Chapter 15

STATE YOUR POSITION CLEARLY AND ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT SPECIFICALLY

You are the only one who knows what you want. Well, hopefully you know. Before you try to work with other people, you need to decide where you are and where you are going, and review often – every day is good. Looking at the situation objectively, think about your goals and the goals of the groups you belong to. Evaluate whether you still think they are achievable and desirable. See if they are still compatible. Determine how far along you are in achieving them. Review what you need to do yourself and what you need help with, what kind of help, and from whom.

Now you know who you need to talk to, if anyone. Sometimes, you need to talk to your team about the goals themselves or the means you have chosen to reach them. You will save everyone much agony if you readily admit to and give up things that don’t work (even if it did seem like the most brilliant idea you ever had at the time). If it was someone else’s idea (and you want them to continue to share their ideas in the future), remember that it doesn’t mean it was a bad idea and you don’t need to get them to admit that. The only relevant fact is that it didn’t work and you need to try something else. Sometimes, everything is on track and you just need to get to work.

I used to believe that the people I was working with were pretty much on the same page as I was. Even if we hadn’t talked about an idea before, they would know immediately where I was coming from and agree with me once I told them about it. I was sure the same things that made it seem good to me would make it seem good to them. When I became a manager, I knew that people would do what I told them to do without question. We all knew what the facts were, and I was the one being paid to do the thinking and make the decisions.

It only took about 20 years for me to figure out why my way didn’t work and how to get what I wanted. What I needed to learn was that most people want and need to know what you want and why you want it. This is good, actually. It means that they don’t do extra work or non-productive work just because someone told them to sometime in the past. It means they get appreciation for what they do, instead of spending time and energy on things that nobody cares about. It means that they understand why something is necessary and how it will affect them. For the good of the group, people may even do something that is going to have an adverse impact on them personally. But, they sure don’t like it when someone tricks or leads them blindly into it.

You can’t expect people to understand you without explanation. People will do the same job differently, even if it is meticulously defined and published in the job description manual for everyone to see. No one can know what you will do just because they know what your job is. You probably have a different agenda from the last person who had the job. The way you see your job is different from the way those that report to you see it and the way your boss sees it. What you want is usually not obvious to other people. Even when it is, the confirmation that what they think you want is actually what you want allows them to give up the time-consuming and stressful task of trying to read someone else’s mind.

The other non-workable part of my old style is that everyone that will be affected by the plan needs to have a hand in it. Your plan incorporates everything you can think of, but other people almost always have some piece of information that you don’t have, especially the people who are actually doing the work. And then there is the situation I hate most, when the defect you just fixed needed to be there because it was preventing something even worse from happening. Of course, everybody but you already knew this.

People will give you what you want if they understand and share your goals. Don’t make them read your mind.