Many of us show up to work with clear ideas about what success looks like. For most of us, unfortunately, we do not articulate our definitions of “quality” and “success” explicitly to our teams, and most importantly, to ourselves. And our teams do not have a secret decoder ring that they can use to decode what we are thinking. This secret decoder ring is really a metaphor to describe the ways knowledge, meaning, and we would argue, power, is hidden in the workplace. Having a secret decoder ring means you have the “tool” to decode the information and power that is being transmitted throughout a variety of professional interactions. So why do we share with some colleagues/direct reports and not others? What should leaders do instead?

If we reframe the question, “Is this job doable?” to “What is my role in this organization?”, immediately, we begin to consider an age-old challenge in the workplace: Role Clarity. Most of us know that role clarity is a significant driver of employee retention, satisfaction, and productivity. However, most of us are probably thinking about how to design, implement, and sustain role clarity in the wrong ways. In our efforts to provide better role clarity for our direct reports, perhaps we are solving for the wrong things.