Michele Harmon
As promised, I want to talk about the Brutal Facts of Leadership. Often, your HR lady is the one that brings you those brutal facts regarding employees’ desires, and more often, than your managers bring you hard-to-hear information.
In Chapter 5 of Good to Great, author Jim Collins addresses the need for leaders to be open to hearing about the squiggly things.
When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, my job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things, even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.
Collins recommends that leaders create a climate where the truth is heard. He suggests four simple mechanisms to get to the truth and find the squiggly stuff.
- Lead with questions. Questions must be phrased to seek understanding and not asked to manipulate or place blame on others. Ask questions in informal settings. I call that managing by walking around. Get out of your office. Texas Monthly had an article back in 1996 entitled Principals, Not Heels. The article noted that good schools need clean bathrooms and principals who don’t wear high heels. The visual of that has stayed with this author while I managed up to 300 staff members. Get out of your office and talk to people.
- Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion. Intense conversation, including raised voices, is okay if you emerge with a solution. Good to Great companies engage in loud debate, heated discussions, and healthy conflict.
- Conduct autopsies without blame. Face the mistakes. When you conduct autopsies without blame, you go a long way toward creating a climate where the truth is heard. If you have the right people on the bus, you should almost never need to assign blame but need only to search for understanding and learning.
- Build red flag mechanisms. Get great intel to know what is coming from outside. Never stop conducting SWOTs and never get complacent. Use the information. Indeed, we found no evidence that the Good to Great companies had more or better information than the comparison companies. None. Both sets of companies had virtually identical access to good information. The key, then, lies not in better information but in turning information into information that cannot be ignored.
Collins concludes this chapter with his interview with Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton. If you read or watched Unbroken, though set in WWII and not Vietnam, then you can probably imagine what life was like for him there. He told Jim Collins that the optimists were the ones that did not make it out. They would say, we will be out by Christmas and then kicked that same can from holiday to holiday and eventually died of a broken heart.
Collins titled the result of his meeting with Admiral Stockdale the Stockdale Paradox. Stockdale said he told those optimists; We are not getting out by Christmas; deal with it. Collins concluded, as should leaders, that life is unfair, sometimes to our advantage, sometimes to our disadvantage. The Paradox is to retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties and at the same time, confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
In August, I will discuss Collins, Chapter Five, The Hedgehog Concepts.
Winston Churchill said there is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.
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“Your employees are the heart of your organization.” Dr. Michele Harmon is a Human Resource professional, supporting clients in Texas and New Mexico that range in size from five to more than 3,000 employees. Email: micheleharmon1@gmail.com