Effective Honesty for Managers and Frontline Employees
Sometimes people suck. They’re so stuck in their own heads that no amount of personal storytelling reaches through their thick biases and self-limiting beliefs to land the epiphanic message. What then? What if you have to move people and organizations who seemingly don’t want to change and evolve? What about when you’re faced with an egomaniac who thinks it’s their way or the highway, even if they’re running the organization into the ground? And what happens when no one can get around one powerful individual who’s acting like the biggest roadblock of them all?
No book on honesty would be complete unless it admitted that sometimes honesty is a tough dish to serve. Therefore, in this chapter, I’ll discuss what is special about operating from within an organization as a manager or frontline employee squeezed from all sides by the institutional imperative, politics, and those most honorable of colleagues who only look out for themselves. (Yes, that was sarcasm there.) As I’ve noted before, many of these tactics blend together. You can use many of the same techniques whether you’re managing down, across, up, or over to clients and prospects.
USING HONESTY AS A STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT TOOL WHETHER YOU’RE MANAGING UP, DOWN, OR ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION
When it comes to using honesty within an organization, there are two truths we must consider. Truth number one is that we can create organizational honesty through a wide variety of approaches. We’ve seen in this book a myriad of examples of how every leader has a different way to go about using honesty in the organization, from Bethenny Frankel’s I don’t know and Dan Hesse’s focus on the long term to Jay Farner’s I don’t care who’s right, only what’s right and Dalio’s insistence on radically transparent feedback. However, while there are myriad approaches, they won’t all work equally well in your situation. That leads us to truth number two, which is that you must tailor your approach according to your individual culture. What works at Sprint might be seen as tiptoeing around the issue at Bridgewater, while the radical transparency of Bridgewater might possibly get you fired at Sprint. You need to find what works for your organization.
So how do you come up with an approach that is ideal for your culture? Although your specific solution will vary, there are three guidelines and related set of actions that may help you, as a manager or frontline employee, make change happen within your organization. These guidelines will help you formulate an approach that will yield effective results within most cultures. The three guidelines are (1) do what you can within your own team, (2) assemble and use coalitions of support wisely, and (3) use data, and if that fails, use more data.
Guideline 1: Do What You Can Within Your Own Team
Jay Farner is a big fan of doing what you can as a leader within your own team. “Just worry about yourself, initially, and create that momentum,” he recommended to me when I asked about his tips for creating change within an organization. “I’m envious of a leader leading fifty to a hundred people because it’s so actionable inside of that world—they can make such a huge difference and do it fairly quickly and turn around later and see the difference they’ve made.” In turn, Farner asserts, the success you create inside your group can help inspire people across the organization to change as well, as long as you thoughtfully show your results using objective data and without stepping on the toes of your colleagues and bosses.
To that end, successfully driving change in your team means understanding how to balance individual vs. group mentalities. True, this takes a bit of political mastery, but let’s be honest: our efforts go nowhere without the people—the right people—to back us up. That means spending time understanding what’s going on with the people around you and what motivates them, so you can start to figure out how to move them by dangling carrots rather than by hitting them with sticks.
“I’m envious of a leader leading fifty to a hundred people because it’s so actionable inside of that world—they can make such a huge difference and do it fairly quickly, and turn around later and see the difference they’ve made.”—Jay Farner
Sometimes, those carrots include asking people to consider if they’re really living up to the organization’s values. Sometimes it’s that simple: the organization has decent values, it’s just that they’re not enforced because no one’s reminding the team why their culture code is important. As Dan Hesse shared, “How we live our values” should always underpin the conversation you have with the members of your team individually and together.
Other times, your culture doesn’t have values, or has crappy values, or no one really thinks about the identity of the organization, and the result is a free-for-all where what you do supersedes who you are. In that case, you have lots of options here, and you may want to start by getting to know the people around you—again, managers, direct reports, bosses, etc.—to begin to understand their personal goals, biases, and assumptions. You’ll need to get honest about the people around you if you’re going to make any headway, especially in a politicized work environment. Be honest: Are you taking into account the core values and the values hierarchies of the people you need to impress or persuade? So often, we act without deeply understanding the beliefs and interests of the people on the other side of the table—in this case, likely your peers or your bosses, who may think very differently than you do. Honestly assessing others will greatly assist you in designing an action plan to make your organization more honest and your team more innovative.
