Culture Focused Practice

 Hey, hey, Hey, Dr. Tara, Vossenkemper here, and you are listening to the Culture Focused Practice podcast. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining me. Welcome. It's lovely to see you. If you're watching this video, know that this beautiful scene behind me that is slightly blurred because of my video set up is Stone Mountain Campground in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

It's fucking pretty here. It's super pretty here. The weather is just spot on so you can be a little bit jealous. I understand. Although I will say the pollen is outta control. It's absolutely nuts. If you're from Georgia, you probably already know this. If you're not from Georgia, like yours, truly, you do not know this and holy wow, it's wild.

So that aside, let's just get into the reason why we're all here today. The reason why we have gathered. Okay. I have decided that I'm going to introduce something slightly new to the podcast. I'm already excited about this little evolution.

What I really was thinking would be awesome is if we did two related episodes and then a lab. So what we're testing out this week is a kind of a it's like a a two part episode plus one day where I am just going to treat it as a lab. I'm gonna do a couple of real life examples or some realistic scenarios and walk through how I might handle each of those situations. I'm excited. I'm very excited about this.

Okay, so the theme of this, um, mini series, if you will, is the clarity gap. Why you think you're communicating, but totally aren't. So the focus for the theme, let me just bring this home real quick. Thinking of the clarity gap, or let's think about the clarity gap as that little tiny, sneaky space in between what you think that you are saying to somebody and what that somebody or that team is actually hearing. Big difference between the two.

This episode in particular is you are not as clear as you think, why your team is confused and won't tell you. Episode two is gonna get more into creating clarity without micromanaging or going into full dictator mode. And then episode three slash the lab portion is gonna be looking at a couple of real life scenarios then in figuring out is this a clarity problem or an accountability problem, I should say specifically talking through how I would approach each of these scenarios and the questions I would ask and the things I would look more into.

Alright. Now we're really gonna get into it after I ask you to subscribe to the series. Wait to the podcast. It's kind of a series. It's a bunch of series all put together. It's called Podcast Welcome, have you heard of it? Get subscribed to the podcast, so then you can just follow along and all the episodes as they're dropping. I'm doing two to three weekly at this point. You can binge listen to previous episodes. You can forward it to friends who it feels relevant for, or you can just stay in tune with what's happening.

I know I'm not alone in this. This is like an, it's just a perpetual problem in my life where you think you're being really clear with whoever you might be talking to.

It could be a partner, you know, it could be a friend, it could be your team. In this case, since I'm talking to primarily group practice owners or leadership, but it really feels like there's some shitty 2D version of the telephone game happening. You know, the game where you whisper into somebody's ear and then they whisper it into the next person and we're going down the line, and at the end, this message is just totally garbled.

It's not at all, almost all the time, especially when you play with littler kids, you know, it's never what it was at the beginning. It's just always some variation of that, and everyone thinks, wait, what? And you have to like work your way back to figure out what went wrong. That same thing happens in the lives of adults that you know and including yourself.

This is something that happens for group practice owners and leaders where we think we're being very clear about something and somehow the message is not landing in the way that we are intending it to land.

So here's our agenda for the day. Number one is just why we think we're being clear. So just. Something, what's, what gives us in this situation, what sets us up to fail basically, number two is really clues that your team is operating in confusion, so really figuring out what are the ways in which we can pick up on, oh, people aren't getting it, like something's off. Number three, I. Our step three in this is gonna be where clarity breaks down.

And then the fourth and final thing, we're just gonna recap and we're gonna have a little call to arms, so to speak. So again, part one, I don't think I said this, but part one is really just getting into the problem. Part two, the episode for tomorrow is really gonna be how do we address this? And then that third part again, is that lab where we're gonna bring to life A couple of scenarios.

So let's do section one or part one. Why we think we're being clear of today's episode, I should say the agenda item one of today's episode. Why do we think that we're being clear when we're not in fact being clear? One is that you are all in your own head, including me, 24 7. So every time we're running through a situation in our head or thinking about a problem or just, not even, uh, trying to ponder on purpose, but our brain is constantly like, you know, gnawing away at stuff in the background. The assumption that we make, and this is with no malice or no ill intent, it's just something that we all, a lot of us, I think inherently do. We assume other people are up to speed in the same way that we are.

So sometimes I think we end up processing things without even realizing that's what we're doing. Like we're not aware of the fact that our brain is still sort of gnawing on an issue. It's like we're a dog with a bone. You know, that always is the image that comes to mind. A dog, like sort of in the background, you, you stop hearing them gnawing after a while, but they're still going at it.

