Listen to "Interview with "Clarity First" author Karen Martin" on Spreaker.
Karen Martin is a bestselling business author of five books and founder of global consultancy The Karen Martin Group, which has helped clients like AT&T, Chevron, Prudential Insurance, and Qualcomm develop more efficient work systems, grow their market share, solve business problems, and accelerate performance. In her new book Clarity First, Martin provides business leaders with methods for achieving clarity to unleash organizational potential, innovate at higher levels, and deliver outstanding results. Martin believes that eliminating ambiguity is the first step for leaders and organizations wanting to achieve their strategic goals.
We spoke with Karen Martin recently about how middle market companies can gain more clarity to catalyze growth.
How might the size of a company impact the need for creating organizational clarity?
Martin: Size doesn’t matters in terms of the need for clarity, but it sometimes matters for how challenging it can be to achieve clarity. In a small organization, if you get most of the executive team on board with clarity, it’s going to be easier to create a culture of clarity. Whereas if you take a massive enterprise that has operations all over the world, it's going to be a much slower to shift culture into a more clarity-seeking and clarity-enabling one.
Having a lack of clarity, or ambiguity, is a very expensive way to operate. People will spend their productive effort trying to figure things out and being lost in the fog. It can also cause poor decision-making. Most importantly, it’s tough to get people fully engaged and all pointing in the same direction if they're not clear what that direction actually is. Leaders don't sleep well when their employees are rambling around and wasting productive time.
So if clarity is so important, why doesn't it happen more often in middle market companies?
Martin: Organization sometimes punish people for seeking clarity. There are leaders who prefer to have willful ignorance because the truth is ugly and messy. There are incentive programs that are off base sometimes. There are also employees who are used to working for bosses who don’t value clarity and assume that nobody wants clarity.
When people say, “I don't have time to stop and clarify,” that behavior is grounded in fear. It's fear because you don't think you'll get the bonus you want or you won't get promoted or someone will yell at you that you’re stupid.
Why should clarity of purpose be a top priority for middle market companies?
Martin: Everything emanates from being clear about purpose. I don’t mean being clear about what you do, which most organizations are, but about why the organization exists. Why do we offer that product or service? Decision making becomes tricky if you don't have good clarity on why you're in business. You can go off into different markets that you don't belong in. That's not to say an organization can't enter different markets, but they have to be very intentional about their purpose shifting. You usually have to go back to founders to get really clear on what the purpose was at that time. That original clarity can be kind of a north star for the company’s strategy.
What’s the importance of clear purpose for recruiting employees, especially millennials?
Martin: It's not just millennials, but all employees who want to be part of something larger than themselves. Everybody wants purpose that’s well-articulated. Most organizational purposes are fairly emotional at their core. For example, a tire manufacturer may think their purpose is to make high quality tires. That's part of the story, but the deeper story is they're making something that helps people move safely and confidently from point A to point B. It's about quality of life, not just that tire, and it's protecting precious human lives.
How are organizations doing when it comes to measuring performance?
Martin: Measuring performance is very important and most organizations have to start by defining what outcomes they actually want. What does the customer need in terms of performance? Then you figure out how to measure for that outcome. You start with the what and then you go to the how. It's important to make sure you're not measuring only what's easy to measure, but measuring the right things: whether that’s speed, or quality, or keeping the organization out of trouble, or something else.
We hear all this talk about how Big Data makes measuring performance easy, but it doesn’t. Most companies, including middle market companies, are not very good at “little data,” measuring the few indicators that matter most. Because we can get so much data, we assume we're getting the right data and most organizations simply aren’t.
What are the enablers of clear thinking for middle market company leaders?
Martin: The most important thing is operating purposefully and intentionally at all times and slowing down. I always say, “Go slow to go fast.” Slowing down in order to get more information that’s better information, not analysis paralysis but more and better information, so you can be clear before you decide. When it's hard to make a decision, it's almost always because you're not clear yet. When you're very clear, the answers kind of present themselves. Mindfulness is the means to get that intentionality and purposeful habit going when you're doing anything, making a decision, reading a report, writing email, anything. Reflection is very, very valuable and underused.
What else would you like to tell middle market company leaders about clarity?
Martin: “Clarity First” is an urgent call to action. A lack of clarity is going to hold any size organization down. The good news about middle market companies is that you can be more agile than larger companies. With massive firms, it can take years and decades to turn the cruise ship. For middle market leaders, now is the time to get this fundamental cultural shift happening, so that you can grow more quickly and scale and do all the great things middle market companies want to do.