Lack of Management Clarity Creates Confusion and Disengaged Employees

BELMONT, MA (07/16/2007)(readMedia)-- Research indicates that up to 2/3 of employees at a typical company are unsure of or disengaged from their employers' missions, business strategies and priorities.

What causes this confusion? Management. Because there is often a lack of clarity and commitment at the executive level about a company's purpose, values, strategy and goals - that lack of clarity can ripple through all levels of the organization until there is a tsunami of confusion at the front lines.

This confusion and lack of employee buy-in results in lower productivity and product quality as well as more customer complaints and higher turnover.

SheerLine Associates, a management consulting firm in Boston offers these strategies for improving organizational clarity and commitment:

• Encourage open and honest debate about issues – this is healthy for teams and organizations, and generates higher commitment to decisions. Get disagreements out on the table so that they can be dealt with and resolved in a constructive way.

• Ensure there is clarity and closure around decisions at meetings. Leave time at the end of meetings to summarize key decisions and to make sure everyone is committed to the decisions.

• Create a mechanism to cascade important messages to the next levels of the organization in a consistent and timely way. Communication face to face, or on the phone is most effective – not through e-mail.

• Build human systems to reinforce the organization’s clarity around purpose, values, strategy, goals to ensure people behave in ways consistent with that clarity.

SheerLine Associates works with business leaders and their teams to help them improve the effectiveness and health of their organizations through improved leader capability, increased team cohesiveness, and greater organizational clarity. They are an official consulting partner of author Patrick Lenicioni’s firm, The Table Group. Lencioni is the author of the best selling business book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, as well as other works. To learn more go to www.sheerlineassociates.com.