How much honesty can you stomach?

If you ask the senior leaders of any organization how things are going in their organization, they would probably give you an upbeat, positive, optimistic description. If you then ask the shop-floor employees, the same question you would probably hear a different story.

From many years of experience, I can attest that there is often a dissonance between how senior leaders view their organizational and business reality and how employees do. While senior leaders often paint a rosier picture and claim that things are going well, even if there are issues, their people often highlight all the issues and describe things as not going that well.

In addition, employees often express frustrations about their senior leaders. They often say things like:

We can’t be honest with our managers about the burning issues because they only want to hear good news. As a result, they don’t understand the full extent of the problem and we can’t address and change things…

If you want to fix or change things or take any aspect of your business to a higher level, you have to start with honesty. You have to make sure employees and managers at all levels feel comfortable and safe to bring up the issues and problems, no matter how ugly or uncomfortable they may be.

Leaders who can stand in front of their superiors, peers, and people and acknowledge: “This isn’t working!” without discounting or sugar-coating the issues have a much greater chance to turn things around and generate breakthroughs.

Unfortunately, so many leaders seem insecure in this area. They seem to be so concerned about how exposing issues would reflect on their personal brand, that their self-preservation concerns hinder their ability to acknowledge and address the issues heads on.

So many leaders come across as politically correct and covering their behinds when talking about the issues. They can’t seem to be able to say: “This is not working. We need to fix it!” Instead, they say things like: “Things are going well, but we have an opportunity to improve…”

Their vague and watered-down pronouncement prevents them from fully owning and addressing their issues. It also weakens their ability to generate urgency to fix what isn’t working. In addition, their lack of blunt honesty hurts their credibility with their people, who usually know exactly how severe the issues are.

Just reflect on any corporate scandal or breakdown that has been in the news in the last few years and you’ll see a similar pattern – customers experience a big issue – be it environmental, safety or quality issues.

Once the issues are publicly exposed – often in the media, the PR department goes full-throttle into damage control. The CEO makes a public apology and the clean-up begins, including things like a stop in manufacturing and/or a product recall.

However, the question that never gets addressed is – Why did the breakdown happen in the first place?

From many years of working with organizations, I can tell you with confidence that employees and supervisors on the shop floor always know about quality and safety problems long before top managers become aware of them.

In a company where leaders are unafraid to hear the truth, employees tend to follow suit and be courageous and vocal too. This environment is much more conducive for everyone at all levels making it their daily business to make sure things are working the way they need to. In those organizations, important information, no matter how sensitive, controversial or troubling, percolates up to the right places very fast.

However, in organizations where leaders are reluctant to hear the truth, people tend to hide and cover their behind. Finger-pointing blossoms, people do as they are told but they are unwilling to be the bearers of bad news. When you don’t have honesty, leaders remain oblivious and blind to the issues and as a result, they don’t own, confront and address them effectively.

You need courage to look in the mirror, face reality and own the uncomfortable and challenging situations. When you do it, you move from being smaller than your problems to being bigger than them. When this shift happens, you always feel more empowered and eager to take action and turn things around.

Honesty is the mandatory first step for taking the game to the next level in any area. And, as the saying goes, “The truth shall set you free.” Even if at first it will “piss you off.”

Is your team extraordinary? If not, do you know how to make it so?

If you want to know if your team is ORDINARY or EXTRAORDINARY simply ‘put your ear to the ground’ and listen to the internal conversations that are taking place within your team.

In an ordinary team when people deal with challenges and new opportunities, the conversations are often oriented around how hard it will be, why it won’t succeed, what are the barriers and problems that will get in the way, and whose fault it is that these problems are in place.

Eavesdrop on people’s ‘around the cooler’ conversations and you will most likely hear phrases such as: “This sucks!”,”You would never believe what happened to me today…”, “They only care about themselves…” and “It’s all their fault…”

You will hear a lot of complaining, judging, invalidating, blaming and winning.

