How Clarity Alone Can Lift Your Business Results by 31 Percent

A recent organisational alignment study by ISA Global found that strategic clarity accounts for a 31% difference between high and low performance across revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. If you are running a P&L and wondering why the numbers are harder to hit than the effort warrants, that gap is worth understanding.

I kicked off the year with a webinar on building business results and engagement through creating Clarity (the C of SERVICE). We talked about what clarity looks like in practice and what happens when it is absent. For many of the people on that call, it was largely absent. I do not think they were unusual.

I have been guilty of being unclear myself. Can you think of a time when something did not get done the way you had explained it? Creating and maintaining clarity takes more effort than most leaders give it, and it is not a one-off task.

McKinsey published an article highlighting that after the volatility and ambiguity of 2020, high-performing organisations were focusing on clarity in three areas:

Who we are – Purpose, values and culture

How we operate – Structure, decision making and talent

Where we grow — Ecosystem, tech platforms and learning

Over 80% of those areas come back to leadership clarity. These companies had discussed all of them before. The problem is that clarity requires constant updating to stay useful as conditions change.

My first programme as a coach was called Clarity, and it did not sell well. The reason is that most leaders do not believe they need help being clear. Much like driving, most think they are above average. This article by Michael Beer sets out six ways most leaders are not being clear, and why their strategies are not working as a result.

Three things that will sharpen your clarity

Start with yourself. The old adage holds: you cannot explain something well until you understand it yourself. A leader operating in ambiguity cannot give their team the clarity needed to make good decisions at the right level. Get clear on your purpose, your values, and why you are in the role. Establish your boundaries and what you will and will not do.

Communicate with more precision. When people feel unclear, they waffle, use jargon, and bluff. Your team feels it, even when they do not say so. One change you can make immediately is to prepare your communications by thinking about how you want the message received, not just how you want to send it. Before any significant communication, map out what you want the audience to think, feel, do, and know as a result. On the webinar we ran this as a live exercise and the responses were striking. A 4x2 grid is all you need. You will find a planner template in the free resources library if you want to use it.

Get clear on what your team is actually doing. Work out what is producing results and what is not, then plot together what you should be doing next and how to get there. Too many teams are still running legacy processes, reports, and methods that are irrelevant or counterproductive. Invite the team to surface those and address them. Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge wrote a book called "Will it make the boat go faster?" which is full of ideas that cut through the noise and sharpen focus. Here is a short video that can help you get everyone clear and aligned on your goals.

 

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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