As the leader of a business, you’re bound to recognize — hopefully sooner than later — that the reality is, much of the information you receive is not true. You may suffer due to others’ sins of omission or commission, but lies are still lies.
This may sound harsh or even ridiculous, but the reality is that most people have a difficult time giving critical feedback.
Let me share a story from my early years (names and details have been changed to protect the innocent): I had just taken on a new senior leadership role and was trying to get to know the business, so I spoke with a couple of managers on the engineering team.
Their boss — let’s call him John — reported directly to me. And naturally I wanted to ask how things were going. So I asked the managers. Their answer? “Good.” What was John like as a boss? Again: “Good.”
I came away from the meeting thinking John was doing a solid job and the engineering team was in decent shape.
Flash-forward a couple of weeks; I went out for a working lunch with some of John’s team. We chatted, and I casually checked in again on how things were going. This time, the answers I got again were somewhat positive, but the team members’ feedback this time seemed inauthentic. Perhaps it was just the relaxed atmosphere, but obviously something wasn’t right.
It took multiple meetings and more probing questions on my part, but eventually it became clear that John was causing significant issues in the business and we had to make a change.
The subtext here? We are conditioned from early childhood to avoid saying anything negative when we have nothing nice to say, and that mantra carries into our professional lives, sometimes causing business leaders to make decisions based on bad data. This article is about how you solve this problem.
We all tell white lies.
Clearly, we all like hearing good news. At first blush, when we hear something positive, we’re inclined to assume that that’s the real answer. However, what I should have done in my first meeting about John was ask follow-up questions on “why” things were good, and to seek more substantive answers. That approach would have highlighted that things in engineering in reality were not that great.
Bad news, after all, travels very slowly up an organization. But the people who have to deal with the issue on a daily basis have a cllear view of the negative situation.
So, again, a reality check reveals that We all tell white lies. We tell our host at a dinner that the meal was terrific even when it was not. We say a meeting was productive when it was a complete waste of time. We praise a presenter for his or her insights when in fact we were bored to tears.
We try to avoid conflict, we seek to be kind, we feel the need to impress. IThat’s all human nature. But the result is that we avoid providing critical feedback to colleagues.
To escape the consequences of all these accumulated evasions, organizations need to change: They need to establish a culture of constructive candor, where honest communication is encouraged. In doing so, employees will be able to focus on high-quality, well-informed decisions and doing the important work that allows them to react and succeed under changing business conditions.
In fact, just the opposite tends to occur; and I have seen this…