> Imprecise asks from managers and leaders cause a disproportionate amount of turmoil and wheel-spinning. To combat this, leaders should be very precise with th

> Imprecise asks from managers and leaders cause a disproportionate amount of turmoil and wheel-spinning. To combat this, leaders should be very precise with the amount of time investment they’re asking for when they ask for things. The amount of time expected is one additional piece of information to add to an "imprecise ask," and it should be part of the conversation, but it really makes me wonder how information-starved your subordinates are if it serves as a valuable parity check for them. How about this: never launch an ambiguously specified days-long task for a subordinate with an offhand comment? Always have a slightly more extensive conversation about it? It's really hard to maintain a major disconnect through the duration of a substantive three minute conversation. Try it. Try to write a realistic, two-way three minute conversation where a major misunderstanding between two people isn't uncovered. You're basically writing a comedy sketch. Human speech is ambiguous, and it makes up for this by providing many different ways of describing a single situation, each conveying additional contextual information. If you say something in one way, the person you're talking to might understand it one of three different ways, but each time you say the same thing in slightly different words, the intersection of possible interpretations tightens down very quickly. Because of this, being strategically chatty is incredibly important for clear communication. Striving to be precise in your use of words is necessary and valuable in engineering, but it can never completely replace redundancy, except in formalized contexts. (Engineers can see strategic chattiness as a superpower, but for managers, it's an expected skill.) It's great to explicitly mention time expectations, but even if you don't, your subordinates should sense something wrong and speak up if the amount of time you spend discussing something with them isn't proportionate to the ask. If a subordinate thinks you are asking for days of work in an offhand comment and doesn't speak up for clarification, then either they are scared to talk to you, or they are accustomed to being starved for time with you. Either way, it likely this stems from a pathological power distance.