Takeaways
- Honesty is more important than style in leadership.
- Avoiding hard conversations can lead to trust issues and mediocrity within a team.
- Consistency in communication and feedback is key to building trust and addressing issues.
- Leaders should demand honesty at every level of the organization.
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Chapter Markers:
00:00 - Introduction
02:16 -The Importance of Honesty in Leadership
05:34 - The Consequences of Avoiding Hard Conversations
09:43 - Building Trust Through Consistent Communication
10:43 - Demanding Honesty at Every Level
12:41 - Conclusion
(upbeat music) - It's not funny, it's not funny. It is kind of funny. - Yeah, back to the retake. - And back to the retake, let's take 12. This is Unleashing Leadership. I'm Travis Moss, CEO of C Planning Group. And I've got our co-host here, Dave Nerci, our Chief Operating Officer. And this podcast is all about how we read good books. We take away some of the best ideas and insights from them, we implement them into our business and day-to-day lives. And we're working on takeaways in the book, Build by Tony Fidal. And today's takeaway, honesty is more important than style, having the hard conversations, or as I'm affectionately referred to as, sometimes you just need a sludge hammer. I think we actually got t-shirts made saying that. But, Dave, is this worthy of an episode? I think we can, let's do it, let's do it, all right. And as always, do us a favor, like or subscribe to us wherever you are watching or listening. And if that's not something you normally do, make it an exception. Let us know, we'll give you a shout out. But anyhow, we appreciate every time somebody gives us a thumbs up, a five star forward. I think we've had like three so far. So it's a fairly new podcast. So you could be like a star. You could be the first one on certain platforms and stuff. Could really be somebody. All right, this episode is brought to you by the one they think podcasts because you are not alone. Learn how to reframe your challenges and overcome the things that are holding you back and check it out at NQRMedia on YouTube or wherever else you can find podcasts. And so this is the Sludge Hammer episode. - Are you ready on the title? - I'm naming it right now, be a Sludge Hammer. Yeah, so all the problems we have in the world today, I think one of the biggest problems we have and how it manifests into like our politics, everything else is that we're so worried about looking good, sounding good, being PC, being this great example and we're just not saying what needs to be said. We're not being honest about things because we're worried about offending people. And you see it everywhere. - Yes, yes, and I think you get to the point where the more people that are afraid to say something because they're afraid of blowback, the less people will actually come forward and say things. If you see people around you who are honest and willing to say what's on their mind and people hear it and they go, okay, that's interesting. And they don't throw things at each other, they don't call each other slurs, they don't hate each other, they go, okay, I see where you're coming from. I do or don't agree with it. You've changed my mind or you haven't, right? When you see that, you become braver. Now you can come forward with your ideas or your perspectives or your questions and be like, why do you keep saying that? Why do you keep doing that? And you can get informed. - Right. - But we're not doing it. We're so, I think we're doing it really good internally. And I think we've worked really hard over the last two or three years to get past the, everybody's on the razor's edge of having a breakdown if somebody tells them they didn't do a good job. But, there's a big part of society pushing us into this area where you have to be very, very careful of telling somebody they didn't do a good job or they're not doing well or, I mean, any little thing seems to be triggering to people. And so then we get to, and people, people who aren't very good at leadership or management who think they are, we'll do this, they'll talk about their style and they're worried about their style. Well, this is my style of leadership. There is no right style of leadership. There's just how you lead, right? Some people lead loud and some people lead quiet. There's no right or wrong. It's just how you do it. The underlying amplifier, I guess, is just the level of honesty that you put with it. Like, you can say something honest and make sure you get the point across or you can say something honest, but soften it so much nobody actually understands why it's important. Right. Yeah, you can't worry about, you can't over worry about how the people you're addressing are gonna take it, right? Because you're never, in most cases, if you have a team that's more than a few people, there's gonna be people-- Someone's gonna take it wrong. Someone would take it wrong. Yeah, the way they receive it, they're all gonna receive that news differently, right? And if you're worried about how each one is gonna take that and you're trying to craft this perfect message, right? You see, like, the press conference, you see people go on, politicians, athletes, whatever, and they're reading off a piece of paper or it sounds so rehearsed. It's like, what are you even saying? Like, is this genuine at all? Are you just saying something to, you know, move on and not actually addressing what the issue or challenge is? And that's what happens when you worry too much about that and not the actual message of, hey, this is what's going on. We gotta fix there, we gotta move on, let's do it, right? And I think one thing that is important when you don't do this, right? So kind of the first point you were making if you aren't having these hard conversations, there's two likely outcomes that I see when this happens, right? One of them is if it's not addressed, things just keep happening, right? So eventually that person will say like a person is a problem, right? They keep doing that. They start losing trust from everybody. The team has now let down because this is being accepted, right? You have mediocrity kind of bringing within and it's not being fixed because no one's having the conversation, this person's just doing what they want to do. The