Clarity Is Kindness: Mike Hagen

You told your team exactly what you wanted. At least, you thought you did. Then they did something else entirely, and you ended up angry at people who were genuinely trying to help.

Mike Hagen has watched that moment wreck more businesses than bad products ever have. He spent ten years in the semiconductor industry, built a string of his own companies, ran a manufacturing firm as CEO for five years, and now works with owners through his consultancy, Bay Island Group. In this episode he explains why so many teams "fail" their owners, and why the fault usually sits with the instruction, not the people.

His favourite example is painfully ordinary. An owner moves into a new warehouse and tells everyone he wants the clutter cleaned up, get rid of it. The team, showing real initiative, starts selling the lot on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, bringing money in while they clear the space. The owner finds out and goes through the roof. He didn’t want it sold. He wanted it on shelves. "The term get rid of implies get it out the door," Mike says. "That’s another example of how clarity would have been very kind. And the ambiguity led to literal verbal abuse."

Which brings us to the line the whole episode hangs on.

Clarity is kindness. Ambiguity is abuse.

It’s not Mike’s line, he’s quick to say, but he’s used it for years, and once you hear it you start seeing it everywhere. "A lot of businesses struggle because the owner isn’t clear about what their expectations are. And having ambiguous goals, that’s abusive to your employees, because they’re always second guessing. What do you want? What are you after? I thought you said this, but then you did that. And now all of a sudden you’ve lost the trust of your people."

Take the most common vague instruction in business: we need to improve revenue this year. Fifty employees will hear fifty different versions of that. The sales team starts discounting to drive volume, revenue climbs, and the owner reprimands them because margins fell. Nobody disobeyed. The goal was never actually stated.

Mike’s fix is almost boringly specific, which is the point: revenue up by this amount, in these categories, by this date, and here are the boundaries, discounts up to 15%, minimum order this size. "As pragmatic as that sounds, you’d be amazed at how many CEOs and owners don’t do that. They just say, get better, go faster."

If your team keeps disappointing you, it’s worth asking which kind of instruction they’re working from.

Saying it once doesn’t count

Every owner has said it: I told them this matters, and nobody listens. Mike’s answer is blunt. "You said it one time. That does not change a company."

His rule, from years of running teams: people need to hear a thing seven times, in seven different ways, before they believe you’re serious. The all-hands meeting, the memo, the email, the small group conversation. And then the leader has to repeat it monthly, roughly every 29 days, or the organisation quietly concludes it was last year’s idea.

The same discipline applies to culture, which Mike calls the thing that wins "almost every day" once the basics are in place. As CEO he wrote his down using the framework from Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player: humble, hungry, smart, with concrete examples of what each looked like on the production floor, in the office, in a management meeting. Then he enforced it in real time, both directions. Someone claims a team win as their own: a quiet word, that’s not our culture. Someone stays two hours to get an order out: praised on the spot, that is exactly what we want here.

"If your culture is strong, people will find a way," he says. "Because they know what your real values are."

Being clear is not being unkind

Here’s the part many owners quietly struggle with: bluntness feels rude, so they soften everything, and the softness creates the very mess they were trying to avoid. Mike is honest about learning this the hard way, and recently. He entered talks to acquire a company with "open hands", no stated intentions, wanting to keep things friendly. Six months later, nothing but question marks in the air, and a friendship under strain that a direct conversation would have spared.

"Especially in my younger career, I was afraid of offending people early on," he says. "Now that I’m older and wiser, I just realised I can love people, I can care for people, but still be blunt." Say what you want, name your terms, give a date. "Being really blunt ahead of time saves a lot of heartache later on."

The advice he’d give his younger self

Mike knew he was an entrepreneur from the paper-round onwards, but he stayed in the comfortable semiconductor job for a decade while the itch grew. "The safety and security of the corporate job is so compelling. It’s like a blanket. But that’s not really what was fuelling my passion."

When he finally resigned, with two small children and his wife at home, it was frightening, and thirty years on he calls it the best thing they ever did. His faith was part of the push, and his advice lands for any founder sitting on a decision they already know the answer to: "Don’t be afraid. Life is short, yes, but it is actually pretty long. There’s a lot of time to test an idea." And then the sentence that stings a little, in the best way: "I don’t even know why I thought about it. I should have just jumped when I knew it was the right answer."

Clear with your team. Clear with the people you deal with. Clear with yourself. It’s the same lesson three times, and it’s rarer than it should be.

Watch the full conversation above, or find Startup Stories wherever you listen.