Did You Give Enough Instruction?

I often hear leaders say that their team doesn't do things right. 

They say that they cannot give up micro-managing because they won't get the results they want.

I was visiting my two youngest nieces this weekend and I brought along what I thought would be a great bit of fun.

Glitter? Check.

Glitter confined within a safe space? Check.

A toy that requires physical activity? Check.

May I introduce the Glitter Jelly Ball from a toy company I'd never heard of called Schylling. 

I happened upon this when I was browsing an old timey general store in Jefferson, Texas. Bought two. One for each kid. That way my sister would love me because there would be no fighting for turns.

Saved them for my visit. Patted myself on the back.

We opened the packages and attempted to follow super simple instructions to inflate the balls and then... we just couldn't.

My sister was ready to kill me.

We actually had to send the girls off to play something else while we figured it out.

We are two highly educated females.

The instructions are quite simple. Unfortunately I can hear your shocked and mocking laughter already, but I'm afraid this is an essential part of the story; therefore, despite my dismay, I must proceed with the details of the instructions.

"To start, insert the supplied nozzle into the balls [sic] hole. Put your mouth over the nozzle and blow to inflate."

Geez. Stop it people. It's a toy for a kid.

This is what the instructions look like:

The rest of the instructions are not essential to my story. It is actually the blowing up the ball part that defeats us.

Highly educated. I repeat.

Also, glitter is basically for enemies. Anything that has glitter on it is basically a hate gift. It takes years to remove all the glitter. 

This is glitter inside a jelly ball and *should* be safe.

But, people, it's this squishy substance. It stretches in your hands and is quite sticky. It seems quite thin. Ergo, we are terrified of the nozzle puncturing this thing and causing

a) screaming, unhappy kids 

and 

b) glitter hatred everywhere

We're very logical, highly educated people.  We've identified the exceedingly small air holes on the nozzle. We are quite confident that we should have to insert the nozzle further than specified. And we are terrified that will cause A & B to occur.

More killing looks from my sister.

I go to Google for help. I watch a YouTube video. I watch a TikTok video. (I have a little anger at both of those people because they completely ignore our plight and show an easily blown up glitter ball.
Ironic. See this recent segment on Anger Management. So, so true. I'm only hurting myself. Though my sister looked ready to hurt me.)

I head to the Amazon reviews. I choose not to share with my sister some of the very alarming "breaks easily" reports. 

Spoiler alert: we found that this was NOT the case for us. Rose bushes, rocks, concrete, kicks, hits, bounces. Nothing destroyed these suckers. No upset kids. They loved it and played for a long time, never experiencing anything even close to the mental anguish we felt while trying to blow them up.

One more tiny point to mention here. We're highly educated, logical and very sight limited ladies. Like cannot see well. And that is not helping our cause. 

But my sister bites the bullet and decides we're going to jam that sucker as far as we can and low and behold, that's what it takes to get the thing blown up.

Insert the supplied nozzle all the way, until it hits the nozzle rim.  That's the additional instruction we needed. It's not on the package. It's not on the videos.

And it just makes me think about how we assume things all the time with our teams. We give them instructions, assuming they know what it takes. If they've never done it before, if it's new to everyone,  if it's been a while...go ahead and double check your instructions.

What else do you need to consider?  What else might be helpful to know? What additional instruction and guidance might you provide that can shift your team from underperforming to crushing it the first time?

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