54. The Power of Clarity for Your Organisational Culture with Ann Latham and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:14

I love what I do. I'm a global leadership coach, a consultant, a trainer, a keenot speaker, a podcaster. I help you to develop your leaders, your teams, and I help you to optimize your organizational cultures. I'm here to help you find ways to change your workplace. Why? Because we spend more time in our waiting days at work than we do with our loved ones. It has to be a good place to be. So in this podcast, you can expect a mix of interviews with amazing thought leaders and then some solo episodes from myself as well. Get ready.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself, Prina Shah. And I'm really, really happy to be introducing today to you my guest Anne Latham, who is from New Hampshire in USA. Anne, welcome. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Thank you, Prina. I'm great. I'm so happy to be talking to you. This is going to be fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Same. Well, today I am talking with Anne about the power of clarity for your culture. And I have a little bit of an introduction to all things Anne. So bear with me, Anne. And I'm really pleased to have you today. And for our audience, Anne Latham is known widely as the Queen of Clarity. Anne is the author of the book The Power of Clarity. For those who are watching on YouTube, she's got her books behind her, beautiful blue cover. And we're going to be discussing all things the power of clarity for your organizational culture today. Anne's previous books are The Clarity Papers and Uncommon Meetings and Drumroll. She actually has another book coming out soon called The Disconnect Principle, which is out in November, I believe, Anne, isn't it? Anne's advice has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Bloomberg, Management Today. And Anne is an expert blogger also for Forbes. An also guest lectures at the University of Massachusetts in the School of Management. Anne, welcome. Lovely to have you with us today. Thank you. Ann, I want to kick off with a few things. So I've been researching all things and I love researching my audience. And Anne, you say that process improvements to date, especially lean thinking, have focused almost exclusively on physical processes that move physical objects and have mostly ignored the cognitive zone where cognitive processes are needed to move cognitive objects, examples, ideas, decisions, plans, and commitments. And which is where knowledge workers, so many knowledge workers, managers, and executives, cognitive workers, spend all of their time. And can you tell us a little bit more about that in relation to the power of clarity? I've launched straight into it, Anne.

SPEAKER_02 3:29

Right, right. And from my in my career, I've personally witnessed the tremendous improvements in processes that have been made over the last couple of decades. And you know, it's but it's very much focused on streamlining the production processes. And that's the factory floor, but it could also be in a bank the loan applications or in a moving company, the the way they you know move the trucks and get everything organized and moved on time and everything. But that's where the focus has been on streamlining how all those physical objects move. And so it's had it's it's created huge results. I mean, things are so much more efficient than they used to be, but we haven't put any attention on how we move cognitive objects, things like decisions and plans, strategies, ideas. You know, we don't when we make decisions, we don't even think in terms of a process, never mind using a process to improve decision making. We just get in the room and talk and hope we can come up with a decision. So to me, this the as you move away from the production processes, whether it's the factory floor or something else, as you move away from that, you get to more and more workers who are the knowledge workers who spend their entire days moving decisions and ideas and plans and strategies. And they don't have the benefit of those well-hewn processes that are streamlined and that are efficient and that are visible so that we can see when we've gone astray. So the problem, there's this huge area where we can focus and make tremendous improvements.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

So, and the missing gap is the fact, just to summarize what you've been saying, especially when we look at things like lean process management, it has really very much focused on, let's say, the manufacturing side of things or the factory floor. So the the floor more so, whereas a lot of us are thinkers and creative and innovative and whatever else in the workplace. So there's a big missing element in terms of clarity for the knowledge workers, and that's what your book bridges the gap with. Is that correct, Dan?

