Watch our Last Candor Video Here: Candor is Everyone’s Right & Responsibility
What we’ve done is isolate a singular capability that seems to make the difference between being a good and great leader, senior team, and salesperson. And it’s the ability to have honest and effective conversations about the real issues, about real problems and opportunities that can’t be solved or seized unless people change. And listen, you probably already understand this intuitively, but what might surprise you is that almost no-one is naturally good at this. And traditional training has done very little to improve people in this vital capability.
And you might be asking, how do I know this? It’s because of an extensive analysis that’s been done of 45,000 documented conversations that didn’t produce the results that people wanted. Professor Chris Argyris from Harvard studied 15,000, and my colleagues and I studied another 30,000 documented conversations. And our collective analysis reveals three important things. That, number one, we all fall into a set of predictable traps no matter what company come or culture that we come from. Number two, that we’re completely or almost completely blind to this fact. And number three, that there’s been a subconscious program that’s been encoded into all of us and reinforced by our cultures that makes us fall into these traps and makes us blind to the fact that we do so.
And by the way, most of the people who shared these conversations with us had been through extensive leadership and interpersonal skills training from their companies. And this is a big problem because so much of what it means to be an effective leader, senior team, and salesperson comes down to the ability to have honest and effective conversations about the real issues. And organizationally speaking, wherever there are gaps in our ability to have honest and effective conversations, our effectiveness as an organization is often severely compromised. Because practically speaking, we can’t solve any problem that we can’t talk to each other about openly and honestly.
