Many Managers tend to be presumptuous about their employees.
They assume that employees know how to do tasks because to the manager, it’s just common knowledge.
However, this is only common knowledge to experienced personnel, if the employee doesn’t have the experience, the tasks are not always going to be common knowledge.
See, we all know how to make a cup of tea right?
Put a tea bag into a cup, fill it with boiling water and add milk and sugar if necessary.
But what if we were to give instructions to somebody who has never made a cup of tea before?
In order to teach someone how to do something that is completely alien to them, we need to very specific with our instructions. We do this by taking things Step by Step.
In the workplace, this is particularly important as you need to make sure your employee understands exactly what to do.
The consequence of not being clear with instructions is that obstructions will now be open to interpretation rather than completely unambiguous.
No matter how much you wish, employees are not mind readers.
So, if you leave things too ambiguous, there’s a chance they may not do what you wanted them to do.
Here’s a funny example of parents tasking their children with writing exact instructions for them:
