First of all, I’m the founder of Holtzman Leadership, and I have been a leadership development professional for over 30 years now. My firm’s mission in life, and my firm’s mission, is to inspire and equip people to be able to have honest and effective conversations with each other about things that really matter, both in and outside of work. What got you started doing that, Todd? Okay, Dr. Cadillac, we’ll get a little Freudian here, maybe. I actually think it starts when I was a kid. I remember this. I’ve been asked this question, how did you become obsessed with candor? And I still remember the story. I’m seven years old. We go to my grandparents’ 35th wedding anniversary, and we come back to the house, and my grandma asks me, How did you like the party? And I tell her, I didn’t like it very well. And she And I said, Why? And I said, Because you kept calling grandpa an idiot all night. I don’t think you love him. And my grandma was cool with it, but my mom, not so cool with it. So she pulls me to the side of the room and says, What are you doing talking to your grandma that way?
And I say, But you always told him to be honest. And she said, Not that honest. So I did very early. And that created a lot of confusion for me as a kid because my dad was always teaching me, be honest, be honest. Speak the truth. And then the first moment that I at least recall doing it, it goes badly. I just grew up with this, I didn’t articulate it this way, with this honesty dilemma. If I said what I thought, often it wouldn’t go well. People will get upset at me. But if I didn’t say what I thought, I would feel badly. I was always caught between a rock and a hard place. I lived with this until I was about 24. I started realizing when I was in grad school at Columbia that a lot of people really suffer from the same thing. That became the focus of my work, is how do we help people transcend this very human honesty dilemma that I think all of us experience.