The mood and spirit that accompanies these conversations is often sarcastic, skeptical, resigned and negative.

People’s behaviors and action follow the same tune. In ordinary teams there is no sense of urgency to keep commitments, meet deadlines or get things done, people comply with the minimum standard necessary to keep their job, but they don’t go out of their way to ensure their customers are delighted.

In fact, as stated above, people often blame circumstances and other teams or leaders for why things move slow and they are unable to drive progress with greater speed and efficiency.

In ordinary teams, people tend to take other people’s efforts and contributions for granted so you won’t hear a lot of “Thank you!”, “You did a great job” and “I appreciate your contribution!”

However, in an extraordinary team, people think and talk quite differently about their circumstances, challenges and opportunities.

People don’t indulge in blame, fault or victim-type conversations. They don’t cover their behinds when things don’t work and they don’t let their ego get in their way,

In fact, if you listen in to the ‘around the cooler’ conversations in an extraordinary team you will hear conversations that are oriented around “What can we do about it?”, “How do we breakthrough?”, “What is missing or in the way?” and “How do we fix it?”.

No matter how challenging things are, people quickly take ownership of the challenges and opportunities and they only tolerate conversations that make a difference and focus on moving things forward.

In an extraordinary team, people go out of their ways to recognize and thank their colleagues. “Thank you for doing a great job“, “I appreciate your help” and “I couldn’t have done this without you” are the daily expression of gratitude and acknowledgment.

It is extremely difficult to change people if you believe they are sarcastic, cynical, circumstantial and negative in nature. However, it is much easier to change the conversations people are engaged in.

You have to start by paying greater attention to and having a greater awareness of what comes out of people’s mouths, including your own. Most people don’t have strong awareness in this area. They tend to express negative and undermining opinions and views about areas that are important to them as if these are undisputed truths. The consequence is a loss of possibilities and ability to shape or change their situation and future.

When you consider the cumulative effect of conversations in a team setting, the impact and opportunities are significant. In fact, you can use team conversations as the lever to elevate your team to extraordinary levels. And, extraordinary teams generate extraordinary results.

When an entire team is negative you can be sure to have a very toxic, suffocating and unproductive environment. However, if everyone talks in the same positive, empowering and effective way you will experience a different-level of collective power. If you keep that focus going over time, you will reach new heights of high performance.

Power requires rigor and discipline. Make sure commitments, timelines and expectations are clear and bold. And, make sure people hold each other to account for their commitments.

Don’t be fooled by appearances. People often say the right politically correct things in public and then they pay lip service to their pronouncements in their actions.

Pay attention to what people actually do after they speak and also how they speak behind the scenes. The ‘around the cooler’ chatter is often more impactful on shaping the mindset, spirit, and mood of the team.

Enroll people in speaking and acting in a way consistent with their vision and commitment. In fact, hold them to account and encourage everyone to do the same.

By changing the talk in the team from “Why we can’t…” to “How can we…” you will start changing the attitude and culture of your team toward extraordinary.

 

How’s your team health? Time for a checkup?

The CEO, of a global service company I worked with, focused only on the bottom line of the business and didn’t put a lot of focus on the ‘softer’ side of the business, including building his own leadership team.

However, when he identified that his team was not working effectively together and he felt that this was now negatively impacting the company’s performance, he decided to invest the time to train his leaders to operate as a high-performance team.

When he started this training with his leadership team their trust was low, leaders were engaged in back-channel chatter and avoiding addressing the business issues, as well as their own inner-personal issues and conflicts, in an open, honest, authentic, courageous and effective manner.

After a couple of team-building sessions, things started to improve. The team started to communicate in a more open and candid way, and everyone acknowledged that the atmosphere was better, people were happier and things were moving better at the business.

The CEO was pleased with the progress and as a result, he stopped all future team-building meetings to make sure his leaders spent the maximum time on business-focused activities.

