Good managers and good leaders work hard to keep things simple, or K.I.S.S. as it is sometimes called. We live in a complicated world, or at least that’s what we say. But people are really very good at making things much more complicated than they need to be. The jazz bassist Charles Mingus summed this up nicely when he said “to make the simple complicated is commonplace. To make the complicated simple; breathtakingly simple, that’s creativity.” He was right.

So, good managers follow the K.I.S.S principle. You’ve probably come across this before; Keep It Simple Stupid. Work hard at making your communications clear, your instructions clear, your goals and objectives clear. Simple doesn’t mean easy and it doesn’t mean patronizing. It means distilling the key points in a way that people get and understand.