Most executives want employees to understand their orders. There is an important, often missed, factor that needs to happen before understanding is likely to take place. That is “Duplication”. When one receives a communication or an order one interprets it as he duplicates it. Any failure at the receiving end to duplicate leads to a different than intended understanding occurring. This leads to the common workplace scenario of “Why are you not doing what I ordered?”/ “I am doing exactly what you asked for!” This has a thousand and one variations – but commonly stems from the fact that the original order was not duplicated.
What can you do about this as an executive? You can observe the person in front of you and communicate instructions in the most easily duplicable manner for that person. To speak from your level of expertise to a ”rookie” in your field, without accounting for his level of knowledge, is often quite unrewarding. Be sure what you’ve said is duplicated. If there are still problems in execution it is now much easier to narrow in on what has not been understood. You can cause real frustration for both yourself and your employee by looking for what is not understood before knowing duplication has occurred and that you are actually both talking about the same thing.
As an aside – you will run into situations where the employee has no or minimal intention to duplicate or understand you. This you would need to address on an individual basis.
Considerable stress can be alleviated by applying this concept.
Renata McDonald
International Licensed Business Consultant
Hubbard Management System Expert