In The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Lencioni outlines the four principles that underpin organizational health and three of the four involve “clarity.”
- Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
- Create Clarity
- Reinforce Clarity
- Over-communicate Clarity
A mistake that most organizations and individuals make is thinking that once they’ve created and articulated the clarity necessary to get their point(s) across, they no longer need to revisit those ideas and messages. Ironically, the more clearly we’ve articulated something, the more we believe we have permission to move on to the next course of discussion and/or action. Unfortunately, all this does is reinforce a habit of efficient quantity, as opposed to effective quality.
What’s important…What’s essential… What’s primary… What’s core… DESERVES TO BE reinforced AND over-communicated. Saying “I love you” is an example of this. Saying “I love you” serves the habit of reinforcement and over-communication because its a value based statement about how you feel about somebody in a present moment in time.
That which is CLEAR is only as clear as the context that gives it direction. Hence, clarity has to be reinforced and over-communicated because situations are in flux, and we need guidance as to how that which was perceived to be clear actually adjusts and can be applied to a variety of situations, especially situations that could never be anticipated (like Covid 19).
