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Clarity comes from the top

July 23, 2014

Reason number 7,000,002 to embrace clear communication: it’s the key to cultivating a healthy organization. As an entrepreneur, I spend most of my waking minutes thinking about how to set my company up for success. How can I be a more effective leader? Is my team working together?

“As a leader, my job is to create so much clarity that there is no room for misinterpretation or confusion.”

We’ve experience rapid growth in the past year – which means we have lots of new faces around the office. What better time to clarify our mission, values, and core competencies!?

Under the influence of one too many business blogs, I started crafting miniature manifestos on things like achieving organizational alignment and maximizing our competitive advantage. Sounds pretty impressive, right? But is it clear? Hardly.

As a leader, my job is to create so much clarity that there is no room for misinterpretation or confusion. This means clear answers to questions like: What does our company do? How do we do it? Who does what? (Ironically, our company exists to make health information more – you guessed it – clear.)

If you – and your team – can answer these questions without using jargon (believe me, it’s harder than you think), you have created the clarity needed for a healthy, successful organization. And there are plenty of ways to figure out whether your team understands your mission and goals – try a quick online survey.

No matter what type of organization you lead, at the end of the day, the antidote to organizational chaos – and most other problems – is clear, simple, concrete communication.

StacyAbout the Author: Stacy Robison is President and Co-founder of CommunicateHealth, Inc. The company is ranked #824 on the Inc. 500/5000 list of fastest growing companies. Stacy served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Plain Language.

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