Friday, March 07, 2014

Briefing Your People Effectively

How do you brief your people when you make a decision?  Do you communicate your decision rationale effectively?   Are you helping them identify potholes that they may encounter in the road ahead?  Are you checking to see if they understand what their roles and responsibilities are?  To help you brief your people more effectively, I advocate a methodology described by Gary Klein, Karl Weick, and Kathleen Sutcliffe.  It's a simple five-step process:

1.  Situation:  Here's what I think we face.
2.  Task: Here's what I think we should do.
3.  Intent:  Here's why I think that is what we should do.
4.  Concern:  Here's what we should keep our eye on, because if that changes, we are in a whole new situation.
5.  Calibrate:  Now talk to me.  Tell me if you don't understand, cannot do it, or see something I do not. 

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