The Missing Link

When my (third-generation Aussie) mum married my (first-gen-migrant Greek) dad, she took on board the saying ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’ and duly set to work learning all my father’s favourite dishes – stuffed veggies, moussaka, yalatoboureko. Of course, she went to my yiayia, my grandmother, for the recipes. Now, my mum is a great cook and the dishes came out fine. But they were never quite the same as when my grandmother cooked them. My mother’s conclusion: “She’s leaving something out! There’s definitely a secret ingredient or a crucial step that is so obvious to her that she hasn’t even bothered to include it in her instructions!” (The other less-charitable interpretation was that yiayia was deliberately leaving out the ‘special sauce’ so my mother wouldn’t supplant her in my father’s affections, but let’s leave the Oedipal psychoanalysis for another blog post). Most likely it was simply that some things were so obvious to my yiayia that she didn’t even think to say them. Has this happened to you in your business? It has to me and quite recently – once with slightly humorous results, another time with more serious consequences. I share these experiences with you in the hope that next time you’re giving – or receiving – instructions, you’ll pause to ensure that everyone has ALL the information they need: 1. We have an office phone which can be redirected to another landline or mobile if we’re all out, or travelling. Our office manager has done this many times, so we know the system works. One day she was not going to be in the office, and gave me the instructions on how to forward the phone. Step 1: put in the redirect number. Step 2: hit 78#. Too easy, right? Well, no matter how many times I tried it didn’t work. And this happened on more than one occasion. Finally, I asked point blank, “Have you given me all the steps?” Well, turns out there was one crucial step that had been missed: Wait for dial tone. Aha! Mystery solved. 2. An existing client send me a one-line brief via email – could we please ‘review’ the attached document for her? Of course. We duly edited the document so that it was concise, engaging, and typo-free, and sent it back, only to discover that while I had interpreted ‘review’ as ‘edit thoroughly’ what the client really meant was ‘proofread’ (i.e. just fix the typos). All that wasted effort! Clarifying what someone means by what they say is almost always a good idea, whether it’s because a crucial step has been missed, or the wording they’ve used is vague. In fact, at our recent staff strategy meeting, we put in place a process for when we’re asking each other to carry out an action: ask 2 questions. We’ve found this simple step is helping avoid misunderstandings and saving time having to redo something because it wasn’t clear what was wanted in the first place.