I’ve never known a person who didn’t light up at the memory of a truly great boss. And for good reason: great bosses can be friends, teachers, coaches, allies, and sources of inspiration all in one. They can shape and advance your career in ways you never expected—and sometimes they can even change your life.

In stark contrast, a bad boss can just about kill you.

Not literally of course, but a bad boss can kill that part of your soul where positive energy, commitment, and hope come from. On a daily basis, a bad boss can leave you feeling angry, hurt, and bitter—even physically ill.

If you’re like most people, over the course of a forty-something-year career, you will have a handful of great bosses, many more that are pretty good, and one or two total jerks—people who are so consistently awful they make you want to throw it in and quit.

Bad bosses come in every variety. Some grab all the credit, some are incompetent, some kiss up but kick down; others bully and humiliate, have mood swings, withhold praise and money, break promises, or play favorites.
Occasionally, there are bad bosses who display several of these characteristics all at once.
How do these people ever get ahead?

Well, sometimes they happen to be very talented. They deliver the numbers or they’re extremely creative. They can have shrewd political alliances or maybe even a family member in high places.

Bad bosses, incidentally, tend to have longer lives in some industries rather than others. Top moneymakers are often thought of as irreplaceable, and they know it, making some of them even more insufferable.

The world has jerks. Some of them get to be bosses.

In any bad boss situation, you cannot let yourself be a victim.
I realize that a bad boss may make you want to bitch and moan to your coworkers, whine to your family, punch a wall, or watch too much TV with a drink in your hand. He/she may make you want to surf the Web or call headhunters, looking for jobs anywhere but where you are.
All in all, he/she may end up making you want to feel very sorry for yourself.

Don’t!

In any business situation, seeing yourself as a victim is completely self-defeating. And when it comes to your career, it’s an attitude that kills all your options—it can even be the start of a career death spiral. I have and know off people who bounced from one crummy job to another after a falling out with his bad boss and quit in a huff. Out in the market, with no recommendations, all you have was an “I was screwed” story of woe to tell prospective employers.

Obviously, you shouldn’t always stay with a bad boss. Sometimes you need to get out. Regardless of your decision, avoid the pervasive victim mentality. You know what I mean. We live in a culture where parents sue fast-food restaurants for making their kids fat and cities spend millions of dollars a year to settle claims for injuries caused by uneven sidewalks and potholes.

Please!

Like every other unfortunate or unfair event that befalls you in life, working for a difficult boss is your problem and you must solve it.

To do that, ask yourself the following series of questions. The answers will help you navigate what is undeniably a painful situation. Painful—but yours to accept, fix, or end.

The first question is:

Why is my boss acting like a jerk? Sometimes the answer to this question is a no-brainer. Your boss is acting like a jerk because that’s the way he/she is. He may be fine with customers and fairly reasonable with his own bosses and peers, but he treats everyone below him with the same kind of bad behavior—be it in the form of intimidation, belligerence, arrogance, neglect, secrecy, or sarcasm.

It is an entirely different situation if your boss is just impossible toward you.

In that case, you need to start asking yourself what you have done to draw his disapproval. That’s right—you need to ask yourself if you are the cause of your boss’s behavior. Generally speaking, bosses are not awful to people whom they like, respect, and need. If your boss is being negative to you—and mainly you—you can feel pretty confident that he has his version of events, and his version concerns your attitude or performance.

You’ve got to find out what’s going on.

Start by asking yourself that question, but know that self-assessment is difficult, to put it mildly. Even with a huge amount of maturity and a cast-iron stomach, it is hard to see yourself as others do.

As you conduct what is an admittedly difficult “mirror test.” Think hard about your performance, and press yourself for the ways you may have fallen short. Think about why your colleagues might not consider you a team player. In a state of forced self-loathing, gauge your personal productivity, your face time in the office, your contribution to sales and earnings. Maybe you open a lot of deals but never close them. Maybe you close a lot of deals but boast too much. Maybe people weren’t really “OK with it” when you blew a big account a few months back.

Finally, face into your attitude toward authority, because it just might be that the source of your problem with your boss is that you are, at your core, a boss hater.

Boss haters are a real breed. It doesn’t make any difference who these people work for, they go into any authority relationship with barely repressed cynicism. Who knows why—upbringing, experiences at work or home, political bent. It doesn’t really matter. Boss haters usually exude constant low-level negativity toward “the system,” and when they do, their bosses feel it, and they return the favor.

