Speaking with clarity is a habit. Bad things happen when you let the opposite, i.e. lack of clarity, take over the habit … 

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Speaking with clarity is a habit.

Just like lacking that clarity is a habit, too.

If a team tolerates lack of clarity, it trickles into every corner of the team.

It becomes okay to use complex and confusing language, even

though that slows everything down.

And it leads to a lot of time being wasted as the team fights over what

was actually being said or meant.

Turning that habit around and making speaking with clarity the

habit is among the most valuable investments a team can make.

It starts with you as the leader.

If you don't settle with confusing communication, your team won't, either.

Try pushing your team for one week to use simpler words whenever you

don't understand something; to design, simpler graphs, that show exactly

what they want it to show; to find anecdotes that we all can relate

to rather than only the speaker.

And even force them sometimes to go back to the drawing board and find

those simpler words instead of having the team figure it out together.

As Wolf Schneider, the famous German journalist once said: “Someone's got

to suffer, either the reader or the writer.” If you want my perspective on

that, I'd suggest that it's the writer.

Yes, it might slow things down in the beginning when you need to

go looking for the simpler words.

But the acceleration you'll experience down the road will

overcompensate for it manyfold.

Clarity really is a habit.

Start looking for it and you'll discover it, or even the lack of it, everywhere.

Start speaking with clarity and you'll gradually transform the

entire way you communicate – and of course that of your team.