Your Staff Are Listening Too Much

I sat down with a small business owner and she told me she was really frustrated with her team.

They weren’t listening to her. They weren’t following her instructions. They weren’t responding to customers in the ways she wished they would. They didn’t sell the way she wanted. They didn’t greet the customers the way she wanted. They didn’t clean up the store the way she wanted. She had told them. More than once.

So she asked me how we could train those staff to do this well. Or at least to do it better.

I asked her another question first. What is the goal for your business?

“Well, that’s easy.” And she was off — lofty expectations, dreams, a real vision for what her business was. Good things. She believed every word of it.

That’s great, I said. Those are good things. But tell me a little more clearly. What is your business mission? What is it that you do? In a sentence.

“Oh, again — that’s easy.”

It took her several sentences. Then a paragraph. She was still going when I stopped her. I stopped her because the whole problem with her staff had just played out in front of me.

The fact that you can’t tell me in a sentence what your business does is the same thing your staff are feeling every day.

Your staff aren’t ignoring you. They’re listening too much.

They hear your many goals and your many perspectives. They listen to them carefully, and they attempt to follow all of them. And when they follow all of them, they follow none of them. They are paying attention to everything.

So they choose one. They commit to it. They do it well. And a little later they find out it wasn’t the right thing — because your expectations were different than they anticipated, and now you’re disappointed in them. That’s frustrating for a team. To aim at a target and feel like you missed. Not because of your bad aim, but because you never really knew the real target.

Frustration is never the way you want your frontline staff to feel. It is exactly what they will unconsciously be sharing with your customers.

This business owner was missing some strategic clarity. And it begins, counterintuitively for some, by saying no.

When you are working hard to expand a business, saying no feels like the opposite of the job. It feels like shrinking. It isn’t. Narrowing didn’t cost her opportunity. Narrowing is where she found it. A clear scope is a scope other people can more easily work towards.

Finding it takes some time to make the implicit explicit. We did the work. It took a few weeks, and it wasn’t especially glamorous. We worked through her history. We understood her best competitor. We got underneath all the vision to what she actually intended.

At the end of it she had a mission statement. One sentence. If I read it to you now it wouldn’t sound profound. It wasn’t profound to anyone else. It was profound to her, and it changed the way she does business today.

Here is what that one sentence actually buys you, and it is the part worth keeping.

It gives you a very clear north star. A clear direction to follow. And once you have asked people to follow that direction, you can finally tell whether they are following it accurately — and where they aren’t. You can modify. You make it easier for everyone to know how their decisions will be evaluated. You stop guessing about your own team, and they stop guessing about you.

She says it to her staff. She says it to her customers. She says it to her suppliers. Everyone knows who she is and what she does in the marketplace. More importantly, everyone also knows who she is not and what she doesn’t do.

Coming in with a narrower focus is the quickest way to help a team understand your wider objectives. So if your people are working hard and still missing, be slow to reach for a training budget. Sometimes a team is following everything you said — all of it, at once — and they are still waiting for the one sentence that tells them where to aim.

If your team keeps missing the mark and you’re not sure why, the Leadership Check-In shows you where the friction actually sits — including the parts that start with you. It’s free, and it goes deep. No personality type. No verdict.

En route — but aren’t we all.