Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me, Ann Latham. She’s a best-selling author of four books, Power of Clarity: A Modern Classic, The Disconnect Principle, her most recent book, in addition to Clarity papers and Uncalming Means. She’s an expert in clarity. First, let’s get started with a quick introduction to how did you become the of clarity.

All right, that’s a great question. So, before I quit my corporate job and decided to be consultant, I asked everyone I’d worked with, my boss, my former bosses, my colleagues, what is it I do exceptionally well that is most unusual? And their answers were thoughtful, wonderful answers. And they all came back and said, basically, that I take in large quantities of information, cut to the chase, find the kernel, figure what the most important next decision is, and move people forward. So, I called my company Uncommon Clarity, and I started trying to sell Clarity after that, and people don’t buy Clarity. So, I ended up doing strategic planning and team effectiveness and process improvement and all that thing. But I started writing about clarity right away, and I started writing about how I create clarity, how others can do what I do to create clarity and make things more efficient, more effective, more productive, and feel more confident. So, people started calling me the Queen of Clarity because that’s what I kept writing about.

And there’s no space where clarity, and I think making sure we don’t have disconnect, is more important than in safety, right? Because at the end of the day, it could cost somebody’s life. There could be catastrophic events if there is a lack of clarity. And that’s really where I got interested in your book and the principle. There’s also a great TED Talk that you’ve recently hosted. So, tell me a little bit about the disconnect and how it applies, in this case, to safety.

Right. So, I’ll tell you how I came about the Disconnect Principle, which is the title of the book. And I was working with a client who called me one day and said, I have to give some feedback to one of my employees, and I always struggle with this. He’s a difficult employee, so help me out here. So, I taught him everything I’d ever learned about giving feedback, how to zero in on a specific observable behavior and to be able to get the impact of that behavior. So, we made it really clear to the employee that this is what the problem is, and this is why so that he would understand. And when I finished teaching this guy everything. He was so ready for this conversation because he was so sure it was going to go so much better than in the past. But then it didn’t.

No.

And that’s when I realized what missing from all that advice. And the problem is that all that advice tells you what to say, but not what to think. And so, if you want to give someone feedback and you prepare the perfect script, you’re still going to fail if the thoughts in your mind are judgmental or if you’re determined to fix the guy or fire the guy. So, I’m sure Max walked into this room with this great script, but I’m sure his body language and his tone of voice and facial expressions gave him away. And his employee figured out immediately that Max was mad at him in danger of losing his job. And so, the conversation didn’t go well. Because if you judge somebody, if you try to fix them, correct them, coerce them, manipulate them, you’re not going to walk in there and have a calm, constructive conversation. It’s just not going to work well. And so what I determined was that what you need to do is to wipe those judgments, those assumptions about why someone screwed up, and get them out of your head and just go, if something doesn’t happen the way you expected, all you know for certain is that something didn’t happen the way you expected.

You just don’t know much. You don’t know why. You can’t start making assumptions about why someone did that you didn’t expect. I mean, it might not even be wrong, just it’s not what you expected. So, the first thing you should say is, I think we have a disconnect. When you say something like that, it’s judgment free, and it’s focused on the thing that went wrong, the situation, not the person. So, the next step is to ask, where are we and what do we need to do next? And so, you’re not trying to fix You’re just trying to fix the disconnect. Where are we? What do we need to do? How do we make things better?

I think what’s really powerful is your message around fix the disconnect, not the person. So ultimately, you’re giving feedback you want to change in the behavior, but you’re not in it. If I’m understanding, reading you correctly, you’re not trying to fix the person. You’re not trying to go and prejudge why they made a mistake, didn’t apply a rule, or something along those That’s right.

Right. And so, their behavior will change not because you’re changing them, not because you’re correcting them, not because you’re fixing them, not coercing them, manipulating them. You change their behavior by helping them understand that the situation didn’t work out. So, what do we need to do differently? And it’s we. You may be at fault. You may be the one who didn’t give them specific instructions. You may be the one who put pressure on them to do something else. You gave them too many priorities. You gave them too much work. So, you have to go in there with a sense of a partnership that it just didn’t work out for whatever reason. Now, let’s talk about what did… I expected this. Apparently, you expected something different or weren’t able to do it or something. Where are we? It’s a partnership. It’s solving the problem together. There’s no blame.

