Make the Obvious Explicit to Improve Team Performance

When you do, you'll see it wasn't obvious to everyone, or obvious enough to drive effective behavior

The root cause of so much team dysfunction and malperformance can be traced back to poor communication.

To extend what I said in Team Habits about communication, we can consider three different ways in which poor communication occurs:

1. What’s said is communicated poorly. Most discussions about communication focus on this.

2. There’s a lot of overcommunication. This is discussed more frequently, especially in terms of chatter and meetings.

3. There’s a lot of undercommunication.

Today’s post addresses #3, as I see it much more frequently from the visionary leaders and owner-executives I work with every day.

Like most team habits, today’s team habit is pretty simple: make the obvious explicit.

The punchline here is that, when you make the obvious explicit, you'll realize “the obvious” wasn't obvious to everyone. And, even if it is obvious, it’s not driving effective behavior.

This starts with leaders, but it’s good for teammates to practice with each other and their leaders, too.

The general rule is: the lower your team’s readiness, the newer the team is, or the less familiar the opportunity or challenge is, the more you'll need to make the obvious explicit. It’s exceptionally hard to over-index on contextual or clarifying communication in those conditions.

One of the many reasons high-performing teams perform well is that they have teamsense: their shared knowledge and practices are such that they all “see” and “know” the same things and also know what everyone’s going to do to address the opportunity or issue. Yes, there are many poor-performing teams that have teamsense but won’t push things forward. Teamsense is a necessary condition for high performance, but alone it’s not sufficient.

A leader’s core job is to seed, cultivate, and expand teamsense. Making the obvious explicit is thus a foundational habit for leaders.

Making the Obvious Explicit Before Execution Is Better, But It's Good Anytime

In an ideal world, assumptions, context, and parameters would all be surfaced and made explicit when we’re setting goals, prioritizing, and planning. Establishing teamsense upstream helps minimize the rocky rapids and Crisco watermelons downstream.

In the real world, though, many leaders undercommunicate up front and have to guide teams and projects the whole way through, hope they catch teammates running with scissors, or continually have to pull projects out of ditches. Like many bad team habits, undercommunication ends up creating a cycle such that leaders spend so much time in managing projects, taming chaos, or problem-solving that they undercommunicate somewhere else and end up in the same cycle.

If you find yourself in a cycle of constantly managing projects and taming chaos, take the time to make the obvious explicit rather than just fixing the top-level problem.

That could look like:

• Pointing to the reality that your team is stretched too thin and needs to reprioritize (which will often require acknowledging that you spread them too thin).

• Calling out that there’s new information or a resource change since the project got started that everyone might not be aware of.

• Getting your team to create and share a common plan rather than having three or four ghost plans.¹

• Questioning whether there are too many cooks in the kitchen on a project and the team needs to be reconfigured to the smallest atomic team to move the project forward.

• Creating or specifying a budget for the project that was never discussed up front or forgotten about.

Any experienced leader will see some of the situations above and be exasperated that their team didn’t see the obvious and adjust on their own. Sometimes experience allows the leader to see the obvious an inexperienced team didn’t; other times, it’s as simple as teammates struggling to see the label when they're stuck inside the jar.

The aspect of the obvious I most encourage you to make explicit is NOT the solution to whatever problem you’re seeing, but the root cause and how you’ve thought through addressing it. That’s what will cultivate teamsense. Otherwise, you’re just creating more work for yourself and, frustratingly, the work you’re creating for yourself is probably someone else’s job.

Use the MTOE shortcode for Making the Obvious Explicit

Figuring out how and where to make the obvious explicit can be awkward, but it need not be.

You can simply use the acronym MTOE and say whatever you need to say. I’ll share one with you:

MTOE: It’s not your team’s job to figure out what's in your head. It’s your job to tell them.

Like I said above, if you make the obvious explicit, you’ll realize it’s not so obvious and not driving effective behavior.

If you want to start a practice of making the obvious explicit, swipe and modify the snippet below:

Team, I'm working on my communication habits and will start making the obvious explicit. I'll be using the shortcode MTOE to make it easier to practice. You can read this post for more context: https://www.productiveflourishing.com/make-the-obvious-explicit

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P.S. Making the obvious explicit is a team communication habit. The Team Habits Quiz will help you figure out the likely best places to start building better team habits.

1. From the Team Habits Glossary: Ghost Plan = A plan that was made by a few members of the team but not communicated to the rest of the team.