Clarity Is Key: Building High-Performing, Aligned Teams

One of the most overlooked skills in leadership is creating clarity in high-performing teams.
What does this mean? That, generally speaking, misunderstanding and miscommunication are probably more common in your team than you’d like. And we get it – it’s so normal to have differing perspectives and interpretations. The real question is, does your team intentionally pay attention towards aligning in clarity?

Because if you confuse, you lose.

Clarity in leadership communication isn’t just about what’s said; it’s also about what’s understood and remembered. There’s a simple yet powerful way to test any team for this:

– Ask each team member to write down what they believe are the five most important core messages of the team.

– Take the answers and test them for alignment, in both content and emotion.

I do this test within my team facilitations all the time, and if I’m honest, the results can be frightening.

What’s So Important About Clarity In High-Performing Teams?

The most effective team alignment means everybody is on the same page and sees the same thing. It means we are pursuing the same opportunity and are united against the same foe. It means we have the same game plan, where each understands their contribution and objective. It means we have an understanding of what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. And if we don’t have this, it all falls apart.

This means there should be complete alignment within your team on:

Why we exist (Purpose)
What our alternate future looks like (Vision)
How we will win (Strategy)
How we behave (Workplace culture)
What we actually do (Mission)
What each individual’s role is (Goals)

Google’s Project Aristotle identified clarity as a cornerstone of high-performing teams for a reason. But here’s the thing about clarity: you don’t achieve it by simply defining it. Most organisations I know have defined their core messages, often very professionally. And yet when you talk to their people, from top to bottom, confusion or misalignment exists. Why?

How To Communicate Core Messages Effectively?

“There are countless ways to make a point. But making a point isn’t the same thing as making a difference. To make a difference, we need the practical empathy to realise that the other person doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t believe what you believe and might not want what you want. When we make a point, we reject all of this. When we make a point, we establish our power in one way or another, but we probably don’t change very much. Change comes about when the story the other person tells themselves begins to change. If all you do is make a point, you’ve handed them a story about yourself. When you make a change, you’ve helped them embrace a new story about themselves.”

Seth Godin

Providing clarity in the work place isn’t about making a point; it’s about making a difference. It enables people to see things in fresh new ways, because it makes them confident in where they stand and what the mission is.
The only way to create this is to engage, facilitate, and repeat through team culture-focused activities.

Clarity in high performing teams is not an outcome of what people have been told it’s an outcome of what people feel and believe. If you want to improve team alignment, start by checking how well your people understand the purpose, vision, and strategy.

Start Creating Clarity With These 7 Steps

Change expert John Kotter found that leaders often communicate change far less than they think, sometimes by a factor of ten. In one study, executives spoke over 2.3 million words in three months, but only 13,400 of them referred to the change that they were navigating. The message existed on paper, but it wasn’t being activated in practice. Clarity is therefore both definition and activation.

So how do we activate? Here are a couple of thoughts.

Start every meeting by reminding people of your core messages. Be like a pilot, who begins each flight reminding the passengers of basic yet essential data, like our flight’s duration and end destination.

Be Emotive – use storytelling. Be like a novelist, create stories and images around your core messages. Include feelings in your messages.
P.S. Want to know how to tell a great story? We have a workshop on that. Reach out to learn more.

Identify influencers who validate your core messages. Be strategically inclusive. If you are the only one saying something, people might deflect. But if others are saying it too, it’s hard to ignore.

Use humour & playfulness to make messages memorable. Be childlike – introduce playfulness. From a crossword puzzle to creating artwork, to playing a game – the ideas are infinite.
P.S. We have a workshop on that too, grounded in our published book, Playfully Engaged.

Create an anchoring open question for a core message. We tend to stop thinking about anything that is concluded. An open repeatable power question keeps the mind engaged. For example, link a core message of growth to a question like, ‘How do we grow this market?’.

Use the power of “playback” for messages to be internalised. The term ‘abracadabra’ means ‘I create as I speak.’ There is something powerful in people speaking the truth.’ Don’t just tell – ask people to “play back” in their own words the core messages. This supports clarity and enables accountability.

Share the next practical step of the core message. Motion creates belief. Steady and stuck creates cynicism. Link your core messages to practical steps, no matter how small these next actionable steps might be. Complete this sentence. ‘The next best step for this core belief is….?

In a world where paradox, tension, and ambiguity cannot be avoided, enable your people to engage the uncertainty from a place of certainty – the clarity of your core messages.