No blame. And then how do you drive accountability? Because in your book, you talk about reframing accountability or the principle of accountability, because it’s not about removing accountability from the equation.

Right. It comes back to that whole employer-employee relationship, be a partnership. So, holding someone accountable isn’t about holding their feet to the fire or putting pressure on them. It’s about partnering for success. Sure. So, accountability is about, to me, it’s about working together. So, it’s me helping you succeed. It’s you are working with me so that the two of us together can succeed, because in any business relationship or pretty much any relationship. If one person fails, it hurts the other person as well, right? Right. So, you want to be an accountability partner. So, yes, you want to be specific about what needs to be done. You want to be specific about how it needs to be done if there’s particulars, to work with the person to be sure they agree, they understand, and they’re willing and able to do what you’re asking. Otherwise, you’re dreaming. I’m big on setting expectations by working together and being sure that the person agrees. So, you might say something like, this is what we need done. You seem to be the right person. Are you? Get them to sign up. Say, yeah, that’s right up my alley. Or I don’t have any time.

Then you want to know that right up front instead of trying to pressure and coerce.

So very much about building the conversation, understanding, not fixing the person, and then getting to a joint commitment in terms of how we are going to move forward together, essentially.

Yes. And another part of that and actually in my book, The Power of Clarity, I talk a lot about delegation. But when you delegate something, you don’t just throw it over the wall and hope that it all works out just fine. Just go do it. So, one of the most important things about delegating is you talk about the steps you’re going to use. So, for instance, with a very experienced employee that you get along well with, you might be able to say, just go do this. But even in that case, there’s room for misunderstandings, right? There’s room for-100 %. Yeah. Yeah. Difference of opinion of what needs to be done and deadlines and how things need to be done and how well things need to be done. But with a for a junior person, you want to be really specific about, okay, step one, you need to go perhaps and flesh out what I’ve just told you and tell me how you’re going to approach this problem. And then, let’s check in at that point. And then when you get back together, you’re checking in on a specific thing that’s accomplished, and it’s an opportunity to figure out what you can add to the process.

So, step two, once maybe they’ve come back and they’ve flushed out their plan, then you can add to that. And you say, well, what’s the next logical step here where you need me, or I need to check in with you to be sure that I’m confident things are going the right way? So, you take it in a stepwise fashion to be sure that things are going smoothly. So, for instance, someone’s putting together a plan, you say, okay, come back to me and I’ll help you look at the risks. So, they flush it out. And it’s really important to you as the manager to say, I want to be sure you’re considering the risks and planning for contingencies. So, you make that. That’s the next milestone you’re going to. You see what I mean? So, you take this stepwise specific approach so that you’re not just checking in with them on Monday mornings, every Monday to say, are you on schedule? That’s not how you hold people accountable and delegate. You say, no, I think at this juncture, I want to see how things are going because I can help with this, or I need to be confident this is proceeding.

So, it’s a stepwise approach.

It’s actually been interesting because when you say this, it reminds me in safety and aviation, which hasn’t been extended in many other sectors. But obviously, if the pilot or the pilots and the control tower misunderstand communication, it can have catastrophic impacts because you could have two planes colliding with each other or lots of other horrible outcomes. Typically, no more than three things are communicated at once because the idea is if I give you four, five, six things, you’re going to forget one of them. I’m going to give you three things at most at a time. And then the other piece that I think is very connected to what we’re saying is this concept of three-way communication, which is I’ll share an instruction to you as an example. You’ll repeat your understanding of what I just told you, and then I reconfirm that what you told me matches what I told you. Sounds overly complicated but eliminates the lack of clarity as to what your next steps are in case all sorts of things could have gone horribly wrong.

Yeah. Well, let me tell you a story that you made me think of. When I was a brand-new employee at a high-tech company at one point, I was sitting in on a meeting and I couldn’t understand anything anyone was talking about because it was technical and they’re all speaking in acronyms. Sure. There was a point meeting where two people were going back and forth trying to solve a problem. And I was just listening as hard as I could to figure out what they were talking about. And when they finished, I said, Wait a minute. Did you just agree to do XYZ? The one said yes and the other said no. And I knew, even though I couldn’t understand what they were talking about, I knew that they had not just agreed, and they thought they had just agreed. It was ridiculous.

