They understand what you want. So why aren’t they doing it?
He’d read the leadership books. He’d tried to be fair, supportive, constructive. He’d explained what he expected and given people time to improve.
Then the same problem would turn up again.
He couldn’t understand why his team weren’t learning.
They were experienced. Surely they weren’t confused about what he wanted. Yet he was spending more and more time revisiting things he thought had already been dealt with.
And work was becoming less enjoyable.
The same explanation, again
This is often the point where you decide you need to be clearer.
So you explain the expectation again. Follow up more closely. Remind people what was agreed. Perhaps make the consequences clearer.
All reasonable things to do when someone genuinely hasn’t understood.
But what if they have?
If capable people appear to understand what you want and the same problem keeps returning, you may no longer have a communication problem.
So what else might be going on?
Diagnosis is often poor
A survey reported in HBR asked 106 C-suite executives across 91 organisations about problem diagnosis. 85% said their organisations were bad at it. 87% said it carried significant costs.
Managers tend to move quickly towards solving what they believe the problem to be.
You can see why. As a leader, you’re expected to act.
The trouble is that a plausible explanation can keep you busy for quite a while.
In this case, the leader’s explanation was understandable: people knew what was expected but weren’t doing it consistently. So he kept working on expectations and accountability.
Once we started working with the team, it was clear his diagnosis had missed something.
Where else to look
When people understand what you want but what they do says otherwise, I usually start by looking at five things.
- Can they do it under pressure? Someone can know exactly how a hard conversation should go and still lose it the moment the other person gets defensive. Being able to describe the skill isn’t the same as being able to use it when it matters.
- What else are they responding to? People may agree with your priority while being measured, rewarded or pressured to deliver something else. What looks like poor accountability from above can make perfect sense from where they sit.
- How is the work set up? Unclear authority, overlapping roles, competing priorities or dependencies on other teams can all get in the way. People can make sensible decisions individually and still produce a poor result together.
- What does acting cost them? Giving difficult feedback to a direct report is one thing. Challenging a powerful peer, pushing back on the boss or raising a problem nobody wants to hear about is another. Sometimes avoidance is less about willingness than what people think will happen if they act.
- Do they actually agree? They may understand you perfectly well and still think you are wrong. Or that the change won’t last. Or that nothing much will happen if they ignore it.
You won’t find that out by explaining the expectation more clearly.
What his diagnosis missed
Difficult conversations were being avoided. Some performance problems had gone unnamed. The team also needed stronger skills for handling pressure, giving feedback and having harder conversations.
What recurrence tells you
Sometimes everyone can see the problem. What gets in the way is that they already think they know what is causing it.
If you’ve been clear, people understand you and the same pattern keeps returning, I’d pay attention to that.
The question may no longer be, “How do I get them to do what I’ve asked?”
It may be, “What have I assumed is causing this, and what haven’t I looked at yet?”
Image by Wayne Jackson from Pexels.