And then you look over and their bone is just done. All the marrow is gone. It's sort of chewed up. It's totally cleaned off of any stuff that was on it. We do that same thing in our brain. We forget that other people aren't living inside of our head in the same way, and quite frankly, they're not gonna be worried about the same issues that we're worried about.

So the things that they're chewing on, because they absolutely are chewing on their own things, their own issues, their own bones, they are not going to overlap entirely. So that's one reason why we think we're being clear and we're not. There's two more.

One is that another, I'm sorry, a second Is that verbal processing doesn't equal clarity.

So I will tell you right now I am hard fucking core and external processor in some way, shape, or form. What is jumbled in my head has to find its way out of my body for me to really see it, sort of see it as separate and be able to like grapple with it in a different way. So whether that's talking with somebody, whether that's writing, whether it's, I might, hell, I might just talk out loud to myself in the shower.

I might journal, I might talk to chat GPT. I might phone a friend, I might talk to my husband, I might talk to my leadership team. There's this constant like processing about what's going on. That is one thing that also kind of ties in with being in your own head 24 7, but what is connected to this is that the point at which you get clarity is your processing.

That doesn't mean it is clarity for those around you. So you've been grappling with something and you've reached a point of. Aha. You know, you've reached some sort of insight or some eureka moment or some understanding of what's going on. You have an answer, so to speak. That does not immediately equate to the people around you listening to process really understand.

They don't really get it. They don't understand all the ins and outs, so don't conflate those things with each other. That's really what I'm trying to say is that you might have clarity from verbal processing. That does not mean that the people around you do, especially your leadership team. Just because you have clarity doesn't mean that they do.

So try to not conflate those things. But that's another reason. Just one other common reason why we think we're being clear and we're not.

Third and final reason is that, and again, I think I, I'm saying this in advance of telling you what the third reason is. All of these reasons to me, they're all really interconnected. So one of these might hit home for you more than another one. They're all cut from the same cloth. From my perspective, in my opinion, they're absolutely all cut from the same cloth.

So this third reason then is the things that feel obvious to you as an owner or as somebody in leadership are very often brand new to your team.

So I would say this is typically happens in a top-down fashion. So what's, you know, obvious to me as an owner is likely going to feel new to my leadership team and slash or I might feel like I am moving up to the minor leagues and they are starting out in, you know, what's before the minors? I don't know, just amateur hour.

They're sort of just getting started with this thing. They might know the rules, but they haven't played the game very often. So it still is all very new to them. And then parallel to that would be my leadership team maybe get something and they're, they see it as obvious, they're trying to communicate about this to.

Whoever their team might be, and it's totally new to the team. And so there's something to be said for the amount of space something takes up in your brain, the way that we engage in dialogue around it with the people around us, and then the things that feel obvious to us not being as obvious to the people around us.

So those are three reasons why we think that we're being clear when we are, in fact not being clear. I wish. Oh my gosh, I so wish I say this. You know, and maybe I wouldn't actually want it to, want it to come to fruition, but I always think about The Matrix- I always think about how Neo just downloaded all these systems into his little, you know, port in the back of his neck.

And how incredible it would be to just take a concept, all the things connected to it that have led me to the final product or final belief or the insight that I've had, extract that and then plug it into somebody else. How. Wick ed awesome would that be? I think that's a whole different conversation about AI and the future of, you know, um, whatever it's called, the, oh my gosh, singularity.

That doesn't matter. Although it would be awesome, hypothetically awesome. Maybe not in actuality. I'm not sure about that yet. Okay. That's again, why we think we're being clear and we're not.

Agenda item number two. Clues our team is operating in confusion, so you might be wondering, okay, that's great, Tara.

Thanks so much. But how do I actually know that they don't get it? This is a great question. Thank you so much for asking. I would love to cover five reasons. Five ways in which they might be showing confusion that you are not tuning in two.

One is you are re-explaining the same thing repeatedly. Just sort of feel like fucking hell. I've already talked about this, like how many times do I have to explain this? It might be that you think you're being clear and you're not. It. That could just be it. You're continuing to talk about the same thing. You have realized that you keep talking about it. You don't understand what is like what is missing, and you might even find yourself feeling frustrated with your team, like it's not that hard, y'all. What is the deal?

That might be a sign that there is a gap. That's the clarity gap, right? What you are talking about, what you know and how it's being received by others.

Second sign that there might be some confusion, deadlines are missed or very misaligned. I always think about this in terms of prioritizing goals, prioritizing tasks on a project, having a clear deadline on either various aspects of a project or just on the project itself.

You know, what is. Um, I don't want to assume that deadlines aren't given, but let's, let's just assume there's a situation where there's not a clear deadline given, and, and maybe as a leader you're assuming it's, it takes priority. You know, obviously this is the most important thing, but that hasn't come through.