other outcome is you're not having the conversation and all of a sudden one day you just kind of lose it or you had enough and now it's like this surprise feedback for the person, right? It's a blow up and it's like, I didn't know this. Why are you coming at me like this? And so neither one of those is good. You didn't give the person the opportunity to improve or fix something that wasn't a problem because you didn't, you weren't honest with them, right? And or the team suffered, right? Because that conversation was ahead. So when you're not being honest or, you know, outright with your words and allowing people to understand that or make improvements, the outcomes generally are not good. - Right. There's a book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Privilege, you're listening to this podcast, you've read that book and if you haven't, you probably should. But he tells a story of a guy who smells like onions and he says, you know, there's this guy and he smells like, let's pretend it's somebody who frequents an area, like a coworker. You have a coworker who smells like onions. And it's disgusting. And nobody wants to hang around with that person. And so when he comes in the room, everybody's got like kind of like, ostracizes him a little bit. So you have two choices. You can pretend that there's not a problem and kind of, you know, exhibit some of these actions that are going to come across in your body language. Or you could tell the person, hey, you smell like onions. And if you tell the person, hey, you smell like onions, they have two choices. They can take that and say, yeah, I don't care. Okay, in which case, why should you get upset anymore? You don't have to care anymore. You did your job. You told them you smell like onions. Or they can say, oh my gosh, I didn't realize they smelled like onions. And then the next day, they come back to work and they don't smell like onions. And I always took that and said, like, look, somebody comes and says, 'cause we get this all the time. Somebody says, I can't believe so-and-so said this, Travis. What do I do? Go talk to them. Number one, you don't know what they meant because you're reading an email or a text message or something stupid like that. And number two, even if they did mean something, go talk to them. Literally, just go out of the conversation and say, hey, this is how I took it. Is that what you meant? Let them say yes or no? If they say yes, well, fine. You know where they stand, right? What? Now you don't have to pretend. And if they say, no, that's not how I meant it at all. I'm just not good at email, it's great. Now you know how to kind of move on from that or you overhear something in a meeting and you take something around like, go talk to them. Hey, this is how I took it that I take it right. If they say, yeah, you took it right, you are a shithead. Then you need to take that in your heart, right? You know, for whatever reason, you need to take that to heart. You need to reflect on why are they saying that. And, you know, is that something that you should be concerned about? Don't be mad at them for it. You should be happy with them that they told you. They gave you information that's important for you to have. You now have this information. And I think consistency is key. You have to, from a leadership perspective, what this podcast is all about, you have to be so consistent. You can't have the days where you're like, I just didn't want to hurt their feelings today. You need to do this every time you reinforce a bad behavior by not saying something about it, by not being honest about it. Or by not clearly articulating that's a problem or that's good or whatever it is. All you're doing is perpetuating a problem. Like you said, you're going to turn it into this explosion down the road. And then for leadership, you've also got to demand it out of your managers. 'Cause what'll happen if we've seen this before? I'm going to be brutally honest with everybody else, right? And then you have a manager that takes it and goes behind closed doors and they're a little silo with their team. And they say, you know, they're just mean to us. This place, I'm sorry you have to work in a place like this. And that's how leadership, bullshit, you know? The tone of the company is you can deal with feedback. You can deal with somebody telling you when something's good or bad, or if you've done a good job or a bad job. We don't need to hide things from you to help your feelings, you're a grown adult. Now that you're a grown and you're a professional and we pay you to be here and be a professional and be a grown adult. And in that case, you ought to be able to handle honest feedback consistently, even if it hurts your feelings once in a while. Well, you have to demand that of every layer of the company. 'Cause otherwise what happens is is people will use it and say, well, I'm being picked on. It's like, no, you're not being picked on because this is how we handle it for everybody. Every single person here, if there's something that needs to be said good or bad, we want them to be able to say it so that it can be dealt with right away and it doesn't become a silo someplace where people are huddled around water cooler, just smash talk in somebody. - Yep. Yeah, I think the consistency part is so key there because you can't do it here and there when it's a little easier to give the feedback and not do it when it's a little bit harder 'cause then you're really sending time. - Yeah, to our last episode. - Exactly, yep. And then it's really sending mixed messages, right? Those people have no idea what's going on. So you really have to be consistent. And a good point with the managers, I think sometimes what we've seen, something like a manager may think they're defending their team or they're standing up for their team, it's okay to do that in the right scenario, right? Or if that's something that should be done. But what we're talking about here, if you're trying to play the hero to your team or kind of undermine what leadership is doing, you're only gonna hurt them in the long run because it's gonna come back and then you lose all your trust in that case. So yeah, that's a good point too. And this is just really great advice for life in general. Spouse, kids, friends, work, whatever it is. (upbeat music)
