When you think about the conversation on candor, often do we tell ourselves as leaders that they’re all saying out of a full metal jacket, they can’t handle the truth.
Quite often, and was that for full metal jacket? I know it was also from as good as it gets with Jack. You can’t handle the truth. I’ll back a little bit. So in these conversations, when we look at all these documented conversations that we’ve analyzed, where the person didn’t get the results that they wanted, a leadership failure. They failed in being able to mobilize one or more people to confront and deal with some important business problem or opportunity. Yes. Okay. And the argument was, at least what we’re seeing in the data is there’s something that they’re doing that they’re unaware of that is compromising candor in those conversation, what candor is most required, because you can’t solve any problem unless you’re having a truthful conversation. So I won’t lose the thread. What you see less of the time is somebody, say, being too aggressive.
Yes.
What you mostly see is people avoiding the conversation.
Absolutely.
For the reason that you’re intuiting, right? And obviously, you know what you’re doing, and you’ve been around the block, and you’ve worked with lots of people. And yes, there is a story in their heads that the person can’t handle the truth. They basically have a very strong view of all the bad things that will happen if they get to candor. Yes. But what they don’t realize is all the bad things that are already happening and will likely happen if they don’t get to candor. So I said at the beginning, people don’t value it enough because they don’t see all the benefits that can accrue from it. But they also don’t see the downsides of their candor gap. And of course, they don’t realize their candor gap. Now, what’s interesting about this, they can’t handle the truth point. It’s both not true and true. What I mean about the not true, and I think this was implied in your question, but regardless of whether it is, I think it’s still true, is that a lot A lot of times, if people were simply to say what they’re thinking, it ain’t going to be nearly as bad as they think it’s going to be.
That is true, yes. We’re overprotective. So we think we’ve got this much room. We’ve actually got this much room to push the envelope in terms of our own honesty.
