Speak truth to Power
You. Hello, everybody. Today I was curious to hear your thoughts on how important you think it is for a leader to be able to have critical conversations. Sort of this idea of speaking truth when you know it's not going to be popular and there's a risk. How important is it for leaders to have these types of conversations? And maybe even more importantly, how would you develop that or train that to our rising professionals?
But through the decision making process there can be a lot of very trying and challenging understandings and decisions to be had and to be made. So I think that although I agree that honesty is the best policy and most times I think that being too quick to share can be very harmful if you are a leader, whether you're representing a people or a country or just an organization or a group
And if we don't talk about those things in a timely way, it will materially impact the person and or the team's ability to meet their commitments right, achieve their goals. So I believe leaders at all levels need to know how to, in a savvy, appropriate way speak the truth about a situation with as much fact and the right level of emotion to create appropriate urgency around the problem. I just said a lot there. That's why I don't think this is a simple idea
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And if it doesn't, then we need to reevaluate these things. So I think having those mission statements or those goals that people know what's really important and how to move on from there. And one final thought
Timing. I don't know all the ins and outs of this because I haven't thought much through it, but I think I was listening to one of Seth Godin's podcast episodes recently and he was talking about how some leaders like to come in near the end of a process and say, oh, well, this is all wrong. We can't continue because of whatever factor it is. Right
You. Wow. Everybody, thank you so much for this sort of robust discussion. But what I think I heard everybody say is that truth needs to be well timed and well contained so that it can be heard. And that the ability to speak truth to power may not be something that's trainable, but you're either born with it or not. And I tend to actually agree with that. There's got to be something innate in you that has a willingness to make that truth come out