A fuzzy work request typically sounds innocent enough to begin with. A person says, “Could you please take care of the customer update?” or “I would like you to investigate the onboarding problem.” The request may be concise and civil. Still, the work is not set to start. The team member might not be clear on the desired deliverable, the timeline, the urgency, or whether to take action and report or present recommendations.
Poorly worded work instructions frequently lead to trouble when leading a group of people. A manager believes that the work request was clear. A team member makes a sound assumption. Then the time limit has passed. The work deliverable is not as the manager had assumed. Instead of discussing the problem as a matter of clarity, the discussion becomes a debate about effort. The new manager has an opportunity to improve the work process in this respect because improvement occurs before any work starts.
A clearer work request contains the four points of an anchor: owner, deliverable, time limit, and priority. An owner is the person accountable for taking the work forward. A deliverable is not a process. A deliverable is a tangible output. A time limit is a work boundary. A priority is a relative comparison to other work. Without anchors, you may maintain a work system that has no owner.
Imagine a work request that sounds like this: “Please draft the notes for the weekly staff meeting.” A team member might:
- Create a lengthy written record.
- List the open questions from the meeting.
- Create a list of decisions to be made.
- Create a list of assigned tasks.
To be clearer, consider: “Please draft the agenda for our next team meeting on Thursday morning. List any open questions, any decisions that must be made, and any assigned tasks for each team member. Provide the draft by Wednesday so I can take a look. Thank you.” In this example, the team member is the owner, the meeting draft is the deliverable, Wednesday is the time limit, and the meeting priority provides the reason for the task.
If you are developing your own clarity skills, select three unclear work requests at work. Draft an answer to these three requests. Draft them without actually talking to anyone. Draft simple language. Do not introduce an unnecessarily broad vocabulary of manager terms. For each work request, determine the following: What will the team member create? What are the required data points? What is the timeline? How should a team member address the situation? If you are unable to answer the question, then you have an unclear work request.
An additional element of an example of clarity is providing support. In other words, when you first begin supervising, you may delegate an assignment without letting the team member know what resources are available to them. You do not mean you are going to take the assignment for the team member. A “resource” is anything that could assist the team member to be successful on the job. A resource could include a work sample, a meeting template, a key decision point, or a scheduled time to check in. In the following example, “Use last week’s weekly notes as an example,” or “Provide me with two or three options to choose from,” the manager is demonstrating their level of support.
You can use this approach to help a team member to improve the results they receive from your coaching. If you provide feedback without having clearly stated the expectation when delegating the work, it may become hard to coach them effectively. If you clearly state the owner, deliverable, time limit, priority, and resource notes when assigning work, a discussion of work performance can be less heated and more focused. You are discussing a situation as it occurred versus a situation as it may have been interpreted.
You could use a mental exercise when preparing to assign tasks to a team member: Put yourself in the place of someone else. Read this task assignment. Do you know what the first step is? Do you know what the work is going to look like when it’s complete? Do you know what to do when you encounter questions? If you pass this test, you are more likely to move the work forward than to create confusion that only occurs after the time limit has been reached.