Straight Talk
The world is overflowing with bullshit.
It’s everywhere. Deceit spills from the flaming media dumpster. Misinformation floods the online environment. Inured to lies, we scarcely raise an eyebrow to them anymore. Fraud seeps from every crack and seam in the surface of life.
I’m not just talking about public life.
Work life is just as bad. The decrepit virus of bureaucracy has infested every corner of the professional universe. Corporate gobbledygook previously reserved as the official dialect of the clown suite has descended into the corpus of the common workplace. Like a gangrenous infection, its clammy blackness progressively darkens everything it rots, replacing the joy and vitality of work with creeping dread.
Ok, maybe I’m vamping a little.
But let’s just be honest with ourselves: dishonesty has gone from being novel to being normal.
Which means honesty has gone from normal to novel. And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
These days, talking straight and building genuine trust relationships can really set you apart as a leader. And it’ll make you and your team magnitudes more effective.
To understand what I mean by talking straight, let’s consider some contrasting examples of counterfeit behavior.
In the spring of 2012, I was due for an annual performance report. Actually, it was many months overdue for reasons of administrative buggery. I’ll save that digression for later.
Having had a sneak peek, I knew I’d been given a high rating among peers. And this made sense. The unit I commanded had been dominant, recognized as the best of four in our wing the prior year. Gratuitous photo.
Between seeing that draft and being given the final copy, I announced my intent to retire in early 2013.
And when the final version came to me for signature, the high rating was gone. To make the report consistent with its removal, the language was also toned down, from Chuck Norris to Charlie Brown. And when I challenged, my chain of command hid behind “what you saw was a draft” and “this is still a very strong report.”
All I wanted was honesty. As a realist, I expected my report would suffer from my decision to retire. I had made my peace with it. But I wanted someone to acknowledge that my rating among peers was being given to someone else who wasn’t retiring, as a matter of pragmatism.
This is an example of withholding information. It gives those doing it the latitude to select an option without being accountable for it. Because if someone doesn’t know the true reason for a thing, they can’t challenge it.
In 2015, the Air Force responded to plummeting public opinion of its F-35 acquisition program by issuing its commanders with an 8-page internal memo telling them exactly what to say to advocate for it. I wrote about it at the time.
Here’s an excerpt.
At that time, critics of the program warned that the expensive aircraft would not be able to perform the missions promised by the Air Force, and that reliability issues baked into its design would make it a dubious replacement for existing platforms.
Nine years later, the F-35 has separated Americans from $1.7T of their tax dollars and is only able to perform its role 30% of the time. It’s a decade overdue and hundreds of billions over budget.
And this has been allowed to happen because of spin. The Air Force used spin to misrepresent the health and costs of the project, successfully shielding it from the valid criticism it needed to get back on track.
During my time at Amazon, the company responded to a bumpy few months of share price by cutting operations teams and support staffs without discussion.
It wasn’t called “layoffs” or “firing people” or “dismissals.” It was called “restructuring.”
What a joke. Bigger words that remove the blunt force trauma of their meaning are examples of corporate doublespeak.
At an earlier moment in my Amazon journey, we were growing faster than we could populate new business units. This resulted in people needing to fill gaps in coverage to keep performance in a good place.
Many in our Team Lead population played a crucial role during this time. Team Leads are like foremen; senior frontline employees with added responsibility who know the business cold and support managers with execution.
When we were thin on the ground, many Team Leads stepped up to temporarily fill management positions, optimistic that if they performed well on a probationary basis they’d be permitted to compete for a permanent managerial role. This had been the prior Amazon policy.
And then, it wasn’t. An autocrat somewhere in the executive layer of the company decided Team Leads without university degrees would no longer be able to compete, regardless of their performance as interim managers over peak season.
But this new edict wasn’t communicated until after peak season was done and those impacted had been hoodwinked into giving more of their time and effort over the holidays in the false hope of advancement.
This is an example of manipulation. When the change was known, it should have been shared instantly. If that would have been bad for business, then the change itself was too. Falling back on “we didn’t promise them anything” just compounds the dishonesty.
