I read an anecdote today about Churchill that made me smile.
While checking a classified document during World War II that his typist had laid out for him, Winston Churchill wrote: “Watch the borders”, referring to the fact that the typist had left little room at the edges of the paper for him to make his comments. These documents were then read by generals from the Allied troops who thought the note was meant for them, asking them to literally watch England’s borders in order to prevent an invasion.
This is an anecdote told by Thomas J. DeLong in his article The Right to Straight Talk in the Harvard Business Review. Not only does it remind me of how many English words have more than one meaning but it also made me think back to some workshops I have been running on Team Leading and Communication.
These workshops have been designed to introduce under 18s to the world of work and in particular, to the world of management. One of the sections of this workshop is on Communication, including the need to check that instructions and information have been understood correctly. It all seems very simple when you go through the models, so simple that a lot of the time the students have trouble as they think they are missing something. No, they have understood the models correctly – what they are missing is the life experience to realise that not everyone bothers to ask for clarification and indeed, sometimes this is not easy.
In a similar way to when we have “difficult conversations” (click here for relevant blog post), asking for clarification can also make us feel like we appear incompetent, like we haven’t understood the information the first time through. Asking for clarification can be seen as admitting that we weren’t sharp enough to grasp things the first time round or, that we think the speaker did not make themselves clear.
And so it is easy to go down the wrong road, to get on with our work without fully committing to it, to misinterpret information or someone’s feelings. It’s not always easy, but asking for clarification will save a lot of time in the same way as giving space to others to seek clarification from yourself, can help to strengthen relationships with your team.