SPEAKER_02 5:44

Yes, yeah, and a colleague of mine said it just wonderfully when he said that the power of clarity does for knowledge workers what lean thinking has done for the factory floor. And that is so much my intent is to try to bring that same level of clear process, clear purpose, clear roles, and clear expectations so that those of us who are knowledge workers can feel just as efficient and be moving things forward with that same kind of confidence and determination and progress, you know, and so that we have that sense that that they that the factory workers have had for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Absolutely. So, and you're talking about the fact that cognitive workers simply don't have the frameworks, the tools, or the vocabulary for dealing with cognitive objects effectively and efficiently. And can you tell us a little bit more about this and what you recommend in relation to the gaps and what's missing? Oh, well, there's so much missing.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

Yeah. But I mean, to start with, yeah, the biggest problem is that we're clarity blind. We aren't as clear as we think we are, yeah, but we don't realize it, we don't see it. No, so the first chapter of my book is called We Aren't As Clear as We Think We Are, and it's costly. And my whole goal there is to help people see the disclarity, which is a word I coined for the total lack of clarity, yeah, uh that's surrounding us. I got tired of typing total lack of clarity, so I call it disclarity. So that if you read the examples in the beginning of my book in that first chapter, you start to go, oh my goodness, there's a lot less clarity than I think there is. And you know, when you think about it, we all know clarity is a good thing. Yeah, we don't really even know what it is. We don't have a good definition for it, we don't have any scale, we don't have any way to assess how clear something is. We have more shared vocabulary to talk about the temperature of soup than we do the level of clarity in our meetings or our conversations or our decisions. We we just say, oh, it's a little unclear, it's kind of confusing, it's not very clear, but you know, which one of those is really bad? So one of the things I do when I in the first chapter is I give these examples. Then I talk about the scale of let's put this clarity, a complete lack of clarity on one end, yeah. And on the other end, let's put uncommon clarity. And the reason I put uncommon clarity out there instead of just clarity is because clarity is this right now, is this nebulous little point floating around that we're always just a little bit off. And most of us think we're clearer than we are. But even though a lot of us might say, Oh, I think I'm pretty clear, not a lot of people would say I'm uncommonly clear. So I wanted to push that out there a little out of reach. Nice. And when I look at my the examples in my book, I I go back and say, okay, now take that example in chapter one. Where would you put it on the scale from disclarity to uncommon clarity? And it doesn't take long to go, you know, most of these are way, way on the disclarity end of the spectrum. Yeah, there's no clarity there at all. And we're kidding ourselves to think that it's very clear.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Yeah. Really interesting. So while you were talking, and you know, especially that, so we've gone from uncommon clarity, uh, uncommon clarity, and we go all the way to dis clarity on the spectrum of clarity. Um, and when you gave the example of the meeting, I was just thinking, so beyond, you know, definitely clarity is needed from that cognitive capacity of knowledge workers within, let's say, a meeting sense. And then Anne, our workforces are so diverse as well. And the nuance of the English language, first off, is just you know, something else. And you know, when you're talking from an organizational culture perspective, Anne, people may walk out confused off this meeting. You know, it's a big decision-making meeting, and we're all just thinking, ah, what was the point of that? Where, where are we now? What's happening now? Um, and that affects our decision making, which affects, you know, when people walk out of the room and the kind of work that they do. And then it really does impact on our organizational culture. Um, so that's one cost of disclarity. What are other costs of disclarity from your experience thus far, Anne?

SPEAKER_02 10:17

Right. There's there's a lot of costs, and it's easy to point to the lack of productivity. You know, if you if you if you waste an hour in a meeting and you've got 10 people in that meeting, you've wasted 10 hours. And so it's easy to count the time that you lose. Yes. Um, it's harder to count the frustration. It's harder to count the lack of confidence. Clarity gives you confidence. If you are really clear about what needs to be accomplished, how you're gonna get there, with whom you're gonna work, and you know what method you're gonna use, you have the confidence to you know knock down walls and just charge ahead and speak up and do what needs to be done. But if you're unsure about you know what you're trying to accomplish, or how you're gonna do it, or who needs to help you or work with you, or who needs to agree with you, or you know, if if if you're unclear or what's the priority even, you know, is this my most important thing or my second most? What should I do first? All of those things inject uncertainty and make us feel less confident. So that confidence it slows us down, which hurts the productivity again, but it also hurts our satisfaction with our work. It it it um I think it robs us of our ability to step up and use our talents. So it's it's a huge um waste of our of our talents and our energy and our enthusiasm if you erode it with disclarity.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Completely so, and and you know, with the kind of work that I do, I see this uh in organizational cultures a lot, just disclarity, as I'm gonna use your language. And can I ask, do you have any examples or thoughts as to why we are not wired for clarity? Yeah, I I don't know why we're not, but I can tell you how we're not.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

