Repetition

I recently saw an activity on Facebook in which parents were to ask their kids a number of questions about their parent, to see how well the kids know Mom or Dad. There were questions such as, “What’s my favorite food?”, “How tall am I?”, etc. One of the questions was, “What is something that I say a lot?”

As I looked at some friend’s kid’s responses, there were things like, “Go clean your room,” or “Don’t hit your sister.” But my son answered, “There really isn’t a phrase that you say over and over.” His reply made me wonder if I’ve done a good job of communicating to him what things are truly important to me.

In Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, the author looks at the importance of organizational health as the key to success in business. He suggests four disciplines that create this health: Build a cohesive leadership team; Create clarity; Overcommunicate clarity; and Reinforce clarity.

In the section on overcommunicating clarity, Lencioni stresses the need to repeat those things that are important over and over again, so that employees understand that these are the things that really matter in this organization, and to you as a leader. It can be easy to emphasize the things that we consider priorities during orientation, or at town halls, but do we repeat them often enough that they become ingrained in our culture, that our people understand that this is what matters?

Lencioni says: “Unfortunately, most leaders I’ve worked with are hesitant to repeat themselves. They call to mind that old wives’ tale…where a woman asks her husband, ‘Why don’t you tell me you love me anymore?’ The husband seems a little surprised by the question and after considering it for a moment replies, ‘Well, I told you I loved you when we got married. I’ll let you know if it changes.’”

He continues: “Many don’t enjoy the reminding role because it seems wasteful and inefficient to them. They’ve been trained to avoid redundancy in virtually every aspect of their work, so embracing it in communication isn’t easy for them. But some leaders aren’t so much worried about the wastefulness of overcommunication; they fear that repeating a message might be insulting to their audience. They assume that employees don’t need to be told something more than once and that they’ll feel patronized if they are.

“What those leaders fail to realize is that employees understand the need for repetition. They know that messaging is not so much an intellectual process as an emotional one. Employees are not analyzing what leaders are saying based solely on whether it is intellectually novel or compelling, but more than anything else on whether they believe the leaders are serious, authentic, and committed to what they are saying. Again, that means repetition is a must.”

What are the top priorities for you as a leader? As an organization, we focus on the patient experience, employee engagement, all built on the culture platform of being Called to Care. How often do you talk about these things with your team? Do you use the language of Called to Care, reinforcing it in every meeting? Does your team know what’s truly important to you and to the organization?

Called to Care Action

Develop an intentionality about repeating those things that are most important in every staff meeting, and in many conversations with your team.