And so you're seeing your team miss all these deadlines around you. Or again, the deadlines are really misaligned. That can be a clue that there is, uh, some confusion. There's some confusion, and we're living in that clarity gap.

Number three. People are asking you to solve everything. I don't know about you, but I don't wanna be the solver all the time.

My brain is tired. I don't wanna think about other people's problems all the time. I want people to be empowered to solve them, and if they don't understand what is being asked or if they don't understand the project or if they don't. Get it. They're not gonna know how to solve the problem because they don't have clarity.

So how can they solve a problem if they don't actually understand what it needs to look like or where it needs to go? They're gonna keep coming to you and asking for solutions to problems. There we go. That's third clue that your team is operating in confusion.

Number four. Passive resistance or just straight confusion like your team is, is saying, I don't understand, like I am confused. Or apathy, which is interesting to think about this notion of feeling indifferent or someone being like, ah, yeah, that's, you know, sort of that noise.

I don't know, like indifference, sort of apathetic, apathetic to the project, whatever's being worked on, et cetera. Confusion about why it's important, where it fits in, what their role in, is it, or again, passive resistance where they're like, yeah, I, I can do this. Sure. But no, like they don't, they're not really on board something's, something's amiss.

So that's number four. And then the fifth thing, the fifth clue would be that you get feedback, direct feedback. This would be really great. This is a very big tell. Where a person says to you, I did not know that was a priority. I did not understand that was what was expected of me. I didn't realize that's what you were asking.

It's really helpful information to have. It might suck to hear, but it's really helpful where you're like, oh, that's good to know for next time. So those are the clues that your team is operating in confusion. IE that a clarity gap does exist.

Here is agenda item number three, where clarity breaks down. I actually really, I like this whole thing. I'd say, I really like this section. No, I like all of it.

Four sort of common areas, you know, where clarity breaks down. One is that your vision isn't shared or repeated. The idea that you have a vision and it's clear to you, but you're not sharing it with others, or you've shared it once and you think that's enough. One time is not enough so your vision isn't shared or repeated. That feels very important.

Second thing is that job roles overlap or are vague. Just um, oh man. Such an easy fix. And it's so rough when it's happening and when you're in the thick of it, it's really hard to see that's what is going on. When you're like, in the middle of this happening, you think, I don't understand this person and this person. They can't seem to figure it out and who's doing what.

And could literally be that their job roles are confusing.

Uh, number three. So again, where does, clearly, where does clarity breakdown, excuse me, meetings are unclear or meandering Again, why I have an agenda for even doing podcast episodes. It's why having any agenda period is really helpful for a meeting.

Staying on track with the agenda is really helpful for the meeting. So. When they are unclear or when they are meandering it, it's, there's no, there's no, um, oomph, you know, there's nothing at the end that's like, this is the task, this is the takeaway. Here's what we're doing. As strict as those things can sound as hard as it can be to stay focused on an agenda, for example, what it does is it also provides clarity to people who are at the meeting and need to know what they need to walk away with.

So unclear meetings, meandering meetings. That's just honestly the worst thing ever. I can't think of a thing worse than a meeting where there's no clear beginning ending or middle section.

The whole thing is just up in the air like, well, we're just gonna talk and hang out. No, I do that with my friends after work, like I'm here to figure shit out, you know?

Okay. Last thing. Expectations are assumed and not stated. So again, this is where clarity breaks down, is when we have expectations in our mind.

We think everybody has the same ones. Newsflash, they do not. And so we don't state what they are. That's a big issue. So I'm gonna recap this quickly, and I feel like I'm, I'm leaving on a, on a, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Sort of like, walk you up to a cliff's edge. Then I'm just like, well, find your way down.

You know, have fun, but just hold that because we're gonna get to the how we don't do this tomorrow. How do we avoid this? How do we work through, again, thinking about how do we create clarity without micromanaging or going into full dictator mode. So today you do get that cliff's edge ending, which is recovering why we think we're being clear and we're not like, how does that clear the gap even start to exist?

Clues for you that your team is maybe operating in confusion rather than clarity, and then also where clarity commonly breaks down. Those are the three things we cover today.

Please make sure you tune in tomorrow, so we will go into, again, providing clarity without micromanaging, without being a full dictator.

Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can follow up on this little mini series, including the Cultural Lab episode, which I am very excited about. And you can binge listen. You can go back, you can. I dunno. Stay up on any episodes that are dropping and I think that's it. Find me on anywhere.

Find me on Facebook, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, go to my website, taravossenkemper.com. You can work with me. There's a bunch of options there. Just yeah, I'm sure you will be in touch and I will be around and it's great seeing you here. Thanks so much. I'll see you next time. Bye.