How's that? Let's do it. So one of the things that we seem to be just we're so eager to jump in and help, you know. So we like to help people. Um, so for instance, I talk about the need to be real crystal clear about what you need when you go into a meeting. And one of the things that people often do in a meeting is say, well, I've done X and now I'm going to do Y. Am I on the right track? And they that's a yes or no question. Am I on the right track? Right? So if you go, yes, you're on the right track, end of conversation. No, let's talk later. End of conversation. But instead, what happens? People really like to help. So they start telling you, oh, and then when you're through with that, do this. And when I did that, this happened. And so they tell their war stories, they tell their lessons learned, they give tons of advice. And the person who said, Am I on the right track? isn't even listening because they're not there yet. That's too far out in the future. They just want to know, Am I on the right track? Done. Let me go get to work now, you know. So our desire to help is one of the ways that keeps gets us off track.

SPEAKER_03 13:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

Another is we like to talk. And that goes hand in hand with our desire to help. So, for instance, you get into a room and you need to make a decision, and if you're not crystal clear about what that decision is or what other outcome you're pursuing, people will talk. Yeah, they will talk and they'll talk and they'll talk. And for instance, if you're if you have a meeting uh agenda item is to uh is a project review, I once did an exercise with a group on you know, brainstorm how many different directions a conversation could go if the topic was project review. And in two minutes, we had 67 totally different directions, you know, everything from whether you're talking about risks or schedules or resources or the customer or the customer expectations, or you know, it goes on and on, and all the variations on those themes. So if you get people into a room where the next, you know, the outcome of what's what's going to be different when we're done isn't clear, people will talk and they will be going in, you know, 30 different directions, and and they'll be vying for attention. No, I want the conversation to go over here, and you want the conversation to go over there. And so we not only don't get anywhere, but we waste a lot of time butting heads and and trying to control each other and control the meeting. So that that desire to talk just gets it's like letting you know the horses out of the bar and they're all running in different directions. Uh-oh. So those are two biggies right there. Yes. Um, and another is we're driven to dive in and get started. So instead of stopping at the, you know, whether it's the beginning of the meeting or the beginning of the project, or just when you sit down at your desk and ask, okay, what needs to be different 15 minutes from now? What's going to be different at the end of this meeting? What are we going to achieve that is going to unleash next steps? That's the key, is that we want to we don't want to just talk, we want to achieve something that unleashes next steps. Yes. So if we dive in and just start talking without figuring that out first, we will not we we will be in what I call a kitchen sink conversation where we talk about all kinds of things, but we don't really get anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 15:48

I have been in many of those meetings, and oh my gosh. Well, and you know, to make things worse, do you know what happens at the end of those meetings? To justify all that wasted time, we brainstorm action items so that we can take those away. And a lot of times those action items have absolutely nothing to do with what the purpose of the meeting was supposed to have been. Oh my gosh. And this is how we add to each other's to-do lists. Yes, because a lot of these are good ideas, but are they the priorities of the organization? Are they the, you know, are they helping the purpose of that meeting, or are we just looking for ways that we could make things better? And, you know, we pile up all kinds of extra to-dos that we can't get to because there's too much to do.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Oh my gosh, yes, I I feel it. I have been there and done that. And you know, you're talking about the fact that you know, when things go off track, it's because of the fact that we have a desire to help uh that gets us off track. We like to talk, you know, there's a lot of chatter that we all make, and we are driven to dive in. Yes. So as the, let's just say then, as the decision maker or as the person, the knowledge thinker who needs to make the decision or needs that input, I'm hearing from you, and that we really need to be careful with our language in terms of open and closed questioning and really direct the group, I guess facilitate the group more so as well, in terms of the outcomes that we are looking for. Where do we want to be, and how are we going to get from today to there? Um, so there's a real power of questioning I'm picking up here as well, and is that right?

