Page 71 - Make Work Great

Clarity Within Relationships

and they are not “their” fault. They simply exist as a natural product
of today’s workplace.
Let’s pause for an important aside. The amount of confl icts, con-
straints, confusion, and complexity is often a direct result of the
employees, managers, and leaders involved. Incompetent workers, clue-
less managers, and disconnected leaders certainly add to the problem
by making things harder than they need to be, and such people should
be held accountable. But that performance management conversation,
albeit an important one, is for another time. In the context of seeking
clarity, we just accept that these stressors will be there, no matter how
good or bad our managers and employees are. Rather than trying to
assign blame for these issues, we merely note them as a value-neutral
reality, one that has been, is, and always will be with us at work.
Seeking clarity is the simple act of looking for next steps while
accepting that some chaos is inevitable; it is about moving forward
anyway. It’s not concerned with discovering permanent, perfect,
universal solutions that eliminate confl icts, constraints, confusion,
and complexity, because it recognizes that such solutions don’t exist.
Instead, it’s an intention to discover or create simple, immediate, real-
istic answers to the question of what to do at the moment.
Emma, my former manager and favorite expert in crystal build-
ing (from Chapter 1), was quite adept at this behavior. I’m certain
it wasn’t easy. Imagine yourself in her shoes: a senior leader whose
organization’s problems are costing the company millions of dollars a
day in lost revenue. Would you be tempted to put hard pressure on the
person responsible? Would you want to tell your new employee that
he’d better fi gure things out or get packing? Would you be inclined
to throw six more senior people at the problem out of sheer des-
peration? I know I would. But Emma knew better. She sought clarity
from those who understood something about the problem—myself
included—and determined that the solution required not more peo-
ple, but more time. She sought clarity from me as to what I needed
to make headway, and she took action based on my needs instead of
her fears. At the same time, she sought clarity from other interested
parties about what was happening and why. In the process, she put

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