21 Oct It’s worth taking the time to get clear
A day-long discussion on Twitter got started when a follower posted “I’m interested to know how many companies do you guys consider yourself loyal to?”
Seeing I was in the mood to tussle, I replied, “ok, I’ll play, but first how do you define loyalty?”
Back and forth we went until we agreed on a specific set of things beyond the usual fluff about “devotion”. And while you might be interested in where we landed, my point here is not to define loyalty. It’s about the time it takes to understand what general terms and jargon mean.
The issue reared its head again during some lively too and fro in a recent core values workshop. The CEO noted he was more worried if people assumed they knew the meaning than by them needing added clarity.
Time. It all takes time: a sorely missing commodity and currency of thinking. To get to clear about anything takes time. Case in point the day of back and forth tweets to get underneath the idea of ‘loyalty’.
And before you jump to “Well, of course, everyone knows what loyalty is”, stop right now and write down what you think it is.
Now take any general terms or jargon you’ve used in that definition and write down what they mean. Go back and revise your definition of loyalty and keep repeating the process until you have something definite, unambiguous and very likely using more than a couple of words.
Of course, it’s not remotely possible to do this for every term we use. Sometimes we need to rely on general meanings to do the heavy lifting. And if what we mean aligns with whatever that is then fine and dandy. But if it doesn’t, then doing the work to understand and define is not just necessary, it becomes critical.
The detail is absent in lots of places. I see it most frequently when people avoid the deep work of thoroughly interrogating their purpose and values — closely followed by promises. And further in the related agreements people make, which are often absent even the basics of who will do what by when.
A failure to be clear is a failure to communicate. So what does loyalty mean to you?
Thanks for reading