HTCH

Healing the Corporate Heart

If You Want The Truth, You Have To Make It Safe To Speak The Truth

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The speed and success of an organization can be measured by the comfort level of telling the truth. Most leaders will acknowledge that the speed at which they get negative information is related to the effectiveness of the organization. Typically, the CEO or senior person will say “I want everyone to get the truth on the table”.

But everyone knows what happens when they do that. Either they get attacked for saying what the top brass really doesn’t want to hear or they get targeted and their performance in some other area will get criticized directly or their decision making will be called into question.

The second possibility is a bit less overt – and sometimes even worse. Top leaders will say they want the truth and want to create a safe environment but their body language, tone of voice, and demeanor will tell a different tale. How they unconsciously act will speak volumes about how they do or don’t want to address the topic raised. Their team will get the message loud and clear. Pay lip service to telling the truth – but don’t actually do it. All the various ways we as leaders can say one thing but actually do something else to prevent the outcome we request is amazing and difficult to stop.

So how do you really make it safe?

As a leader you have to do the inner work so that you can truly be willing to hear people’s truth. The inner work in this case is being aware of your almost unconscious reactions and learning to either release your damaging beliefs or at least delay the knee jerk response. Begin to see if you can catch the very quick thoughts that probably sound something like this “If I allow people to disagree with me I am losing authority” or “I am the leader – people will do what I want whether they like it or not”. Starting to catch these almost subliminal thoughts is the first step.

You don’t have to agree with the ideas presented by your team – but you want to work towards being neutral to what is presented without blame or judgment. It is OK to say – “That may be true and if it is I am willing to act – but I need more proof/data”. However, you actually have to act if the data supports the presented point of view.

In the end, as leader it is safe because you really make it safe. People know you will listen without judging them – even if it is just internally. Here is the tough part:

  • Can you hear the truth without blame or judgement?
  • Can you put a higher value on the truth than being right?
  • Can you stand in front of your leadership team and own your own stuff? Can you say things like:
      • “Yep – we didn’t do that well”
      • “Wow – I really dropped the ball on that”

The next step is critical. You don’t actually look to blame anyone. Instead, focus your team on solving the problem. When you, as a team or leadership group, are working together on how to solve the problem then you are truly making it safe. Assuming in this case everyone has the requisite skills – then it is all about collectively focusing on the best approach and intent.

If you are collectively focused on solutions, you have shared intent and a frequency alignment that is both powerful but also acts like a modulator for the larger organization’s behavior. When an organization drops the need to blame and instead focuses on solving the problem or creating a different outcome it is powerful. However, not everyone is comfortable functioning in an environment without blame. If a leader consistently comes back to creating a genuine place of safety to tell the real truth and work to solve problems, then slowly an energy field is created to which people will either entrain or they will self-select and voluntarily leave the organization.

If You Want Commitment, You Have To Give A Real Voice

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One of the biggest challenges and the biggest opportunities in organizations is dealing with people. The conundrum is that people have free will. They choose what they want to believe and only they can choose to what they will give their energy, drive, passion and commitment….and as a leader you don’t have any control over that.

In a traditional, hierarchical management system what you have is the illusion of control. In the end, you can coerce people to do certain things –ultimately through the threat of being fired…but that is not the same thing as commitment. Real power comes from people who are committed to the goals of the organization because they have decided to do so of their own free will – they are “all in”.

Will you get everyone to commit? In short “no”… but that is OK because you don’t need everyone. However, your top leaders and their top leaders do need to be all in. So what is the cornerstone of building to that?

Of course there are several pieces to solving this puzzle and include trust, consistency and demonstrated behavior – they all play a factor. What we are going to explore in this post is the concept of having a real voice.

Typically, goals are delivered down from on-high. “Here are your targets – go get them”. Top leaders will argue – we really think it through, we debate, and we are realistic about what the business needs and what is expected. However, there is rarely a real conversation with the operational leaders to actually change the goals and therefore the trajectory of the organization. Remember – it is the operational leaders who have to actually achieve the results.

Sometimes growth will come at the expense of required investment of infrastructure, methodology development, or systems required for the next stage of growth. The people who will have to actually implement solutions to customers never get a chance to voice the trade-offs especially in terms of the human impact. What you rarely, if ever hear, someone say is:

“Yes we can make the numbers but we will also damage the home life and personal lives of our employees and will see significantly higher attrition in 18 months – but we will hit this year’s numbers”

If you want someone all in they have to be able to push, challenge, contradict…everything…in a safe space. That doesn’t mean they get what they want but they have an opportunity to challenge, honestly, what the organization is doing and how that will play out.

If you set goals in this fashion, and get leaders comfortable really speaking the truth and really connecting the dots, you will typically get a committed team focusing on goals they believe they can really hit…and then they will often outperform. The reason for the outperformance:

When you feel respected and when you feel heard…. honestly – you will bring more of yourself to the work and the combined energy is powerful.

What is crucial for the top leadership to understand is that this can’t be a check the box exercise – you have to mean it. You must, at a deeply felt level, really believe in and want your team’s commitment and be patient and focused on uncovering the truth until the resonance is achieved.

This brings us back to the overall theme of this blog and this approach. Top leaders must do their inner work and really understand what they truly believe – not just what they think they believe. People feel before they think. Your team will instinctively pick up the difference between what you say and what you actually believe. It is only when there is a coherence between what you say and what you do that committed goal setting and solid performance can become a consistent reality.