But how many times does that happen in a day-to-day business where we think we’ve agreed or we had a meeting we agreed on something, and then the 10 participants all have a different understanding of what the expectation is?

Yeah, and it happens all the time. And it’s one of the reasons I became the Queen of Clarity, because I saw things like that. And my processes and methods help you avoid those kinds of things. I love to tell three things at most. And that specificity, it helps you Wiring three things helps you ensure that you are being very specific about what that person needs to hear. I always ask the question, what needs to be different when we’re done? And I want to know what the outcome looks like. What has to be different 15 minutes from now? What has to be different by lunchtime? What has to be different by the end of this meeting? And I always say, don’t start a meeting without knowing what needs to be different when you’re done. What are you going to walk away with that you didn’t have coming in? So that’s similar to those three things at most. What specifically needs to be different when we’re done here so that things can be… You can unleash progress; you can move things forward. And that’s a great example of helping people be really specific. If you tell them you need to say three things, they can’t just blah, blah, blah.

They must go, what are those three things?

And it’s being very I love your question there. It’s really trying to get people to understand, okay, what needs to happen next? Not, let me blurb up a bunch of things and hope that you understood my intent.

Right.

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One of the things I know when we talked about when we first connected, you touched a little bit about creating an environment for raising concerns, and I think that’s an element as well with Clarity. You talked about being a brand-new employee on a team, but that happens all the time. Again, if you’re in a safety space, implications can be quite substantial. But I’ve seen this many times where the most junior employees, they’re listening to what they’re needing to do, listening to a tailboard or a start of shift meeting that’s telling them clear instructions, and then you ask them afterwards, So, what are you going to do? And they’re like, I don’t know. They had no understanding what was shared, and nobody checked for understanding. Tell me a little bit about what you can do in this context to create that environment to raise concerns.

Well, I could talk about it. Okay, so the new employee, there’s two things there. You want the new employee to speak up, right? And that’s where the disconnect principle comes in. And you want the employee to be clear about what they heard in that meeting, what they’re planning, right? Okay, so let me talk about those. So, the disconnect principle is great because just that phrase, I think we have a disconnect. If that becomes part of your culture, then believe it, companies that have learned that and made it part of their culture, they see disconnects everywhere. So, making that part of your culture means that a new employee who’s learned that can be in any situation whatsoever, sitting in a meeting, just having been told something by the boss, you can just go, Wait a minute. I think we have a disconnect. Just saying, I’m not clear, without saying, I’m stupid, I’m confused, I’m losing it, whatever. I think we have a disconnect. I think you just said this. Is that right? Or I’m not sure when you’re asking me to have that done by. I mean, it’s the way to open the conversation to clarify and to ask those questions without saying, I’m confused.

I don’t get it. I mean, that’s hard to say. But I think we have a disconnect, just so I’m sure I don’t waste your time, just so I’m sure I’m doing the right thing. And so, it’s that line alone, I think makes it easier for a new employee to get what they need in terms of the specificity.

It’s interesting because it’s a very simple word, but like you say, it doesn’t cause any alarm. It doesn’t get people on a defensive. It just makes sense that somehow, we’re disconnected, we’re not sure. But simply introducing that word disarms the conversation. It’s now being acceptable to say that.

It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It doesn’t reflect poorly It’s not depending on anybody. It’s just the situation.

Yes.

Okay, so that’s one piece. Then you talked about new employees sitting in a meeting. They walk out and they’re not sure what they just heard. This only happens about 99% of the time. It’s not just new employees, believe me.

Oh, yeah.

And the problem is that people start meetings without knowing what needs to be different when they’re done. And A lot of meetings, if you look at meeting agendas, are filled with words. And I talk about this in my book, The Power of Clarity. But they’re filled with words like, let’s review, report, discuss, communicate, update, inform. Those sound familiar.

Very familiar. I’ve never seen this before, but yes.

