There’s also a personal dimension on it as well. Another way to say what I said is we’ve documented now that we’ve analyzed nearly 50,000 cases of leadership failure. In every single instance, one of the biggest underlying causes was the leader in the situation was not having the right conversation with the right person at the right time in the right way. It’s like there’s this core pathology that seems to explain a lot of other problems. And so that’s where we focus. But one of your alma maters, I know you’ve gone to 14 different schools with 20 different master’s degrees and certificates, but you went to Georgetown, right? And I was asked to give a talk on Cander to the Institute for Transformational Leaders. Yes. And in preparation for it, I wanted to better understand if this capability gap had implications beyond just leadership and organizational effectiveness, which is what I’ve been seeing for the last 30 years. And I looked at the psychological literature, and at least when it comes to the ability to express oneself authentically, and Cander isn’t just about that. Cander is also about helping other people do the same. Yes. But at least on the ability to express oneself authentically, what the psychological literature demonstrates, that capability is either causal of or significantly correlated with every measure of psychological well-being the clinicians care about it.
So if you can actually help to produce conversations that are deeply truthful on behalf of making things better, then your life is going to be much better. And so will the lives of people around you from a psychological well-being standpoint. And if you don’t, I think the converse is also true.
