Clarity is the job

I'm a big believer that your role as a leader has two big components: clarity and consequence. If both of these things are clear to a team it's much easier to make progress.

This post from Gert focuses on the clarity angle. One of his opening sentences summarises it well:

When teams struggle, it is rarely because they lack talent or effort. Much more often, they lack clarity.

What happens when there is a lack of clarity if interesting. It's not that the teams do the wrong thing (which had a chance of being the right thing). It's that they do nothing at all.

Research on role ambiguity and team dynamics explains this phenomenon well. When no one is quite sure what matters most or how decisions will be judged, the safest move becomes waiting. People stop taking initiative, momentum erodes, and team trust slowly disappears.

The post also does a good job explaining the role of a director. It's their job to take the nebulous strategy and crystalise it in a way that their teams can make sense of the future direction.

Directors operate in a different layer of the system. Their responsibility is not to make today work, but to make the work make sense. They shape clarity across teams, across time horizons, and across competing priorities. Where managers translate goals into action, directors translate strategy into coherence. They explain why certain priorities exist, resolve tensions between roadmaps, and surface trade-offs that would otherwise remain implicit.