It didn’t take long before things started to go downhill again, and not for any ill will. Without continuing to focus on team effectiveness, the intense day-to-day grind, busyness, and stress pulled people down again. Everyone was less open, compassionate, generous and collaborative. Finger-pointing and the negative back-channel conversation sprung up again. Teams started to work more in silos with less sharing and transparency, and instead of addressing conflicts head-on the leaders would go to the CEO to complain about their colleagues. Needless to say, the dysfunctional dynamic was hurting the business again.

After a month or so the CEO couldn’t tolerate the nonsense any longer, so he gathered his team, again, for a few team building sessions. This vicious cycle went on a few times. Unfortunately, I see this happen in other companies too.

Driving the business and building the team are two distinct paths and activities with two different sets of challenges and opportunities.

You are not going to develop your team as a high-performance team by merely working on the business at hand. Every high-performance of a championship team knows that.

There are multiple articles on the internet about what you can learn from sports championship teams about being a strong team and making your business greater. I found two great ones – one about the Golden State Warriors and one about recently crowned NBA champions, the Toronto Raptors. These articles are about team leadership, attitude, communication, boldness, not the technical basketball abilities of the players.

Unfortunately, I still meet too many senior executives who don’t seem to get this. They are either old school, or they are closed-minded or they suffer from a low dose of Emotional Intelligence (EQ).

These leaders tend to only spend time on developing their team when they feel they need to fix their team because they have a problem in team effectiveness. The minute they feel they have fixed the problem or at least pulled it out of danger they go back to their old ways of ignoring the importance of team health.

So, if you want your team to be a high-performance team:

Work on building the team distinctly, in addition, and in parallel to driving the business.

Are you managing your objectives or are they managing you?

Aspiring people have personal and professional goals as do most driven teams.

However, having goals is a double-edged sword. Goals could be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you relate to them.

Why?

We create goals in order to focus, compel and motivate ourselves and others. If we are ambitious, we typically take on bold and aggressive ones. We don’t stop there; we typically create a detailed execution plan with strategies and milestones.

Then we delve into implementing our goals and it doesn’t take long before we are so immersed in the roller coaster of our day-to-day life that we forget that we are the ones who came up with our goals in the first place.

When we achieve our goals, meet our milestones and/or achieve our plan as we wanted, we feel great. More than that, we believe we are great. Our mood and spirit are uplifted, we feel empowered and invincible.

However, when we fall short or fail to achieve our goals, milestones or plan we tend to feel disappointed, upset, anxious and/or stressed. We often second-guess our ability to achieve future goals, in the same or other areas. We get nervous about how others will view us. We often even make it mean that we will never achieve our vision or that it will never work smoothly for us.

For the most part, our relationship with falling short is not simple or objective; we don’t view it as: “we have failed to achieve a goal”. We make it mean something much bigger: “we are failures”.

Actually, in both success and failure, we tend to have a reactive and undermining relationship. Both leave us smaller than our circumstances, commitments and dreams. If we fail to achieve a goal, we feel a failure. If we achieve our goal, we feel invincible.

In both scenarios, our identity and self-worth are wrapped up in external circumstances. In either scenario, we are only as worthy as our results in relation to our objectives. And, because we created our objectives and then forgot that key fact, we are now prisoners of our own creation.

The only reason for having goals in the first place is in order to empower and inspire us to reach higher grounds. Creating goals that compel us is a powerful act. However, by forgetting, or not owning that we are the creators of such a powerful dynamic, we lose all the power.

Corporations often take the objective game to a whole other level of drama.

I was supporting a regional sales team of a global product and service organization that recently became public. The company was growing steadily due to the sales team achieving their sales objectives each quarter.

Then, toward the end of one-quarter things changed. A few big regional deals that the team was betting on to achieve its goals didn’t go through according to the plan and the region was at risk of missing its sales objective.

The global sales leader called the regional president multiple times urging, even demanding him to do whatever it took to meet his objectives.

The regional account managers started giving excessive discounts, at times giving up all profitability just to move deals forward in order to achieve their objectives.

