And what I’ve tried to figure out is what is actually good look like? Not what I hope good looks like, not what’s in the dozens of books about… There aren’t dozens, but there’s a handful of good books. And there’s some good stuff out there, to be fair. Difficult conversations, radical candor. But no one has studied this phenomenon, like my team and I have for 30 bloody years, trying to figure out what actually works in the real world. And we’re turning it into a competence. And so what we find is that a lot of the things that people are taught about how to, say, be honest, actually backfire. So for example, as Chris Arjers coined it in one of his famous Harvard business articles, The Shit Sandwich. The only thing I’m really trying to communicate is the shit in the middle. But the stuff I say at the front and the back, it’s all fluff. Let me ease you into it to make you more open to it, and let me rebuild your self-esteem at the end. First of all, these days, it’s not even a shit sandwich. It’s a shit focaccia because we don’t have any freaking time.
Okay, so we got one thing of bread. But everybody, I mean, we’re so far past how to win friends and influence people stuff. Ron, if I say your name maybe a few more times. Maybe I’ll be able to coax you into believing what I want you to believe. I mean, we’re more skeptical. And so these games, they don’t work anymore. Or I’m sorry, I may be offending people here, but things like the GROW model, where I’m going question to death until you answer the way I think you ought to answer, because I’ve been told, I can’t tell you what I think anymore. I mean, I’ve been in the aftermarket for these methodologies so many times. It’s not even funny. But when we find people can learn the competence that we’ve isolated, it is very rare that their fears come true. And then things they didn’t believe were possible at all actually become possible. Like, wow, the person was quite open to the conversation. How did that happen? Oh, my goodness. Their behavior is changing. Their performance is improving. We’re getting better collaboration. Decision making. We’re not swarming endlessly. We’re actually making lots of progress. We’re actually enjoying it, and we’re getting a result.
How could it be? If we could turn the truth into a competence, then we don’t need to have so much courage, I think, because if you’re skilled at something, you’re naturally less afraid because you feel you have an ability to control the outcomes to a much greater degree. I actually learned that from race car driving.
