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Wearing the Mantle of Leadership

What is Leadership

Creativity: Using the SCAMPER Process

Change

Creativity

Attitude Survey

How to handle Mistakes

Influencing People

Change: Surviving a Corporate Merger

Change: Becoming a Champion

Coaching Your Teammates

The Sales Leader`s Challenge

The Three Roles of Sales Leaders

Assuming that you, as a leader, want your people to candidly tell you what they think, you can build an environment that nourishes and encourages such behavior. Here are some suggestions:

Insist on Candor

In an interview in the Harvard Business Review, JackWelch, then CEO of General Electric, said:

There's still not enough candor in this company. [By that] I mean facing reality, seeing the world as it is rather than as you wish it were. We've seen over and over again that businesses facing market downturns, tough competition, and more demanding customers inevitably make forecasts that are much too optimistic. This means they don't take advantage of the opportunities that change usually offers. Change in the marketplace isn't something to fear; it's an enormous opportunity to shuffle the deck, to replay the game. Candid managers—leaders—don't get paralyzed about the fragility of the organization. They tell people the truth. That doesn't scare them because they realize their people know the truth anyway.

By insisting that your managers be candid with their subordinates, their peers, and you, you create a set of expectations that the truth shall prevail. It then becomes easier for people to tell the truth and harder to take revenge on those who do.

Ask Tough but Stimulating Questions

People who worked for Jack Welch described his style as argumentative and confrontational. He initiated the kinds of give-and-take discussions that exposed all sides of an issue. His tough questions were legendary, but they stimulated deeper thinking about the critical decisions being made. Welch set a standard for candid exchanges that permeated GE.

His questions were often tough because he demanded knowledgeable responses. "The one thing you can never do with Jack is wing it,'' said David Orselet, a retired GE executive. "If he ever catches you winging it, you're in trouble. Real trouble. You have to go in with in-depth information. Stand up for what you believe, but acknowledge what you don't know when you don't know it.''

Absolute honesty through tough questions and candid answers makes it hard to blur the issue with generalizations, half-baked theories, unsubstantiated arguments, and shaky assumptions. Tough, stimulating questions help you uncover and act on the facts.

Restrain Your Own Brilliance

Our guess is that you are the leader of your group, department, division, or organization for many reasons, but usually it's because you are smarter, more articulate, faster thinking, and have a more accurate view of the big picture than most of your subordinates. Additionally, as the boss, you have the unspoken power to reward and punish people who work for you. For all these reasons, you can be very intimidating to them.

If you want to encourage them to be forthright, especially those you manage, you need to control your own comments and let them speak. Keep in mind that they will often try to tailor their opinions to match yours, so if you tip your hand first, expect their "truths'' to echo your own. This can lead to your becoming a naked emperor.

Bob Galvin, former CEO of Motorola, put it this way:

The focus shifts from deciding and directing to creating and maintaining an evocative situation, stimulating an atmosphere of objective participation, keeping the goal insight, recognizing valid consensus, inviting unequivocal recommendation, and finally vesting increasingly in others the privilege to learn through their own decisions.

If your style is to "decide and direct,'' you will have trouble restraining yourself and creating and maintaining the evocative, stimulating atmosphere Galvin describes. The leader who is used to making decisions quickly and getting on with it must learn patience, letting others voice their opinions and having those opinions simmer in a cauldron of open discussion until a final decision emerges.

The reward will be worth the effort, however, when people speak up in the best interests of the company. It's worth it when a normally reticent sales manager mentions that the marketing campaign you're so fond of is falling on deaf ears in her region because it offends the ethnic population that lives there. It's worth it when an accountant working on your auditing team objects to categorizing certain items as investments rather than expenses. It's worth it when a vice president suggests that it would not serve the stockholders or the interests of the company for the executive team to cash in their stock options shortly before an expected downturn in business.

If you're interested in the long-term survival of your company, that kind of information is pure, twenty-four-carat gold.

Listen Intensely

Listening is the leader's way of laying out a welcome mat for the truth. Robert Townsend of Avis Corporation found that the key to listening to people is to "take them seriously.'' Intense listening sends the message that you value the truth this person is sharing with you and that it is welcome, which invites and encourages more of the same behavior.

Here are some dos and don'ts to follow in that listening process:

• Do:

• Allow people to finish their sentences, no matter how slowly they speak or how much difficulty they have getting to the point.

• Don't:

• Interrupt. Your interruption telegraphs your impatience and will dissuade them from being candid with you.

• Do:

• Give people your full attention.

• Don't:

• Allow distractions or interference. Nothing is more insulting or disheartening than engaging people in what they consider an important conversation and then taking a call. It will discourage them from being honest with you, and it's just plain rude.