Build strong relationships throughout your team so you get to truly know people. Become known as the person crusading for what’s true, and build on that reputation. You might be surprised how quickly you can rally others around the ideal of honesty. If you hope to extract superior performance from your team, you must, as Martin Whittaker reminded me, “appeal to better motives and incentives—that is, ‘there’s something in it for us’—and present a positive business case on how we can look at this in a different way.”
Be honest: Are you taking into account the core values and the values hierarchies of the people you need to impress or persuade?
Even so, changing your current culture to a high-performing one will take time—enough time to form new habits of asking better questions, eliminating assumptions, saying yes before no, and dislodging the institutional imperative. Russell Weiner emphasized that one reason companies drift into obscurity is that leaders think simply returning to their core business and halting non-core projects is an honest assessment. It’s not that easy, though. “You can’t go to a therapist one time and you’re solved,” Weiner pointed out. “It’s not going to come to you in a three-hour brainstorming session. It’s going to be hours and hours of discovery and reflection and refinement.” When you get stuck, bring in an outside perspective so you earn the benefit of Pietersen’s “outside-in” philosophy. The pursuit of honesty is about creating industry-dominating success. It’s not easy, but the Hourglass of Honesty is the framework you can count on as a dedicated manager who wants to create meaningful change from within your own department.
“You can’t go to a therapist one time and you’re solved. It’s not going to come to you in a three-hour brainstorming session. It’s going to be hours and hours of discovery and reflection and refinement.” —Russell Weiner
Share this book or the concepts in it with your teammates. As Buffett noted, get people “alert to the problem,” and become the expert on strategic honesty within your own team. If you can’t seem to get your comrades excited about asking what’s true in order to find new opportunities, consider the possibility that your message might be spot-on but you’re simply not the right messenger. Seeing this about yourself requires an enormous amount of self-reflection and honesty, but that critical realization could make all the difference. Is there a colleague who is better suited to deliver your assessment? What about your boss? Or a small group? This is where understanding your target audience is key—not only what they need to hear but also who can make them most receptive to hearing it.
Guideline 2: Assemble and Use Coalitions of Support Wisely
At some point you’re going to need to make a case for honesty to either your peers, bosses, or direct reports. If so, consider assembling a coalition. What does this look like? As Rohit Malik, one of the architects behind Columbia Business School’s honor code, specifies, “Form a committee of those [you] consider to be high-integrity leaders and work with those people to create programs, workshops,” and brainstorming sessions specifically designed to mine honest insights. Employees who bring a united front to the decision-maker are harder to ignore, particularly if they make a strong, data-backed case for what they believe in and if what’s being proposed is truly for the good of the organization. Remember Russell Weiner’s assertion that brainstorming won’t yield true insights if the session only unearths opinions instead of facts, so lean on data to make the case for you.
ACTIONS TO CONSIDER
1.Build relationships on the basis of honest principles so you can earn the trust of your team. Ask them questions to get at their biases, beliefs, and motivations. Share your beliefs about honesty with them in return, and make honesty a critical part of every discussion, asking, “Is that true?” and “How do we know?”
2.Map out which people you would need—in every direction of the hierarchy—to help you execute honest change. Include (and be honest about) their motives, beliefs, and the relative support you can expect from them.
3.Become an expert on strategic honesty, but also ensure that you’re the right messenger to introduce these concepts to the rest of your organization. Bring in team members to help land your message if that’s what it takes to get through to your colleagues.
Before we examine what a coalition is and how to create one, I’ll provide a word of caution: don’t be a victim of your own zeal. Sending around secret email chains and meeting in dark corridors during lunch is definitely not the way to go about convincing higher-ups to act on your ideas. In addition, outright whistle-blowing or getting on your soapbox is usually a poor choice for change management, so avoid going to the press or your Twitter account; instead, look at what motivates the company, whether it’s profits, investors, other stakeholders, etc., and use those intrinsic motivations as reasons to come together for the benefit of the organization. In the pursuit of honesty and transparency, begin this process by putting an agenda item on the next company meeting and speaking transparently about your vision for strategic honesty, as Ray Dalio requires at Bridgewater. Then, follow through with a request to put together a coalition with the sole purpose of discovering ways to use strategic honesty to achieve the organization’s most important goals. Make sure you frame your coalition request correctly, as a team with the sole mission of achieving the organization’s goals.