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Yeah, and that's absolutely true. But I can even simplify it one notch farther to get down to some real basics. So there are only basically six, what I call my cognitive six, six outcomes for a meeting or a conversation or whatever you're doing, other than building something. Yeah, and so if you want to make progress, cognitive progress, the there are only six, you decide, yeah, you plan, yeah, you resolve a problem, yeah, you create a list, and a list is an input to those other three. So you might not make the whole decision, that might not be the intent of what you want to do next, but you might want to list the objectives, the decision criteria. You want to you might want to make a list of options, you might want to make a list of risks. So a list is a tangible outcome that moves you forward. Yes. Next one is is you want to confirm something like the person who walked in the meeting and said, I've done X, I'm gonna do Y, am I on the right track? All you want is confirmation, a yes or a no. And the sixth one is authorization. Yes, we've got our plan. Do we have permission to implement? Do we can we move forward? So if you do, if you accomplish any of those six, yeah, you can move things forward. Furthermore, if you know which of those you're doing, then you can pay attention to the process. What's the process for making a decision? What's the process for creating your plan? What are the pieces there? What do you need? And part of our diving in, our design, you know, our tendency to dive in is that we don't stop and pay attention to our process. And if you you you there's always a process, yeah, but if it's not clear, you're fishing, you're wandering, you're you know, you're you're wandering around. But if you pay attention to the process and you determine, okay, what's the next tangible outcome? What's the intermediate outcome that's going to get us there? Then you pay attention to the process and you will make far greater progress. When I facilitate groups, they are usually stunned by how much discernible progress there is in a very short time because I'm always working toward, you know, what's the list of questions we have to answer? What's the decision we have to make next? What's the what's the risk we have to worry about? You know, what are the critical success factors for this project? I'm always working towards a very specific, tangible outcome that everyone can understand. And because we're all understanding that we're on the same page.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

This is gold, Anne. Oh my gosh. It is, it is, it's huge, it's massive. As you were talking, I was just thinking in those messy meetings that I have been in, and you know, that just go on forever, and people just fill the void for an hour, and then at the end, like you say, people scurry around to think, oh, okay, what do we have to do now? Versus using Anne's potential six outcomes, depending on what you want. Do you want at the end of your meeting a decision, a plan, something resolved, or to create that lista and just explain beautifully? Do you want confirmation or do you want authorization? Now, for our listeners, uh, Anne, imagine listeners walking into a meeting that you are leading, and you say at the beginning of the meeting, as the facilitator of the meeting, this meeting is about blah blah blah, and we need to, by the end of the meeting, decide on blah blah blah. Music to my ears, and I think music to everybody's ears that's in the meeting room because we're all clear from the get-go, and then that drives our conversation the right way rather than you know, here, there and everywhere. And conversations often digress, like you said, we like to talk. Yes. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

Kitchen sink conversations, I call them. Everything, including the kitchen sink, swirling around.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah, beautiful Anne. Um, do you have any other uh have we missed anything? Do you have any other practical tips or any case studies? Anything else that you want to share in relation to these wonderful examples?

SPEAKER_02 22:00

You're giving in since we've been talking about meetings, let's talk a little more about meetings. So there's if you I get something from Harvard Business Review pretty much every other day about improving meetings, and there's been millions of articles written about meetings. I don't know how many millions, but it's just they're all over the place. And the problem is that they're all missing the boat because mostly they're that the advice you get is about the rules and tools used to control people, as if people are the problem for bad meetings. And the problem is a lack of clarity. So one of the rules, for instance, is well, you have to have an agenda. And this became a rule back in about the 90s. And so everyone started producing agendas before they have a meeting. The problem is that these agendas are filled with what I call treadmill verbs. These are words, verbs, words like report, review, share, communicate, update. Do those sound like words you see on agendas? No. Oh, yes, they do. Yes, yes. Yeah, they're there all and but you can report forever. There's no way to know when you're done. You can share forever. You can communicate forever, you can review forever. And so as long as we put those kind of words on our agendas, we have no clarity.

unknown 23:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

And then we're wondering, you know, how do we control people? Well, the answer is your agenda has to have your destination verbs on them. We already talked about decide, plan, resolve, list, confirm, and authorize. Yeah. So there's only the good news is there's only six destination verbs. The bad news is that there are dozens of treadmill verbs. And by the way, plan can be a treadmill verb. I know people who can plan forever, so you have to be a little careful. Yeah. But yeah, so if if if I were to give one piece of advice about meetings, it would be eliminate treadmill verbs. You have don't start a meeting unless you know what must be different when you are done. What concrete, tangible outcome will you have walking out that you didn't have walking in that will unleash next steps? Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

And now I am very mindful also that we have been talking, especially along the meeting examples, you know, and case studies of meetings. But I know that your work goes beyond meetings, you know, there's so much more that is beyond. Yeah. Can you tell us what other things the power of clarity in your work is applicable to in the workplace that really impacts workplace cultures, Anne?

