DOES YOUR TEAM CONFRONT THE BRUTAL FACTS?
During engagements to evaluate an organization’s current state of effectiveness and productivity I often find huge gaps that are holding the company back from reaching its’ full potential. It is always interesting to see how different leaders respond when presented with this information. Some leaders are very defensive. Some leaders are skeptical. While other leaders embrace the findings and are eager to learn more about the solutions.
It is always interesting when you have been hired to dig up the brutal facts of an organization’s issues and then they reject your findings. This is always a clear indicator to which teams will succeed in the changes needed to turn an organization around and which will not. I have personally seen multiple companies who failed to confront their brutal facts and are now no longer in business. While others have heeded the findings and put effective action plans into place and made fantastic turnarounds.
How does your team handle the brutal facts?
One of the key flaws many organizations have in common is their inability to deal with the reality of their current situation. Many times there are emotional connections to methods, programs or processes that have been created by the current leadership that is no longer effective, but due to the emotional connections involved, the leadership of the organization fails to recognize the actual facts of the current reality.
What is your organization continuing to do due to your emotional connections to it despite the brutal fact that it is no longer truly effective at moving the organization forward?
When the leadership of the organization either fails to see the facts of the situation or if they do see them, choose to ignore them, they cause the organization a great deal of harm. It is incumbent of the leadership of any organization to have a clear understanding of their present reality so that they can effectively move an organization forward based on sound decisions arrived at by understanding the brutal facts of their current situation.
Jim Collins does a great job detailing the importance of this fundamental practice in the companies that went from being just good companies to great companies in his book, Good to Great. Collins later details the peril of ignoring the brutal facts in his latest book, How the Mighty Fall.
Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)
Collins contends that all good to great companies began the process of finding a path to greatness by confronting the brutal facts of their organization. When you determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusion an honest confrontation of the brutal facts. A primary task of taking a company from good to great is to create a culture where people have the opportunity to be heard and ultimately the truth to be heard.
Facts Are Better Than Dreams
- One of the dominant themes of Collins’ research is that breakthrough results come about by a series of good decisions, diligently executed and accumulated one on top of another.
- Good to Great companies made more good decisions than bad ones.
- In order to make good decisions, these companies infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality.
“You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts.”
The Charismatic Leader Problem
- The presence of strong charismatic leaders can easily become the de facto reality driving a company. Charismatic leaders can actually impede the confronting of the brutal facts due to the power of their personality casting a large shadow over the organization.
- Charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. The strength of the charismatic leader’s leadership can actually deter people from bringing you the brutal facts. The power of such a leader’s personality can intimidate team members from bringing out the brutal facts because they may conflict with the charismatic leader’s perspective and the team fears repercussions for expressing conflicting information.
- Once leaders allow themselves to become the primary reality people worry about rather than the actual reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or perhaps even worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
In order to combat this tendency, Winston Churchill created a Statistical Office, with the primary function of feeding him continuously and completely unfiltered the most brutal facts of reality.
Creating The Right Climate
How do you motivate people with brutal facts?
Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision? No. Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. If you have the right people on the bus they will be self-motivated.
The real question is ‘How do you manage in such a way as to not demotivate people. And one of the single most demotivating actions you can do is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events. I have seen personally seen highly visionary cripple their organizations by undermining their own credibility by consistently doing this.
Spending time and energy trying to ‘motivate’ people is a waste of time and effort. The right people will be motivated – the key is not to ‘de-motivate’ them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.
How do you create a climate where truth is heard?
Four basic practices so people can be heard
1. Lead with questions, not answers. To gain understanding, not as manipulation or as a way to blame or put down others.
- What’s on your mind?
- Can you help me understand?
- What should we be worried about?
2. Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
- Create a climate where debate in is normalized.
- The strategy is often an agonizing process where arguments and fights are common and expected.
3. Conduct autopsies, without blame.
- This should only be to search for understanding and learning.
- Not just better information, but better information that cannot be ignored
- The entire team takes responsibility for extracting the maximum learning from the tuition that was paid.
4. Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms
- Turn information into information that cannot be ignored.
- One company used a short pay red flag mechanism to alert it to problems immediately. Each customer has the right to short pay an invoice if there is a problem with their order. This provides immediate and costly feedback that cannot be ignored.
Maintaing Unwavering Faith Amid The Brutal Facts
Three Categories of people who have suffered serious adversity
1. Those who became permanently dispirited by the event.
2. Those who got their life back to normal.
3. Those who used the experience as a defining event to make them stronger.
- This is called the hardiness factor.
- People act most while on the edge of a precipice.
The Good To Great companies were like those in the third group, with the “hardiness factor”.
The Stockdale Paradox
This is named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. He was imprisoned for eight years and tortured more than 20 times. He survived this nightmare while many others did not because of the mental paradigm he lived by while in there. When asked who didn’t survive he stated that it was the optimist that failed to prevail.
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end-which you can never afford to lose–with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be” Admiral Jim Stockdale
Your team must 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.
- Leaders must never confuse having faith that you will prevail in the end (which you can never lose) with the discipline to conform.
- Leaders must retain faith that you will prevail in the end AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.
The key elements of greatness are deceptively simple and straightforward. The good to great leaders were able to strip away much of the noise and clutter allowing the organization to just focus on the few key things that would have the greatest impact.
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