If you get the green light, it’s time to pick your team. We are searching for truth, remember, not conformity (which is the great killer of truth in many instances). Therefore, diversity is key—and, more specifically, a diverse group of individuals who all believe that honesty will positively transform your organization and who disagree about exactly how to do it. There will be people in your organization who are interested in ways to break out of the status quo and improve performance; find them and recruit them. As Ray Dalio reminds us, we must listen carefully to people who disagree with us so that we “replace the joy of being proven right . . . with the joy of learning what is true.” Consider bringing in an outside referee who can keep the group honest, productive, and asking the right outside-in questions. As an outside consultant I’ve seen the benefits of being able to serve two critical roles: first, to help a group achieve the stated goal by serving as an independent guide, and second, to be a scapegoat that allows employees to push responsibility for success on the outsider, so the team gets all the upside credit with far less downside risk.
Employees who bring a united front to the decision-maker are harder to ignore, particularly if they make a strong, data-backed case for what they believe in and if what’s being proposed is truly for the good of the organization.
Your coalition will go further, and faster, than you could on your own. After studying which tactics worked best to create organizational change, researchers Susan J. Ashford and James R. Detert found that “building a coalition generates organization buy-in more quickly and on a larger scale as more people contribute energy and resources.”1 The authors reiterated that diversity is key. As they wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “One person might have access to important data . . . and another might have a personal relationship with one of the top managers you’re trying to persuade.” The most successful leaders in their study involved a diverse group of colleagues in pitching their concepts, because the network effect gave the group access to resources and relationships that made the whole buy-in process easier.
I’ll be the first to admit that the last thing I want is for people on my payroll to be sitting around “discussing innovation” at 3 PM on a Tuesday while pressing projects go untouched. Therefore, your coalition must produce actionable results, and on a timetable. Come up with a plan, perhaps first focusing on open-ended brainstorms that run through the Hourglass of Honesty, the Flawed Diamond, and Waterfall Culture, to see where opportunities exist to become more nimble, innovative, and effective. Introduce the Johari window and start to explore what might be in the organization’s and the leaders’ blind spots. Then create a list of opportunities that exist along with potential actions that different departments can take. This is not about highlighting problems; it’s about illuminating opportunities along with some associated solutions (i.e., action). If your bosses want to create a high-performing, industry-leading organization, this shouldn’t be a tough sell. If they don’t . . . then there’s always Monster.com.
Guideline 3: Use Data, and If That Fails, Use More Data
To really get your organization moving, take action. Start small, with accessible hypotheses and tests. Gather data—especially from customers, just as Russell Weiner did at Domino’s. It’s worth noting that Weiner asked his current customers what they thought about his pizza, and they told him how to fix it. Often I get questions about doing external marketing research. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan. The reason I’m not a fan is that anyone can say they might buy a product. Can you imagine basing an entire business strategy on the feedback of people who might be your customers? But when you open your wallet and buy, that’s a powerful vote, and—as Weiner pointed out—it’s the only vote that matters. Ask current customers what they think; they’re usually more than happy to be put in charge of how you might make positive changes.
ACTIONS TO CONSIDER
1.If you’re trying to push change through an organization with several layers, use a coalition of support to strengthen your argument.
2.Build your coalition openly, honestly, and transparently as a change agent pursuing opportunities for growth within your organization.
3.Embrace a diverse coalition to ensure you don’t lose insights to your collective blind spots, and develop recommended actions your organization can take.
While capturing perspectives and data within your organization, you may also want to benchmark your findings with other, competitive organizations, as Martin Whittaker provides with the JUST 100. When managing up in particular, rankings of peers frequently matter to corporate executives who fear losing to competitors (remember Buffett’s imperative and consider exploiting that weakness). As the former CEO of Sprint, Dan Hesse, said, “You can make a case—you could go to the numbers and take a look at the companies [with] a culture of honesty and truth . . . who have higher returns on equity and sustained better business performance” to show to your bosses. You can also show binders full of cases where market caps have been destroyed by dishonesty, like in the cases of Wells Fargo, VW, and Facebook when the Cambridge Analytica data scandal broke. “If you could speak to me in the language of improving our performance,” Hesse said, “you would have an impact” in convincing the CEO to make strategic changes. That institutional imperative is strong, and you may ironically be able to use it to your advantage in the beginning stages of transformation.
