The Cost of Confusion

Make no mistake, confusion contributes to several of the profitability killers we’ve looked at already; so much so that I believe it’s critical we take a focused look at it individually as well! Whether it’s through the lack of clear expectations that we touched when we worked through the High Risk Areas early on, the importance of maintaining high expectations that I covered when addressing how It All Starts at the Top, or with how misunderstanding eat away at our bottom line as we looked at The Cost of Poor Communication, a lack of clarity in any aspect of our business is sure to impact our margins! Quite frankly, I’m convinced confusion contributes to each of the other areas we’ve worked through here as well…

Think of any performance review you’ve ever received (or given)... Have you ever been told you were doing great without getting any specific feedback on what that meant? I sure have! And have you ever gotten one of those dreaded “needs improvement” marks on a review but no real detail as to what you could or should be doing to produce different results? Ugh! That’s even worse than the random “great job!” pat on the back…

Now put yourself in a scenario where you’ve been tasked with the painfully vague goal of “improving performance” over a previous period. I may be going out on a limb here but I’m gonna assume you’re like me and strive to do the best you possibly can every single day. I can’t imagine you’ve hung with me this far if that’s not the case… The only thing I can imagine making such a broad request any worse would be working with team members who weren’t interested in that same level of achievement and were allowed to drift through each day with no ramifications.

And just for measure, picture that boss who barks a few quick commands and expects everyone around to know exactly what should be done - and how soon. How much time, effort, and profitability is wasted trying to figure out what’s expected of us in a situation like that?

In hopes of keeping you from slipping into complete depression, I won’t ask you to consider how much each of those things impact our desire to stick with an organization, how hard they make it to attract great talent, or what happens to our desire to give it all we have when we deal with any of those things on a routine basis. What I would like to work through with you now though is just how much it costs us and our entire team when we’re not diligent about removing every bit of unnecessary confusion. We absolutely can do that IF we’re intentional about setting (and maintaining) extremely clear expectations - and we’ll look at exactly how we can do it.