RUN WITH THE Big dogS™ newsletter
Volume 3, issue 41

Can you handle the truth?  Perhaps you should encourage your team to share the brutal truth...John

Management idea

We were reviewing the lessons learned in the classic business book "Good to Great".  In it, author Jim Collins describes the power of starting with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of a situation.  Often that is enough to make the right decisions self-evident.  The COO immediately saw this as a concept that could dramatically enhance communications.  "I'm tired of finding out we have a major problem like quality or customer service after the fact.  I want to hear the 'brutal truths' in our staff meetings and day to day communications."  

Why weren't he, and the other executives, hearing the brutal truths? We identified lots of reasons:  Some folks assumed that the top team had to be aware of the issue, so they kept quiet. Some were afraid that there would be a knee jerk reaction to take immediate, inappropriate action. Many had been burned in the past when they opened their mouths and were told to stop being negative.  If the COO was told before his intermediate managers, the managers became angry about going outside the chain of command. The COO's body language, and outright anger, at bad news conditioned many to tell him what they thought he wanted to hear.

We established a specific goal to incorporate the Good to Great concept of “brutal truths” into the company culture.  Some of the ground rules included not allowing managers to get angry when they hear bad news or news outside the normal chain of command.  When someone believed they had a brutal truth, it was to be presented with the preamble:  "I think this is a brutal truth."  Lastly,  the brutal truth was described initially without any theories about why the issue exists. (It is too easy to waste time arguing about whys instead of dealing directly with the issue.)  The effect of announcing the new policy and culture was electrifying - with the middle managers enthusiastic about the senior management directly facing their brutal truths.