Once again, don’t bring problems; bring solutions. I’ll add to that: don’t be a problem. Making the case for organizational change to your boss while she’s right in the middle of preparing for her next board meeting is probably an ill-fated idea. Executives, boards, leaders of all kinds are people, too, so some sensitivity is in order here. Remember the feed-forward framing technique for gently nudging people along to the benefit of all. With a scientific, data-driven method in hand, and the right persuasive tactics, you’ll be able to make a proper case to effectively communicate to those in charge when the time is right.
ACTIONS TO CONSIDER
1.Lean on objective data whenever possible—in the absence of facts, only opinion and politics are available to decision-makers.
2.Use benchmarks to make a solid, objective case for making change in your organization so your colleagues, managers, and direct reports can see why using honesty is important.
3.Be sensitive to timing in terms of conveying the insights you’ve gleaned from the data so you don’t accidentally crush your chances before you can even get started . . . and be sensitive to the egos who pay you every two weeks.
A special note to those who are managing up. Convincing those above you that they need to change may seem impossible. It isn’t, but it does take some attention to empathy and detail. Without expertise, consensus, and evidence, most arguments will fall on the deaf ears of a manager who has an entire set of rules, initiatives, and worries floating around her head at any given time. But if you can use principles of honesty to create a culture of innovation within your own team, you’ll be well on your way to creating change in your organization (guideline one). If you can recruit the assistance of those around you by finding like-minded colleagues and asking more honest questions, you can start to build momentum with a coalition (guideline two). And if you can speak in the language of the leader and present data-backed examples where honesty has succeeded, you can “present those examples in a compelling way such that there’s a Return On Honesty,” as Rohit Malik suggested (guideline three). Take it back to the basics, in the language the leaders understand, and use the frameworks and stories in this book to back you up. Then you might have a chance to create the same game-changing results as many of the leaders in this book, who all stand behind you.
GETTING BRUTALLY HONEST IN A PLACE WHERE DISHONESTY THRIVES
We’ve looked at some ways that managers can bring about honest change in their workplaces. Trouble is, in today’s world, we aren’t exactly inundated with the benefits of virtue and principle. Instead, as Rohit Malik pointed out, many leaders see “example after example of individuals and organizations that do not follow high integrity and yet are still able to succeed in the marketplace.” As long as that’s true, honesty only looks like a nice-to-have option instead of a must-have opportunity. But if you believe that a world with ultimate transparency is fast approaching, then you might also believe that any leader wanting long-term, sustainable success will have to embrace honesty and integrity at some point. And in a world with instantaneous information, “some point” looms closer as transparency increases.
Plus, remember that the power of honesty touches all the elements your organization cares about—not in the long term, but right now. When it comes to using strategic honesty within your organization, the implications of the case studies in this book touch recruiting, human resources, operations, finance, sales, marketing, and more. Marching into your CEO’s office with a picket line is likely not the way, but gently reminding your organization that it needs to recruit better talent, innovate ahead of its competition, and increase profits makes you the type of thoughtful leader that every organization should want. Making change is tough but not impossible. Alexander McCobin, CEO of Conscious Capitalism, said it best: “Being honest and calling out dishonesty is often a lot easier than people make it out to be in their own heads.”
There may come a time when you decide you’re done beating your head against a wall and you don’t want to go down with the ship you’re on. That’s a tough call, and nothing saddens me more than seeing enlightened individuals stuckin companies that can’t get out of their own way.
All that said, there may come a time when you decide you’re done shouting about honesty through a megaphone while no one listens, and you don’t want to go down with the ship you’re on. That’s a tough call, and nothing saddens me more than seeing enlightened individuals stuck in companies that can’t get out of their own way. Millennials especially have less and less patience for old-fashioned ways of doing business when we can work remotely from Bali in between yoga sessions. Cliché, but why not? Sometimes the answer is in Rohit Malik’s advice when you realize the organization you work for will never embrace honesty: “Find a new organization to work for.” Or, in Russell Weiner’s words, “The beauty of data is it can help you turn around the brand or get out of a company you probably don’t want to work for. If the upper management doesn’t want to make a fact-based decision, then you probably don’t want to work there—and you win either way.”
QUESTIONS FOR HONEST REFLECTION
1.When might be the right time to introduce your organization to strategic honesty? How can you present honesty to all your colleagues so they see the benefits?
2.How can you set an example by using honesty within your own team and developing a mini-culture of innovation that produces better insights and results?
3.How can you think and act more politically in your organization—including discovering what your colleagues think and feel, assembling coalitions of support, and making data-backed arguments to adopt honesty in your own organization?