits best in the early stages of the leader's journey in developing an individual or a team.

And this is what an engineer who now understands explicitness, as captured beautifully in Dr Derek Biddle's book, Leading & Developing High Performance, said .....

"As an engineer, 20 years of management have gone by thinking about systems, machinery, investment budgets etc. Only now I have discovered how to oil, tune, grease and maintain the biggest resource .... human." Muzaffer Erdal Kilic, BSc.Nav.Arch.M.Mech.Eng, General Manager



So what is explicitness? It is ......

.....specifying in clear, unambiguous, behavioural terms, what is required for successful operation, and what will be regarded as poor performance Dr Derek Biddle

The Art of Explicitness

Explicitness is part of the leader's toolkit. Understanding and using it will make a significant and powerful impact on a leader's effectiveness. It is rarely taught however, and often leaders are assumed to have this skill .... few have.

What happens when we fail to be explicit?

Typically we don't get what want. A recent trip to a ten-pin bowling alley on a fun outing with my 9 year old son brought this home to me again, with painful awareness.

It was a completely impromptu visit, decided on a whim between seeing 'X-Men Origins' in the cinema and going to Burger King for tea.

So, in the bowling alley the young lady behind the desk, having taken our money, said to me, "I'll take your shoes".

Without thinking I slipped off my flat silver coloured summer pumps and was about to exchange them for a pair of less than glamorous lace-up bowling shoes which the lady put on the counter for me - then consciousness kicked in. I held onto my shoes for a moment longer and said, "Actually, will my shoes be OK?"

What I meant was will they be OK to bowl in, after all they were flat with soft, light coloured soles, just as good for the job as my son's trainers, which seemingly weren't in question.

And she said, "Oh yeah, they'll be quite safe", at which point she grabbed my shoes and put them behind the counter, in a place I could neither see nor reach, then she walked away and out of sight!

My son thought the incident was very funny.

Clearly, I wasn't prepared ... and leaders often aren't prepared for situations as they arise, quite often we are caught on the hoof. In the spur of the moment I had not been explicit and the fact that I was left with ugly, ill-fitting shoes which made me slap my feet like a duck as I walked, was completely my own fault.

How easily simple questions can be misinterpreted and situations can get out of hand. The consequences aren't always as inconsequential as in my example.

In your role as parent, how often might you give an instruction to your child like "tidy your room", and when you go and look nothing much has moved. They will say something like "I thought you meant just pick my clothes up off the floor". Oh really!

Or as leader you might say to a staff member "I need you to identify the problems in the system and report back" and nothing happens because they have no idea what constitutes a 'problem' in your eyes - to them everything is working fine.

If you are not properly explicit, you are setting your staff member up to fail, and by the way setting yourself up to fail too!

Being explicit takes more time at the outset, but it saves heaps of time in the long term. For instance in the staff example mentioned above, "I need you to identify the problems in the system", it would have been better to say exactly what you want. Something like this:

"I am concerned we are taking 3 days to process chits, this is too long and I need it brought down to 2 days. There seems to be a lot of duplication between what you do and what Jo's team does. I would like you to identify the areas of duplication and think how these might be eradicated. Also look for anything else that can be done to streamline the system to ensure that all chits can be processed in 2 days.

Please do this by Friday. We will sit down together then and you can tell me your findings, offer solutions, and identify any issues you see that might prevent us achieving a 2-day turnaround.

Coming back to me with no suggestions or areas for improvements in the process will be unacceptable. Are you clear about what I am asking you to do?"

It takes longer to say, but the job will be done quicker and you are far more likely to get the result you want. Also, being explicit in this way makes it infinitely easier to appraise the staff member's performance, you know exactly what you are measuring.

A fear of being patronising?

There are often things getting in the way which prevent leaders from being explicit which may be conscious barriers, or indeed imposed by the unconscious mind. A barrier could be to do with culture perhaps, like this, "chuck them in at the deep end, that's what happened to me", "let them learn the hard way, it's the only way to do it".

Or maybe we feel it is patronising. It certainly shouldn't be if presented with the right positive intent of helping the other person to succeed, and getting the task done well. A simple test is to ask yourself if you would you prefer to be on the receiving end of instructions which are clearly explained, or more ambiguous instructions which are open to doubt?

The extent to which you need to be explicit will very much depend on the stage of development your staff member is at. The leader's job is understanding the stages and adapting their style appropriately ... but that would need to be the subject of another paper!

Keeping with explicitness for now, or rather the lack of it, statements like "smarten yourself up" or "you really need to work on your e-mails, they're terrible" are far too vague and leave the meaning completely open to interpretation.

The dictionary definition of explicitness is ....

'expressing all details in a clear and obvious way, leaving no doubt as to the intended meaning'

In summary

Explicitness brings tremendous clarity and carries its own power for producing results. But it has to be delivered with the right mindset. That is, delivered with a mindset of trust and genuineness ...

• where you have a vision of people performing at their very best
• where you are commenting on behaviour as distinct from personality
• where you are catching people doing something right
• where the reasons you are giving feedback and being explicit about the way you want things done, is to provide every opportunity for the individual to develop their own personal effectiveness, and to ensure the team as a whole achieves its objectives

In so doing the power of the team is harnessed, no-one is left behind because part of explicitness is being able to deal with poor performance and take appropriate action.

Being explicit requires you to be there, to be visible, to notice when things need to be done and how, and especially notice when things are being done well. This becomes all the more acute when offices are virtual, your staff don't work at the same location, or you are constantly travelling. Your 'being visible', the light you are shining, and being able to lead with clarity and explicitness, requires attention, commitment and passion. It is an art, and it pays to get it right.

As a leader you can inspire excellence in others through developing the art of explicitness.

Ali Stewart

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Article Tags: explicitness, leadership skills



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