This is some shady shit … an inference or two removed from stopping someone’s pay and letting them continue working for free until they notice.
Positioning also happens. Like forcing people to endure training they don’t need so if anything happens later, your ass is covered.
Or denying someone opportunities so you can assess them as under-delivering against expectations in the next talent review. They’re in a doom loop and don’t even know it.
And then there’s posturing. Like when the FAA conducts a “blue ribbon panel” to review airworthiness issues with the 737 MAX, changing nothing while looking busy. Years later, to no one’s surprise, the aircraft is still sufficiently troubled that doors are falling off in flight and former Boeing managers are refusing to fly on it.
See also:
Finally, there’s tactical deniability. This is when someone avoids information they suspect will force them into inconvenient honesty. Like when the Air Force’s morale survey got kicked into the tall weeds, preserving Gen. Mark Welsh’s latitude to deceive Congress into perceiving Air Force morale as “pretty darn good.” A mountain of evidence then and now exposes this as pure, uncut bullshit. Most notably, an entrenched pilot shortage created by Welsh’s refusal to confront morale issues in his service.
Now let’s imagine we live in a more honest world. A world of straight talk.
Instead of withholding:
“Tony, we’ve decided to remove the peer stratification from your report. With you retiring, it makes sense to give it to someone who is staying and also performed at a similarly strong level.”
Instead of spin:
“We have some problems with the F-35. It’s over budget. Its capabilities don’t fully solve for some existing weapon systems, and we need to work through that. But we still believe it’s the right platform to serve as nucleus of the future fleet. Let’s talk about it.”
Instead of doublespeak:
“There’s no easy way to say this: we’re going to dismiss some people. Here’s why.”
Instead of manipulation:
“We’re moving to a model of requiring all managers to have degrees. Here’s why we’re doing that. There are still good reasons to take an interim manager role, but it won’t lead to a promotion unless you have a degree.”
Each of these examples places limits on the organization and its leaders. Being transparent invites challenge. Providing rationale might require a defense of it. Explaining can expose inconvenient facts, like the fact a policy is based on a unilateral edict from an executive based on their personal view.
But if it’s true, why hide it? If they believe in their decision, let them defend it against those directly impacted.
Being honest gives people information that could translate into situational bargaining power. This in turn could incur marginal cost penalties when they successfully argue for a better outcome.
But here’s the thing.
That’s all fine. In fact, it’s essential.
The best people, the best leaders, the best organizations … are self-limiting. They recognize that being too flexible means you have no shape.
Lying, in its various forms, gives us latitude we shouldn’t have. When we don’t lie to ourselves and others, we are forced into clarity and precision. What we deliver improves.
And not only that. With straight talk comes the possibility of trust. When we have trust in our teams, we can move faster, encumbered by a lot less process and structure.
Shared values, intent, and mutual trust are what distinguish great teams. Without trust, performance is hard-capped at mediocre.
I’ve provided bad examples, but it’s the great ones I saw early in my career that have always stuck with me. In fact, it’s likely that my coming of age in an Air Force wedded to integrity as its signal value meant I spent formative years surrounded by leaders who were promoted for their honesty and straight talk.
But as much as honesty has suffered across the board in the years since, the good news is that it now emerges as a key leadership differentiator.
We needn’t wait for society, law, politics, business culture, or influencers to show us the way. Leaders just need to start pushing more honesty into their own working environments as best they can.
Try deliberately maximizing the use of these three phrases:
“These are the facts.”
“Here’s my candid view of the situation.”
“This is why we’re doing this.”
Every time you stick to these and it creates discomfort, that’s the feeling of you filtering bullshit out of your engagements with your team.
The more you talk straight, the more trust will take hold. At some point, you’ll fly out of the clouds and into clear airspace.
And you’ll truly soar as a leader and team.
TC is an independent writer, speaker, and consultant on leadership. He is based in Manchester, UK.
Thanks, Tony. It would be good to talk sometime. I am now an Army (!) Brigade Commander in the SC State Guard. The things you wrote on plague me daily.