Winning - Jack Welch [11]
Inside your head, you’re about ready to burst, as you tell yourself, “Here we go again. I know Bob and Mary across the room feel the same way I do—the complacency around here is killing us.”
Outside, all three of you are playing the game. You’re nodding.
Now imagine an environment where you take responsibility for candor. You, Bob, or Mary would ask questions like:
“Isn’t there a new product or service idea in this business somewhere that we just haven’t thought of yet?”
“Can we jump-start this business with an acquisition?”
“This business is taking up so many resources. Why don’t we get the hell out of it?”
What a different meeting! What a lot more fun, and how much better for everyone.
Another situation that happens all the time is a high-growth business with a self-satisfied crowd managing it. You know the scene at the long-range planning meeting. The managers show up with double-digit growth—say 15 percent—and pound out slide after slide showing how well they are doing. Top management nods their approval, but you’re sitting there knowing there’s a lot more juice in that business. To compound matters, the people presenting the slides are peers of yours, and there’s that age-old code hanging in the air: if you don’t challenge mine, I won’t challenge yours.*
Frankly, the only way I know of to get out of this bind—and introduce candor—is to poke around in a nonthreatening way:
“Jeez, you’re good. What a terrific job. This is the best business we’ve got. Why not put more resources into it and go for more?”
“With the great team you’ve put in place, there must be ten acquisitions out there for you. Have you looked globally?”
Those questions, and others like them, have the power to change the meeting from a self-congratulatory parade to a stimulating working session.
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Now, you may be thinking, I can’t raise those questions because I don’t want to look like a jerk. I want to be a team player.
It is true that candid comments definitely freak people out at first. In fact, the more polite or bureaucratic or formal your organization, the more your candor will scare and upset people, and, yes, it could kill you.
That’s a risk, and only you can decide if you’re willing to take it.
Needless to say, you’ll have an easier time of installing candor in your organization if you are closer to the top. But don’t blame your boss or the CEO if your company lacks candor—open dialogue can start anywhere. I was speaking my mind when I had four employees at Noryl, the smallest, newest unit of a hierarchical company that had a very dim view of straight talk.
I was too young and politically clueless to notice at the time, but I was covered because our business was growing by leaps and bounds.*
If we had the guts to be candid, it didn’t feel that way at the time—we didn’t know enough to know what candor was. It just felt natural to us to speak openly, argue and debate, and get things to happen fast. If we were anything, it was crazily competitive.
Every time I got promoted, the first cycle of reviews—be it budgets or appraisals—was often awkward and unpleasant. Most of the new team I was managing wasn’t used to wide-open discussions about everything and anything. For example, we’d be talking about a direct report at a personnel review, and in conversation, we would agree that the guy was really awful. His written appraisal, however, made him look like a prince. When I challenged the phoniness, I’d hear, “Yeah, yeah, but why would we ever put that in writing?”
I’d explain why, making the case