“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 James Stockdale
Have you ever overreacted to some bad news from your team?
Have you ever hesitated to tell the whole truth to a manager for fear of overreaction?
If you’re a leader at any level, and you are overreacting to bad news, your team’s behavior will change. They will start sugarcoating the news, stop bringing you problems or manipulate the truth to keep you happy. Remember The Emperor’s New Clothes?
Look, no one is perfect, and we all have our moments.
But as leaders, we can’t mentor, manage or improve our teams if we don’t have the truth about our problems. Personnel, finance, marketing, win rates, etc., whatever your department, company or team KPIs are…YOU WANT THE TRUTH.
More importantly, you want to encourage a culture and system that allows the truth, and the issues, to bubble up to you quickly.
With the truth (the facts), we are able to adjust the plan, resources or schedule. We get to mitigate risk, communicate to the client and engage stakeholders. We get to manage expectations.
We get to lead!
As the saying goes, bad news doesn’t get better with time. So, the better our communication and the more open we are to bad news, the earlier we get to intervene.
BJ Kraemer, President
P.S. – I WANT THE TRUTH. Our team tells me we have great content. Our podcasts are getting better, and our KPIs are improving. I’m not looking for instant gratification, but I do want to know that we are giving you content worthy of your time (and your inbox). Would you do us a favor and fill out our survey?