The region ended up barely achieving their objective. However, no one felt good about it. People felt they did the wrong thing for the wrong reason; they felt the price of the apparent success was too high – giving up profitable business and ravaging the next quarter’s prospects just to cross the line with the objective at hand.

I guess it is easier to give a huge discount to a client, even at the expense of doing the wrong thing for the health of the business, than to have the tough conversation with your colleagues or boss about not allowing objectives to dictate bad behavior.

I recently spoke to the CEO of a different company who took on bold objectives and missed his first milestone. He shared with me that he felt guilty about the high bar he set, because had he not done that his people would have felt happy and successful.

I see this type of unhealthy, reactionary, survival-based behavior around objectives play out all the time in so many companies.

The lesson here is:

  1. All goals, strategies, and plans are made up.
  2. Don’t be a victim of your objectives.
  3. Own the fact that you created them for the purpose of focus and empowerment.
  4. Have the courage to manage your objectives, including saying ‘no’ to them when they are no longer the right way to go.
  5. Most important, don’t let your objectives manage you.

 

Can your team handle the tough conversations?

You could say that any team is as strong as its ability to handle and engage in sensitive and tough conversations. The easy ones are easy.

Two types of conversation are typically sensitive and tough for people to have – giving or receiving critical or negative feedback, and any topic that requires them to put their own personal feelings, egos, pride and/or agendas aside for the greater good of their company or team.

It could be something more complex such as deciding which team to invest in, which team member to promote or re-allocating resources and budgets from one leader’s team to another.

It could be something as simple as giving honest feedback to colleagues, your boss or subordinates about poor performance, or receiving the same from them.

It is a natural human reaction to take even the most insignificant topics personally, which leads to out-of-proportion reactions and behaviors.

In high-performance teams, team members never lose sight of the bigger picture. They put their team and company first and they always strive to do the right and the best thing for the collective cause.

In high-performance teams, people don’t hold back their punches when it comes to discussing and debating the tough and sensitive topics. Teammates may fully ‘go at it’, push back and/or disagree with other team members, but they continue to listen to each other and consider each other’s views. They never cross the line of interacting in a respectful way.

In high-performance teams, at the end of the conversation, no matter how sensitive or tough, when the team or the leader makes a decision all team members put their personal preferences and agendas aside and they all genuinely align, own and support the decision, whether it is in their personal favor or not.

When they go back to their respective team members, they represent the decision as their own in a united front with their colleagues.

I have seen some great teams that exemplify this behavior. However, I have seen more teams that don’t. I think it would be safe to say that most teams don’t do a great job when it comes to having tough and sensitive conversations.

For example, the senior leadership team of a global manufacturing company was attempting to have an honest discussion about the effectiveness of their organization. The CEO, who felt proud of the high-performance culture he had built opened the meeting by asking his leaders to be open and honest about how things were progressing. He was expecting to only hear great input from his leaders.

However, while the leaders did acknowledge that the CEO had established clear processes and rigorous discipline, they also felt their CEO was not open to hearing their ideas (when they were different than his) or receiving any critical feedback about the processes he had put in place or about his tough and controlling leadership style.

The leaders took a chance based on the CEO’s urging to be open. They told him in a direct and unvarnished manner how they felt about his lack of openness to their ideas and his intimidating style.

Instead of listening, internalizing and owning the feedback… and thanking them… the CEO became very defensive and emotional. He lost his cool and started screaming at his leaders. The room went silent. People were shocked, the level of intimidation skyrocketed and everyone shut down. It was apparent to everyone that the CEO took everything his leaders conveyed personally.

Needless to say, any traces of ability this senior team had prior to this conversation to discuss and address real tough and sensitive issues were destroyed.

Let’s be honest, having the tough and sensitive conversation in a productive, constructive and respectful way takes leadership maturity and courage.

Unfortunately, too often there isn’t enough of these qualities even in the most senior teams.