How Managers Can Give Clear Instructions Without Controlling Work

Learn how to create clarity, reduce repeated questions, and build team ownership without becoming a micromanager.

As a manager you may be facing a situation where you will observe that the team members keep coming back with more questions.

When team members continue to without not much progress, managers should stop and check whether the team has enough clarity to act.

When team members come back repeatedly with questions, it does not always mean they lack capability. It may also mean that the team members do not have enough clarity to make decisions to move forward confidently.

This is where some managers make a mistake of misunderstanding capability of the team members vs providing clear instructions to bring clarity about what must be accomplished.

In this blog, I want to share a practical framework that will help you to provide clear instructions so that team members may not have to come back with questions for every small things.

The Situation

Often it has been observed that managers tend to provide more instructions or check every detail or changing decision frequently due to either they are new to management role or sometimes may be because of pressure to deliver the agreed work.

It is obvious why managers would want to do that. Some of the reasons are:

Managers want to avoid mistakes and missing deadlines
Managers want the work completed in the way they would have done it
Managers believe providing more information will bring clarity

The problem with the above approach is that it leads to confusion in ownership among the team members. They will not understand what they own and what they are answerable for.

So, it creates a gap in understanding or not sure whether to make a decision or not when they are stuck. Hence, team members keep coming back with questions as they are not clear what to do or whether whatever they are doing will be accepted by the manager.

The ultimate issue will be that managers end up doing micromanagement for all the activities as they will assume that the team does not have the required skill or capability to deliver the agreed work.

The Solution

Most important aspect is managers should create clarity. What that means?

Managers should provide direction, context, and boundaries, while allowing team members to use their judgement.

By allowing team members to use their judgement to proceed will provide them enough room for the members to think and come up solutions to solve a problem. These solutions can then be reviewed by the managers to ensure the ultimate goal is reached.

So, then how to provide clarity? Use the below simple 5-part clarity check framework.

Managers can use this before assigning work or before responding to repeated questions.

► Outcome
It is very important to ensure that team members understand what does success look like? That means they need to understand what are the success criteria for the assigned task.

► Purpose
The next important information is that team members should understand how the assigned task relates to other task or why it matters to the organisation or to the team. This will provide the context of the task at hand.

► Ownership
While doing the task, team members should understand what they own in that and what the manager or other team members own. Understanding what they are responsible for, will help them to understand what kind of decisions they should make while performing the assigned task.

► Boundaries
When the ownership is clear, they should also know the boundary of that ownership. If things are not going as expected, team members should know that they should escalate to the manager. And what is the boundary for the decisions that they are making.

► Timing
To complete the task, team members should know the milestones or deadlines including the check-ins that would be needed to ensure that progress can be reviewed and course-corrected if necessary.

The above approach will help to create clarity with the team members and avoids major portion of hassle during execution.

At the end of the day, manager's job is to create the conditions or environment in which team members can do good work, make decisions and grow through taking responsibilities.

How to respond to question - "What should I do?"

Even after providing the clarity there will be some team members, who will still come and ask what should they do?

Should the manager immediately give an answer? No.

Under such situations also, managers should avoid giving all the details, instead use the following questions to make the team member think about the possibilities.

Do you remember what outcomes are we trying to achieve?
What are the options do you think we have?
Which one is the best option that fits to achieve the outcome?
Are there any risk associated?
Why are you not able to make the decision, is it because of boundary set?
What support do you think that I can provide?

The questions will help the team to build the judgement while they are discussing with you which, in-turn, looks like the manager is giving the support that is required.

So, when should managers provide an immediate answer? When the risk is high, provide the direction needed to protect the outcome. Example, something to do with legality, financials, customer dissatisfaction or people-related situations.

In summary, managers should ensure they first attempt to provide the clarity instead of jumping in to provide all the details.

A manager should step in more directly only when the team members cannot progress despite providing clear expectations and appropriate support or when the risk is high.

So as a reflection manager should do a short self-check when team members are coming back with repeated questions:

Have I explained what success looks like?
Does the team member understand why the work matters?
Do they know what they own and what they can decide?
Have I given enough information to act without controlling every detail?
What are the one or two recurring questions that are coming up and how to prevent it?

The above self reflection questions will provide manager clarity on where things have gone wrong. Based on that take the corrective actions.

End of the day, the goal for the manager should be to create clarity by providing the direction, context, and boundaries.

Happy Management!