SPEAKER_02 24:45

Well, I mean, to start with it, we have to make the disclarity surrounding us more visible. In other words, we all have to get rid of our clarity blindness so we can start seeing the disc clarity. So you need to be able to, you know, I would define clarity as knowing exactly what you're trying to accomplish, and that's very specifically. And that's like a list, a decision, and you know, whatever it is you're producing very specifically. So, what am exactly am I trying to accomplish? How am I going to get there? With whom, when, how well, all those kinds of things, so that you are crystal clear about what you need to do next.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Yeah. And yeah, this can be applied to so much. So strategic planning, it can be applied to, gosh, uh, projects, as you said, also, um, so many aspects in the workplace, even uh teamwork. Yeah, yes, what's going to be different before I go to lunch? Yes, so individually as well, we can completely apply these principles. Yes, beautiful. Every day, imagine if we do that, how much more clear, how much yeah, more clear we'll be at the end of the day. And I imagine then our results will be far higher as well, depending on whatever we want to achieve, and yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

So, but if you start noticing how often you sit down at your desk and you just start kind of doing things, yes. We just start doing things. Oh, yes. We're not crystal clear about what needs to be different when we're done. No, we go into meetings without do knowing that. We um, you know, you you make a phone call. Maybe people plan their phone calls better, I don't know. But you know, a lot of times you you just kind of start talking to people and it's like, what do you really need? What's gonna unleash next steps? And as soon as you do that, it as soon as you know, like I said earlier, exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah, man, it's so easy to dive in and focus. Yeah, assuming people let you focus, but you know, it is so much easier to dive in and drive through and get it done.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

100%. And you're very right. And you know, when you were talking, you just gave me an example of uh phone calls. I remember so when I used to work in corporate days and my background's in human resources, and you know, a lot of the stuff that human resources make phone calls about is people issues, and they're really important issues, and you can't miss anything. So I remember before a phone call, I just used to have a bit of a script ideas to the outcome that I want, the advice that I have to give, the knowledge that the manager needs to know about, and the actions that they or we need to take collectively. I just needed to have my stuff together because it was a really important conversation, and those phone calls compared to the phone calls which weren't scripted, completely different. Oh my gosh. The time, yeah, and the same applies to email.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

Yes, when you write an email and you start telling people stuff and you copy a bunch of people and you get up with an email chain that goes on and on and accomplishes nothing, yeah. So the same thing applies to email. What outcome am I trying to achieve with this email? Yeah, and if you can't do it in one round trip, by the way, yeah, you shouldn't use email. You should you should get on the phone. But the kind of planning you're talking about for a phone call, yeah, you should be doing with email. But instead, we tend to go, well, let me give you some background information. And it goes on and on and on, and we could do this and we could do that. And and you know, if you think about it, unless you're asking a real clear question right off the bat, yeah, as soon as you start going in there and adding all kinds of other stuff, you're guessing what the other person knows and what their reaction is going to be, right? Right? Guessing, well, he might not know this, so I better give him background information. Yeah, um, I might have to persuade him. So let me add an argument. I might have to, you know, you're guessing, and that drives you to write longer and more convoluted emails. Whereas, do you need a decision? Do you need a plan? Do you need a list? Do you need confirmation, authorization? Do you need to resolve a problem? If you're clear about that, then one, is email the right vehicle?

SPEAKER_03 29:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

And two, how specifically, what specifically do you want, and how are you going to get there?