When you think about it, those are what I call treadmill verbs because you can do them forever. You can communicate forever, discuss forever, review forever, report forever. There’s no way to know what you’ve done. And that’s the language that we use, especially in business. It’s almost like they teach it in business schools. So, I call them treadmill verbs, and they should be avoided entirely. But they drive meetings They’re all over meeting agendas. Let’s discuss this. Let’s review this. Let’s report that. So instead, they should only use destination verbs, another phrase I coined. And destination verbs make it obvious what needs to be done and when you are done. So, the first one and the most important one, because it is decided. Decisions are arguably the most important and It’s a frequent task we perform, especially in an organization. We decide things. And a decision, once you’ve made the decision, you’re done. You know what to make. And you also, you have to make a decision Because you’ve reached a fork in the road. When you make that decision, you’ve unleashed next steps. You can move things forward. So that’s true progress.

It’s progress.

Communicating isn’t progress because you can do it forever, and it doesn’t have an outcome. So, decide is the most important destination verb. There’s only five of them, which is the good news. Stepping one is plan. When you plan, you’re done when you’ve got a plan, and it unleashes next steps. The third one is solved or resolve. Resolve a problem, solve a problem. When you solve the problem, you’re done, you know it, and you’ve unleashed the next steps. The fourth one is list. Now, you can make lists until you’re blue in the face, but those lists should contribute to the other three. When you make a decision, you need lists like lists of decision criteria or limitations. You need lists of alternatives. You need lists of risks. Those lists, they don’t make the entire decision, but they’re concrete things that you can accomplish that move the decision forward, and you know you’re done when you finish the list. Plans need lists of action items, lists of resources, lists of to-do item. There’s a lot of lists that go into planning. So, if meetings only use destination verbs, it’s crystal clear for new employees and all employees that, oh, we just made a decision.

We just made a plan. We just solved the problem. We just made a list to help with this decision. So, with that clarity, you won’t have people in meetings going, oh, that was interesting, but I don’t know where it left us.

Right. So really forcing you to have a decision on where you’re trying to get to, what you’re trying to change after that meeting.

What needs to be different when we’re done? Yeah. And the things that move things forward, there’s four things: decide, plan, solve, list, confirm, and approve. Confirm is like someone says, I’ve done A, now I want to do B. Am I on the right track? They want a yes or no answer. But instead, we usually give them a whole litany of ideas and what to do on step 10, even if they’re still on step 2 and war stories. And we talk forever because we don’t just say, yes, go do step. Go for Yes. And then the sixth one is approved. I’m ready to implement. Do I have approval to do it? I’m ready for this. Do I have approval? It’s clear when you’re done, you’ve got your approval, you’ve got your confirmation, you’re done, and we’ve unleashed next steps. So, we’ve got real progress, and it’s crystal clear to the people in the meeting.

Love it. To me, I still, and for anybody who hasn’t watched your TED Talk, I think it’s worth having a listen because it’s a good 15-minute segment that really illustrates the power of just the word disconnect. I think very much applies to the safety space because it disarms it, making try about an understanding of why you’re not potentially following a rule, why did you not understand, as opposed to getting to solving the person. It’s just let’s understand what’s happening. You had some really good illustrations there in terms of not coming in with decision or judging the person at the front-end. I think that was one of my main takeaways from it. I think it’s a very powerful way to introduce it, to give feedback, or to capture an understanding of where is there a lack of clarity between two people. I loved it in the example you had around creating an environment for raising concerns. I think that’s a very powerful spot. If you create the language in the organization, it’s not just about giving feedback, having a difficult conversation. It’s also about how you create a language around somebody maybe not understanding clearly what needs to happen next.

Right. Yeah, it’s really powerful. And my clients who have learned it and use it, people are treated much more like partners, like equals. They feel free to speak up. Where there used to be a certain amount of griping or petty disagreements, they’re gone because people just say, wait a minute, we’ve got to disconnect. I thought you were going to do this. I don’t know what you were thinking. Where are we? No judgment. There’s no blame. People cut to the chase and figure out where weren’t they communicating clearly? Where were there too many things to do? Where were there other priorities? Where did someone just not know how to do it, so they didn’t get it done? Or where were they afraid to speak up and ask questions? If you are just, I think we have a disconnect. The focus is just not on the person. So, everyone feels more at ease to ask questions and to say what needs to be said.