• Do:

• Summarize their point of view. This tells them you got it and gives you a go signal to offer your point of view. Include in the summary a comment about how you think the person feels about the content of what he or she said: "So, Gena, you feel pretty strongly that if we force this accelerated delivery schedule on our vendor, he's going to promise us the moon, and then deliver shoddy products or miss deadlines or both.''

• Don't:

• Assume that you understood what they said because you heard them say it. What you heard is not necessarily what they meant. Besides, if you don't summarize it, they don't know you got it, so they can't trust that you understood.

• Do:

• Participate nonverbally. Eye contact, nodding, encouraging "grunts,'' and leaning forward all say, "Tell me the truth, I really want to know.'' Taking notes sends a strong signal that you are listening, especially if you explain what you are doing.

• Don't:

• Lean back, look away, or become distracted.

• Do:

• Ask questions to clarify and verify their thinking.

  • "What data do you have, Gena, to tell us he doesn't have the resources to do what we want and that he can't get them?''

  • "What could be done to help him meet our demands?''

  • "What alternatives can we explore to provide a back-up?''

• Don't:

• Attack the reasoning of their position or offer other solutions until their position is clarified and fleshed out with questions. Then attack only the position, never the person: "Gena, it sounds like you've thought this out very well. I'm not convinced, however, that the vendor can't perform once he understands what the cost will be if he fails. What was his performance like last year when we had all those rush shipments?''

Play the Devil's Advocate

This technique demonstrates that you are interested in considering what the person has to say, but that you want to make sure all aspects of the truth being presented have been seriously considered, analyzed, and tested. To minimize the truth teller's fear, acknowledge the merits of the proposal or thought he or she is presenting, declare that you are playing devil's advocate, and proceed:

"Gena, you're probably right that pressuring this vendor may backfire on us, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Suppose we threaten to dump him altogether if his quality drops or he misses a delivery date. If you were him, what would you do?''

Create Debate Groups and Reverse Roles

You can minimize Gena's perception that she is being personally attacked and enhance the examination of her proposal by having the team debate its pros and cons. Assign Gena and those who favor her idea to argue against it, and those who are leaning against it to argue in favor. Collect the arguments on a flip chart and weigh them against each other to make a final decision.

Reward Truth Tellers

Principles of behaviorism tell us that what gets rewarded gets repeated. General Electric rewards managers for their candor by including it in their performance reviews. The practice was started by former CEO Jack Welch, who said:

People said just what you said, "How can you put a number on how open people are, on how directly they face reality?'' Well, they're going to have to—the best numbers they can come up with, and then we'll argue about them. We have to know if our people are open and self-confident, if they believe in honest communication and quick action, if the people we hired years ago have changed. The only way to test our progress is through regular evaluations at the top and by listening to every audience we appear before in the company.

Rewarding honesty and openness can go further than a financial pat on the back in a review. Speaking the truth will have its own rewards when the speaker knows her message is heard, appreciated, and seriously considered. It is then that people get a deposit in their needs account for going out on a limb and saying what's on their minds.

Consider Ron Jensen, past director of public works for the city of Phoenix, who oversaw the turnaround of that 2,000-person department from an inefficient, problem-plagued organization into a nationally recognized model of municipal operations.

Ron's first step was to post question boxes throughout the organization where anyone could submit questions—signed or anonymous—about any topic. His promise was to publish all questions in the department's monthly newsletter, completely unedited (except for the deletion of obscenities), and to answer each candidly. It was sort of like Work-Outs at GE in a written, published format.

In the first month, fewer than ten questions were submitted, and half of those were hostile, often personal attacks. "Why don't you just quit? The city would be better off without you?'' was an example. Ron answered them as honestly and candidly as he could. His typical answer? "You're probably right, the city might be better off, but I need the job and I'm on a mission to turn things around, so I'm not going anywhere.''

Once workers realized that all questions would be posted and taken seriously, the questions became serious and started pouring in. The size of the newsletter had to be tripled to accommodate them. Along with the questions came suggestions and ideas that had never surfaced before. It was the start of a turnaround that led to the department's winning numerous national awards and being featured in a nationally televised PBS documentary, Promoting the Common Good—Excellence in the Public Sector.

What was the reward for all those truthful responses? Simply the courtesy of acknowledgment, the chance for employees to get straight answers, and great strides in efficiency for the department.

Forums that allow people to express their views anonymously encourage people to make suggestions for improvement without fear of retribution. And they open the door for building the trust level that makes anonymity unnecessary. In addition, they establish a stage upon which individual and organizational misdeeds can be exposed and excised.