Candour is a touchstone you, as a leader, can use to build good relationships at work.What exactly is candour? Some people believe that candour is “always telling the truth.” Certainly, telling the truth is an essential part of candour, but there’s more to it than that. The quality we attribute to candour is the quality of being open, honest and straight-forward in attitude and speech. It is also the ability to be free from bias and be fair and impartial in any action.
When you are the leader, these qualities allow you to fulfil your responsibilities as a true leader. And candour is also the way that you approach feedback, team-building, and achieving results that will strengthen – or destroy – your relationships with others.
Culture of feedback
When you solicit feedback, it’s useful to prepare your questions in advance, because it’s awkward to ask for feedback later.
Ask a question that feels natural, such as “Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me.” Once you’ve asked your question, you’re going to have to endure a minute’s silence because nobody wants to jump the gun without thinking over twice. The key here is to wait and wait.
Almost nobody can endure that much silence. One will begin responding. The most important rule for you is not to defensive. Listen with the intent to understand, not to reply. And reward the candour of the team member. Fix the issue addressed if you agree. If you disagree, find some grain of truth in what you’ve been told, and promise to think about the rest. When you’ve had more time to think, get back to the person and explain why you disagree. Never run down the ream member in front of his colleagues.
Now that you are getting the feedback, start with praise, and remember to give more praise than criticism, but only if you sincerely mean what you say. Remember, both praise and criticism show that you care personally, and challenge directly. Praise should be specific and sincere. Criticism should be kind and clear.
If you can get everyone on your team giving and getting feedback, you’ll improve results and relationships on your team. The most important thing here is simply this – don’t talk badly about people behind their back, and don’t listen to back-stabbing. Encourage people to talk directly. If they can’t work it out, you can help mediate, but make sure you’re always talking to both people at the same time.
Build a cohesive team
It’s important to show you care personally and to be willing to challenge directly with feedback, because people’s feelings are on the line. But when you’re building a team and it’s not just their feelings but their promotion or bonus on the line, it matters even more.
Taking the time to learn people’s life stories will help you understand who they are. Asking them about their dreams of the future will help you understand what they really want out of their careers. Doing these things not only helps show you care and deepens your relationship. It also will help you know what projects and roles to assign to whom. You’ll make better promotion decisions when you know who wants growth and who wants stability.
Achieve results collaboratively
Telling people what to do doesn’t work. You want to get “it” done, but you can’t just start by doing stuff. How can you maximize the collaboration dividend? How can you execute in a way that shows you care about the people as well as the results, but also challenges the team to deliver astounding performance?
Start by listening. Sir Jonathan Paul Ive, Chief Design Officer of Apple said a leader’s job is to “give the quiet ones a voice.” It’s certainly not to be the vicious tyrant.
When you’ve listened to people, help them clarify their ideas. New ideas are fragile, and you want to help your team nurture them. Having nurtured your team’s thinking, you then need to make sure to subject them to debate. This will polish your team’s work. Your job is to make sure decisions get made, usually by others on your team, who are closer to the facts. The less often you are the decider, the more decision-making power you’ll build on your team.
Once a decision has been made, it’s your job to ensure others who matter are brought along, are persuaded that it’s the right thing to do. You won’t get quality execution without buy-in.
Now, finally, it’s time to execute, to get “it” done. The key thing in all the steps leading up to this is not to skip any, but also not to get stuck at any. Having executed, you’re now ready for the hardest part – learning whether what you decided to do was in fact the right thing.
You’ve got to learn, and start listening all over again.If you can approach feedback, team and results with radical candour, you and everyone on your team will do the best work of their lives and form the closest relationships of their career.
Tips
Organizational leaders have long recognized that candour from employees can pay huge dividends in making improvements, serving customers, creating more innovative solutions and expediting organizational learning, flexibility and execution.
Here are 9 tips that you can implement immediately to encourage a more open, collaborative atmosphere.
1. Invite perspective.
By taking the time to ask others to share their perspective, you are demonstrating that their ideas matter. Too often we focus more on completion than we do on contribution and collaboration to create the best result. Recognize that people may not have had positive experiences with this type of interaction previously. It may take time for your team to come to believe that you are sincerely interested in what they have to say.
2. Be patient.
If people don’t or won’t engage with you, be patient. Change takes time. Allow people to see for themselves that you truly are interested in their ideas and experience. Some people are hesitant to share things in front of others for fear of looking foolish. Others won’t share their thoughts without personally being invited to speak. Keep asking questions and eventually people will get the message that you really want to hear from them.
3. Listen for what’s important.
Once you get people talking, listen to them. Sometimes people have negative things to say, or they may complain about what they don’t like. Rather than focusing on people’s negativity, ask yourself, what is important to them?If you take the time to really listen and try to determine what they value, you will hear something in their message you have never heard before.
4. Don’t push your point of view.
If you are sharing an idea and you begin to experience resistance, quit pushing your point of view and ask questions. When people are resistant to your ideas, it is often because they have a perspective that they may think is being excluded. Perhaps they are testing or exploring your idea in the context of their own thinking.
5. Take your time.
When holding difficult conversations on tough topics, take the time to share perspectives and create mutual understanding. These types of conversations often take more time than you might expect. Don’t be in a hurry to get it over with. Being preoccupied with other issues and not being present will send the message that the person and their ideas are not important.
6. Gently challenge negative projections.
When heated conversations progress, listen for people to make wild assumptions or even negative projections about the future. This catastrophizing tactic is often used to avoid talking about an issue in depth. When this occurs, listen for facts or data that would support a person’s point of view. If you don’t hear any evidence that backs a person’s perspective, ask for it. People often base their thinking on experience or current concerns. Seek to uncover the reasoning behind their thinking to more effectively understand their perspective.
7. Do not assume anything.
Don’t assume that a person has understood you even though you think that you have clearly explained your position or given clear direction. Summarize what you think they have heard and ask them to confirm or disconfirm your perspective. Don’t be afraid to ask for examples or applications to ensure that you have understood them or that they have understood you..
8. Offer support.
If in the course of your conversation you find that a person is struggling with something, don’t hesitate to offer support or encouragement. You might even ask if there is something you can do to assist the individual. Too often we become consumed with our own work and isolate ourselves, to the detriment of others. Look for opportunities to use your expertise to support and help others.
9. Thank them for sharing.
If you ask people to share their perspective or invite them to push back and dis-confirm your point of view, always thank those who have the courage to do so. When others are willing to disagree with us, we should take that disagreement as an opportunity to learn something that is outside our perspective. Unfortunately, we often counter resistance with resistance, rather than trying to create and achieve understanding.
(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired company director with over 30 years’ experience in senior business management. Presently he is a business consultant, freelance newspaper columnist and a writer.)
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