Success Tip: Communicate, Communicate, Celebrate

When you walk into work in the morning, are you ready?  Do you have a plan?  If not get your goals for the day done right away.  With your goals in hand, does everybody above you and everybody below you know exactly what you plan to do? One of the truths in life is that we cannot do everything ourselves. We must depend on other people to do some of the work. In fact the bigger your life becomes the more you depend on other people to accomplish things for you.  You can teach anybody to do just about anything if you have enough time, patience and money. If you only have two of the three requirements for training someone your chances of success begin to approach zero rapidly.

If you are not a practiced teacher, time and patience may not be on your side. More often than not, it is a shortsighted view of money and the investment in training that prevents us from training other people to do their job to the best of their ability. So many times I hear people say things like "I just have to get them working". or "I have to get them producing, I have too much work to train them." Instead of taking the time to train them to be successful you throw them into the fire headfirst.


There are several simple tricks you can use in order to more effectively communicate to the people around you what you expect and train them to do it. Notice here I started with communication, it is critical to success. It doesn't matter whether you want red velvet cake or a beach house, the more clearly you can describe and communicate your desires to other people the more likely they are to be able to produce what you expect.

The first step here is to describe in as much detail as possible exactly what you want. Do you want that red velvet cake as a cupcake, a 9 inch three layer cake, or a sheet cake. Look at how something as simple as a red velvet cake can be interpreted three different ways. I am sure if you ask around, someone will find four or five different ways to make a red velvet cake.  Extract out and do something a little more complex like homebuilding and you can see how projects go astray quickly.

The next step is to communicate your entire vision of what you want.  This is your description of the perfect execution that leads to a perfect completion of your vision. You want a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese on top and a dusting of white chocolate in a parchment wrapper, not a 24" sheetcake with butter cream frosting and dark chocolate sprinkles.

Finally before releasing someone to go make you a perfect red velvet cake, have them describe to you how they plan to do it. This step is critical and it makes sure two things happened; first they received the message and second they have a plan for accomplishing the task that works for your expectations.

Now it's time to turn them loose and let them get the job done. I'll give you a couple of examples of how things can go awry from not being as detailed as you could be. Last summer I asked my landscaper to clean up the yard and trim away all the dead foliage from the winter cold.  We walked the entire property and went over just about every plant. The part I skipped was the budget. He saw this is an excellent opportunity to keep his guys busy for a week and brought in everyone. My yard looked great but my wallet got really thin. I had failed to communicate something that was critical and important to me as part of the project, the budget. He did exactly what he understood I wanted done just at three times the price I expected.

In another case, I was extremely detailed with an employee. We walked the project together, reviewed the plans and discussed all of the options. What I failed to do was have him walk me through how he was going to approach the project. I turned him loose and came back three days later to find the house looking like a giant swiss cheese round. What I wanted was very gentle and careful drilling using six-foot and 12 foot long drill bits down the walls. Instead he knew the wire had to get down the wall so he cut several large holes throughout the house to make it easy on himself. He did accomplish exactly what I asked him to do, just not in the way that I expected it to be done.  What was implied to me, was not to him and that failure is on my shoulders because I never asked him how he was going to approach it, nor was I clear that our motto, "make it easy" meant for the customer, not for us.

When planning a project there is no such thing as too much detail, the difficult part is finding the balance between what is required to be discussed and what is not. Too much detail presented wrong can lead to frustration and boredom.  Not enough detail can lead to friction and tasks being redone two or three times.  With each project, unless you change how you want it done every time, you can shrink the planning stage a little.  After you have somebody trained, they will begin to understand more of what you expect, so you will have to describe less. Until you make that investment in your time and give your patience, you will not succeed in having other people fulfill your wishes as you want them. When you don't make that investment, you limit your ability to create opportunities for other people to succeed that are required for you to grow.

The next time you have an important project, no matter how financially stressed, time stressed or personality stressed you might be, try it. I think you'll be amazed at how much smoother the project goes, how much less involved you need to be and how much better the overall product becomes. Success is really about achieving what we want to achieve in our own minds, it doesn't really matter what anybody else thinks. If we don't believe that we are successful we are not. By giving other people a complete vision and giving them the opportunity to succeed you also create the opportunity for you to succeed while having other people complete your vision.  Go out and communicate, communicate and celebrate.