Your people, there are things that bother them, and there are opportunities that excite them. And so the act of leadership is bringing it up in an engaging way with other people, so that people want to lean into these things, versus push you away. Okay, fine. So what does that mean? Well, you got to talk about it. And you better talk about it in a truthful way. That’s also effective. Because usually, the things that you have to have truthful conversations about, I don’t know, unusually, but I think probably, at least more often than not, it has the potential to be upsetting, to be uncomfortable, to create conflict, all of that. Because maybe your marketing person thinks the way your… Well, maybe the salesperson thinks the way your marketing person is functioning isn’t setting them up for success. Maybe it’s true. Maybe the marketing person thinks the salesperson always blames us for their lack of success. So these two people got issues, right? They got to talk to each other and work it out. And they’re not going to work it out unless they’re being truthful with each other. But if they’re truthful with each other in a way that is antagonistic, they’re making each other wrong, they’re really not trying to figure out what’s true together, then their attempt to it will often not result in an understanding or solving of the real problem, but also will create a new problem, now they got a conflict in their relationship, which compromises their ability to solve the first problem.
So if you think about just basic problem solving that happens between people in groups, and teams, and organizations, and families, communities, schools, societies, so much of it depends on how How effectively we can have honest conversations with each other. And I’m fond of saying, We can’t solve any problem we can’t talk about with each other, openly and honestly. And I’m also, and when I worked at IBM, they were fond of saying, I liked his, There’s no problem we can solve as long as we get the right people in the Marine together, which I thought was an optimistic turn on what I say. And so That’s basically it. And so that is a… That’s the rationale for why the ability to have honest and effective conversations is so crucial to team, organizational, and just overall business success. And there’s a lot of research to back all that.