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Boom. Anne, making assumptions is what we're talking about, and that just takes away all of my confidence. Versus what you said earlier, clarity gives you confidence. That line is going to stay with me for us, and that is going to stay with me. You have shared loads and loads of practical tips, An, and from an organizational culture perspective, I really see how uh this clarity just completely impacts organizational culture on so many levels in decision making, in communication, and you know, when there's miscommunication, conflict arises. That's when things really start to go wrong.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Well, and and I can give you another example that I talk about in the book that where a woman wrote me and she said, How can I think faster on my feet? Yeah. And so I wrote back and we had a good conversation. And and and I asked her, you know, are there examples of times when you do think, feel like you think quickly on your feet? Well, she was she was in the medical field, uh, I think some kind of nurse, I can't remember exactly, in a hospital. And the the bigwigs would come down into her wing of the hospital and they would ask her a ridiculously vague question, like, how's it going? And she would feel like she's got to come up with an intelligent answer to, you know, make good use of their time or impress them or whatever. But it's a totally ridiculous question. But the problem with that is that instead of her recognizing that their question was ridiculously vague, instead, she's feeling inadequate. She doesn't think she can think quickly on her feet. She's contacting me to say, How do I do this? And I write back and say, Well, you know, that was a dumb question. No, but you you have to clarify that. So, what would you like to know? Yes. What do you need? What information specifically do you need? Because, you know, it's like asking someone, how are you? And then it's just a greeting. But if you're if you are in control, in command, you know, a high up person in an organization, and you ask vague questions, that ambiguity makes your people often feel inadequate. Yes. Think how destructive that is, especially if you have cultural issues on top of that, or gender issues, or whatever else is going on. Yeah. And it's it's not fair to people.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

It's not clarity is fair. Yeah, yes, clarity is fair. And you make some uh again really good points. So I talk to the concept of positional power, and you know, the higher you are up the ladder, the up the chain, the more positional power you have. Um people often forget that, you know, you'll walk around, and if you are uh coming from a disc clear perspective, then my gosh, the impact on your people is awful because you from your example, the emotional turmoil that happens, you know, um, it's it's too much, and that wasted energy then is the result of it, and it just throws people awry, really. Um, yeah, and uh while you were talking, the other thing I was thinking about as well is the clear that we are, the clearer that we are, the better we connect with others, also.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

And that's yeah, because as soon as you create any kind of ambiguity there, you risk the other person going off uh and doing the wrong thing or not making it a priority or whatever that you you create this disconnect, which is what my next book is about, but you know, you you don't give them a fair shot at being able to satisfy your needs. That's and so yeah, and that's also it wastes time and it puts them in a bad situation. And other things, you know, even if they want to stop and say, you know, wait a minute, I don't think that's clear. Can you help me out? They feel like they're gonna insult you, they might be worried about speaking up. Yeah, but if you're clear, you know what needs to be different when we're done.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

Yeah. Then yeah, we know where we all are. Um, the disclarity, and I've seen also from the work that I do with supporting my clients, especially from the poor culture, poor organizational culture perspective, this clarity results often in gossip within the workplace as well. Because there's a void, I'll make something up to fill that void, and then comes you know the whispers, and then yeah, the message is just diluted by the time it gets to the you know end person's ears. Uh, that's all too common as well, Anne. Unfortunately.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

And clarity is all good. Oh, completely, completely. I'm with you. And we have talked a lot, and you've shared some wonderful examples with us, and clarity gives you confidence. Everybody, remember that. Um, but I have one question for you, Anne. If I was to give you a magic wand, what is one way that you and Latham would change the way of the workplace?

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Uh, well, in relation to the power of clarity and what we've been talking about, anything I would give people, I would eliminate that clarity blindness so that we would all be in a position to say quickly and upfront, you know, wait a minute, you know, that's not clear enough. What specifically? Can you be more specific? Um, and we could all see it, because you can't fix a problem you can't see. You know, you if you don't know what's there, you can't do anything about it. But if we could all start seeing the lack of clarity, then we could stop and we could get more specific and we could pay attention to the process and we could do, we could make it so people know exactly what they're trying to accomplish, how and with whom, so that everyone feels more confident, more productive, more successful, and more satisfied.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Beautiful. Imagine being on the same page. Yes. Yeah, imagine. And thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. It's been great talking to you. I appreciate it. Sign up to my newsletter, which is detailed in the show notes if you stand against crappy cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams. And I'll see you in the next episode.