And I think the other part that comes to mind is in many organizations, what I see is from a safety context, people aren’t necessarily giving feedback because they’re generally a nice culture. They’re friendly and they want to be perceived as nice, et cetera. But this also disarms that piece because it’s not about the difficult conversation that we have to prepare ourselves and speak in the mirror because we’re not comfortable having it. It’s not something that’s confrontational. It’s just we have a disconnect.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because there’s no blame. There’s no shame. There’s no reason for anyone to feel bad. You just go, wait a minute. It’s a disconnect. It’s not about you and me. It’s the disconnect. And they happen all the time. I mean, the clients are everywhere. They are everywhere.

But I think it’s also to your earlier comment is if you introduce a language, people talk about disconnects. They’re more likely to find disconnects everywhere. But that’s a good thing because it’s about creating more clarity across the organization from a messaging standpoint.

Right. And when you say you have a disconnect, the first question is, where are we? What needs to be done next? But oftentimes, you also should ask, how are we going to avoid a disconnect like this one in the future? It’s a good question in a lot of cases. So, let’s say you and I misunderstood each other. You didn’t do what I expected. Instead of chewing you out, I said, I think we have a disconnect. You say, oh, I thought you meant this, and that’s not what you meant. And then we say, what do we need to do next? And then the very next question is, okay, how come we didn’t understand each other? How are we going to be sure we understand each other next time? How are we going to prevent a disconnect like this one from occurring again? And then you learn about each other. You learn the way you think, the way you act. So, it builds stronger relationships. There’s no fear there where people think, if I give someone feedback, it’s going to damage the relationship. With this method, it builds stronger relationships.

And I think it touches also on another topic that I’ve read through some of your books, is this element that we think we’re clear, but most of the time, we aren’t clear in our message. You’re seeking to understand, where is it that I wasn’t clear in my message?

Right. Yeah. The power of clarity, the whole first chapter is called, we aren’t as clear as we think we are, and it’s costly. It’s also risky.

It’s risky, too. Yes.

And yeah, there’s a remarkable number of examples in the book and through life where you go, Oh, my God. There’s one example where A VP tells one of my clients, look into this. And so, he goes, and he looks into this huge plan of hers and digs around and figures everything out and comes back weeks later with a recommendation. She didn’t want a recommendation. She thought it was a dumb idea. She just wanted someone to tell her it was a dumb idea so she could tell another VP it was a dumb idea. It’s like wasted time, burned relationships. The guy who did all the work had a team working on this project.

Oh, my goodness.

They lost faith in him. It was just a disaster. But she thought it was clear, I’ll just go look into it. It’s just an idea this VP had. So, yeah, there are a lot of cases where that happens. Another example is that the guy I was checking in with a coaching client, and he said, how is it going? He said, well, I’m still waiting for feedback on my marketing plan from my boss. I said, what did you ask for? I asked her to review the plan. I said, what do you need? He says, I need permission to execute. So, the next morning, He went in and said, Can I execute, implement this plan? So, he asked using a treadmill verb review, review my plan, which could mean anything, from grammar to credibility to whatever. And then he went back, specifically, and asked for approval, and he got a yes immediately. So, he lost several weeks for no reason. Furthermore, that poor boss probably had that plan sitting on the side of her desk ask. She probably picked it up 10 times and went, oh, shoot, what do I do with this? All that time right now.

It was hanging over her head, driving her crazy.

Yes.

Yeah. Anyway, there’s a lot of cases where we think it’s a It’s a simple request, and it isn’t.

It’s not. Yeah. Very powerful in simple message, but hugely important, particularly in the safety space. We just talked about, there’s too often there’s a disconnect that happens on the safety side where we have a new rule procedure and somebody’s not following it. So, we assume the worst. I’ve seen… I had one person actually tell me; we have a great safety program. It’s an at-will safety program. You make one mistake and you’re gone. Never learn anything from that. But how do you make sure you fix the disconnect as opposed to trying to fix the person ultimately? And then again, there’s no space where clarity is more critical and has bigger consequences than in the safety space. So how can we become clear in terms of our message, clear in terms of the conversations that we have? So very, very powerful message. Again, I encourage you to pick up the disconnect principle or the power of clarity. And if anybody wants to get in touch, what’s the best way to do that?

I’m easy to find on LinkedIn If you type in Anne Latham, only one of them will say Queen of Clarity after it. But also, if you go to Ann Latham. Com, you’ll find links to the TED Talk and to my books. Yeah, so that’s the simplest way. Perfect.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. It’s been a fun.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.