Most people confuse a taut ship with a harshly run one. According to the source, the word that fits is positiveness: an order that leaves no doubt about what is needed and by when, enforced without anger, and resting on real knowledge of the work.
The right word is positiveness
The chapter rests on the correction of a single word. According to the source, most people mix up a taut ship with a harshly led one, and “The right word is positiveness.”
The difference lies in clarity, and tone does not set it. Harshness is a matter of volume. Positiveness is a matter of leaving no doubt about what has to happen and by when. Someone can deliver a positive order in a whisper, and someone else can shout one that nobody understands.
The source ties this directly to agreement in a team. When the person leading a group gives very positive plans and orders, the people in it have a chance of reaching agreement with one another.
An owner who is afraid of sounding harsh usually retreats into soft, hesitant wording, heavy on maybe and when-you-get-a-chance. That wording is what produces the mess he was afraid of.
Suppose an owner tells an employee to see what can be done about Ron's order. Then the same person, in the same tone of voice, says that Ron's order goes out tomorrow by two o'clock. The result is completely different.
Or an owner who asked her team to try to answer a bit faster, and a month later asked why nothing had changed. When she set a rule that every enquiry is answered within two hours, even when the answer is that she will get back tomorrow, things changed within a week.
A flawed order beats no order
Here the source says something that sounds wrong on a first read. Even orders that were poorly thought out and angrily given are better for a group than none, as long as they are actually issued and enforced.
According to the source this is a choice between two bad options, and it gives no encouragement to give bad orders. It is aimed at the owner who paralyzes himself while waiting for flawless wording. Better a mediocre decision spoken aloud than an excellent one that never leaves his head, because the first can be fixed tomorrow.
The source does not let this become an excuse: “But such orders are the low end of the scale.” What a group needs in order to prosper and expand is positive, enforced orders, given without misemotion and aimed at visible accomplishment.
Misemotion is an emotional reaction that does not fit the facts in front of you, such as anger or panic that is bigger than what is actually happening. The last condition is the most practical of all. An order whose result you cannot see is a wish.
Suppose an owner puts off a decision about the order of work for three months, until he has thought it through. Meanwhile every employee works in an order of their own.
Or a manager who set a mediocre procedure and fixed it twice within two months. The third version was good, and it was built out of the two weaker ones.
And this is how the gap between a wish and an order sounds: improve the service, against a check-in call to every customer one week after delivery. Only the second can be seen.
When the rule itself is arbitrary
The source does not stop at praising enforcement. In a different volume it draws the line. An arbitrary is a law, a rule or a decision that was interjected and does not fit, or is unnecessary. When it is held in place, it becomes an enforced lie.
That phrase explains what happens to a rule nobody understands. Outwardly everyone keeps it, and underneath each person finds a way around it. That costs more than never setting the rule at all.
In a small business an arbitrary usually looks like a procedure born from one incident that nobody remembers anymore.
Suppose a double sign-off on every order, set two years ago after a single mistake. The mistake never came back, and two hours a week go to the sign-off.
Or a ban on remote work, introduced after one employee abused it. He left, and the ban stayed.
And the other direction: an owner who went through his procedures and asked about each one why it exists. Two were scrapped and one was rewritten.
An order is worth the experience behind it
The source adds a last condition. The soundest leadership comes from long experience and close knowledge of the circumstances, and leadership without that lacks judgment.
This is the caveat to everything said so far. A positive order about work you don't know closely sounds confident and turns out wrong, and the employee who carries it out pays the price.
In a business of up to ten people the owner usually knows the work. The trouble starts when the business grows into an area he has never done himself.
Suppose a garage owner sets a standard time for a repair he has never done. The time comes out a third too short, and the mechanics stop reporting the real time.
Or an owner who sets her first salesperson's targets by gut feeling. After a quarter she hands him the setting of the targets and asks him to explain them.
And the other direction: an owner who stayed on a new job for two days before writing the procedure for it. That procedure held for two years.
What the booklet has on this
The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: Positiveness, and The arbitrary. It also has a self-check, and it sits inside a full booklet about what the manager's job requires of someone who hired a first employee.
If you worry about sounding harsh, keep in mind that a quiet order works as long as it says what is required and by when.
The booklet is general knowledge about managing people, not legal advice on employment law.