Preventive Maintinance Leadership by Max Garcia

In my opinion there is no different level of difficulty between processing a do or don’t do order, the difficulty is within the business speaker. The only difficulty is if the person doing the business speaking for upper management forgets or doesn’t know exactly what needs to happen. It is difficult to remember to pass every step to completing the task but if you forget something specific then you can not complain when it is not completed the way you would do it. That is the only difficulty in the “do instructions”. It is a motivational leadership failure if you only state what you desire as an end result and then complain about how it was achieved.
The business speaker or leader needs to do what I call “Preventive Maintenance”. If you know there is a project coming up then you need to start writing down all the things that helped you achieve or not achieve results from before. Then you must give a quick brief. Your brief should include what specifics you want to see happen. Without focusing too much on the negative you should firmly state the things you don’t want while maintaining your motivational leadership style. This will keep your people on your side. I will give you an example.
Let’s say you are cleaning up your work area and checking your paper work for an inspection of upper level management. While business speaking you can not just simply state, “our inspection is coming up”. “The place needs to be immaculate and the paper work needs to be perfect”. A good business speaker for the boss will do preventive maintenance by stating, “every desk needs to be cleaned free of dust, loose papers, pictures, and all trash taken out”. If desk are your major concern, then you know you just covered it and everyone should be taking note of what you just said. Next you might want to cover paper work by stating “everyone needs to check his or her own log book for mathematical errors and then hand it in to the shift managers for further editing”. Then you can state what you do not want as long as your tone is of a motivational leadership style.
An example of that would be mentioning that how you don’t want to see any white out on the pages or pen scribbles. Now you have just covered what you want and what you don’t want. You may also want to mention that if anyone can think of anything else feel free to bring it up to your shift manager. Now, your people are thinking outside “the box”. If you forget something they will use their own initiative because you used motivational leadership while asking their opinion. The last thing a boss ever wants if for his business speaker to run a dictatorship where they act like robots because then you have no room for error.
If during your inspection a desk has outdated paper work and some of the paper work is sloppy you have a solid ground to informally counsel your employees with anger. If you just said “I want the place cleaned up and all the paper work straight”, then you have no room to counsel anyone because you did not specify.
Keep in mind that it is not any easier while business speaking to process a due instruction, it is just easier for people to complain that it isn't the way they wanted it. It takes guts to get up in front of your people and clearly articulate the objective at hand (Captain Handon 1999).