The Truth Is, the Truth Hurts

The Bible says, "The truth shall make you free." Witnesses in court proceedings swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." So why is candor in business still so rare? Telling the truth means many different things: delivering bad news to the boss; giving a negative performance review to a subordinate; disagreeing publicly with a colleague. But most people think it means something else - risking your future. In a survey of 40,000 Americans, 93% admitted to lying regularly at work. Of course, for leaders, the flip side of telling the truth is hearing the truth. How can you make the right decision if you can't get accurate information and honest opinions? Fast Company asked 11 plainspoken business leaders to provide advice and techniques to help people tell - and hear - the truth.

Jim McCann
President
1-800-FLOWERS
Westbury, New York
jim@1800flowers.com

Truth is about actions as well as words. General Electric CEO Jack Welch taught me that lesson a few years ago. I had to fire a senior person in the company. Everyone knew he wasn't right for the job. Everyone knew I wasn't dealing with the problem. But this guy was a friend. I'd spent time with his family. It's never easy to fire someone, but in this case, it was brutal.

I met Welch at a dinner party and told him about my situation. His response? "When was the last time anyone said, 'I wish I had waited six months longer to fire that guy'? Always err on the side of speed." The look in his eye told me that he had learned this lesson in the school of hard knocks. It motivated me to deal with the situation a few days later. It hurt - but I felt such relief. The pain soon went away. And now my friendship with my former colleague is back on track. It was the right decision for everyone.

Of course, words count too. My first rule of communication - whether it's an email, a memo, or a half-day briefing - is "Tell me in the first sentence what you would have told me in the last sentence." So much of corporate life is about spinning the facts. I don't want to be spun. That simple rule helps stop the spin.

People from our ad agencies understand this principle. When they come in to deliver a 34-slide presentation, they don't wait 'til the end to get to the punchline. "Do you have a final summary slide?" I'll ask. If they say yes, I insist on seeing this slide first. Then we go back and look at the details.

Jim McCann bought 1-800-FLOWERS in 1987, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. It is now the world's largest florist.

Chuck House
Executive Vice President
Dialogic Corp.
Parsippany, New Jersey
c.house@dialogic.com

What everyone wants to know is, Can I tell the truth without jeopardizing my career? My honest answer is, you never know until you try.

Three decades ago, as a naive young engineer at Hewlett-Packard, I persisted in championing an idea despite opposition. I came away from the whole experience with a motto: "Come to work each day willing to be fired." David Packard awarded me a "Medal of Defiance" for my efforts. I became something of an icon of truth-telling at HP.

Which is why I found it so striking that as my career moved forward - first inside HP and then beyond - the truth became harder to come by. The further up I was promoted, the less my former colleagues trusted me. I was now one of "them," and "they" never tell the truth. And in fact, my fellow "thems" expected me to become less candid and more polished - to be realistic about "the compromises we make at this level." What most disappointed me, though, was that I stopped hearing the truth. People who had once told me everything assumed that I couldn't be trusted anymore.

Over the years, I've thought a lot about how to maintain enough trust and honest communication to keep organizations flexible. I would make three simple points:

Maintain an informal network. Use this network as a source of authentic feedback. Hold it up as a mirror to yourself.

Find gentle ways to discuss hard truths. Leaders don't always face pleasant choices. Find nonthreatening techniques (one of my favorites is scenario analysis) to sort through the options.

In the end, just do it. People respect decisive leadership, even when they disagree with a particular course of action. The more that you show a bias for action, the more likely the people around you will be to tell you the truth.

Chuck House spent nearly 30 years at Hewlett-Packard, where he was the company's first corporate engineering director. His second career involves working with software startups. He is also president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Michael Wheeler
Professor of Management
Harvard Business School
Boston, Massachusetts
mwheeler@hbs.harvard.edu