Maybe you’re comfortable with authority, and the rest of your self-examination has you coming up empty-handed too. Now what?

It’s time to find out what your boss is thinking.
Any kind of confrontation, however, is incredibly risky. Your boss may be waiting for just such a moment to dump you. In fact, he may have been hoping his negative vibes would eventually inch you into his office with the question, “So what am I doing wrong?” so that he can answer, “Too much for this to go on any longer.”

Still, you have to talk. There is no way around it. Just remember, before you go into that meeting, be prepared and have options in the event that you come out of it unemployed.

Then, go do it. Don’t be defensive. Remember, your goal is to uncover something your boss has not been able to explicitly tell you for whatever reason. Maybe he’s conflict averse or he’s just been too busy. Regardless, your objective is to extract from him the problem he has with your attitude or performance.

If you’re lucky, your boss will come clean about your shortcomings, and together, you can work on a plan to correct them and get your performance or attitude back on track. Ideally, as you give it your all to improve, his attitude toward you will as well.

Ironically, you are less lucky if you find out that your bad boss is satisfied with your performance. If that’s the case, he is being awful simply because he doesn’t particularly like you.

Which puts you in the same position as the people who work for bad bosses who act the same way…just because that’s the way they are.

For all of you, the next question is:

What’s the endgame for my boss? Sometimes it’s obvious that a bad boss is on the way out. His own bosses have signaled as much to the organization; or he himself makes it clear he can’t wait to move on. In either case, survival is just a waiting game. Deliver strong results and have a can-do approach until relief arrives.

You are in a different boat if your bad boss is not going anywhere anytime soon.

You may not work at a company that lets a bad boss hang around until a mess erupts. But it’s possible great numbers will keep your bad boss around indefinitely.

If you feel that’s the case, your next question should be:

What will happen to me if I deliver results and endure my bad boss? If you think that your organization, and in particular your boss’s boss or someone in HR, understands your bind and sympathizes, you should feel pretty confident that eventually you will be moved up or sideways as a reward for surviving. While you’re waiting, hang in there and give the job your all.

But be careful. Uncertainty about the final outcome can make you do something foolish—that is, pull an end run. You may feel the impulse to sneak upstairs and talk to your boss’s boss about the situation. That can be suicide. About 90 percent of the time, complaining about a bad boss to his boss circles right around to bite you on the rear. The big boss may have your best interests at heart when he scolds your boss for his behavior, but you can be absolutely sure that your life will only become more unpleasant afterward. There is a reason why kids don’t tattle on bullies. Unfortunately, the same principle applies in the office.

There will always be an element of uncertainty to enduring a bad boss. You may surmise a happy ending or be promised one. But there are very few guarantees. All you know for certain in this kind of situation is that going to work every day isn’t fun.

Which is why you need to ask the following:

Why do I work here anyway? It is rare for a job to be perfect in every way. Sometimes you stay in a job for the money or the friends; sometimes you give up money and friends for the love of the work itself or the job’s location or its lack of travel. Sometimes you stay in a job because the company has so much prestige, you know it will help you get a new job once you have a few more years of experience under your belt.

When you find yourself in a situation with a bad boss that isn’t going to change anytime soon, you need to assess your trade-offs and ask, “Are they worth it?”

If the answer to this question is no, then start constructing an exit plan that gets you out the door with as little damage as possible.
On the other hand, if your boss situation offers some kind of long-term benefit that you understand and accept, you really have no choice. Focus on why you are staying, and put your bad boss in perspective. He/she isn’t everything in your life—he is the one downside of a career or life deal you have made with yourself.

More than anything else, come to grips with the fact that you are staying with a bad boss by choice. That means you’ve forfeited your right to complain.

You can’t consider yourself a victim anymore.
When you own your choices, you own their consequences.

In a perfect world, all bosses would be perfect.
That happens so infrequently that entire movies and books are written about bad bosses, not to mention lots of country-and-western songs.

When you get a bad boss, first find out if you are the problem. That’s not easy, but in many cases, a bad boss is just a disappointed one.

If you’re convinced you aren’t the problem, ask yourself if your company is likely to keep a bad boss with good results. If the answer is yes, the only thing left to do is look at the trade-offs you are willing to make. Is your job worth the price of enduring a bad boss? If so, put up and shut up, to put a twist on the old saying.

If the trade-off is not worth it, leave gracefully.

And as you start your next job, remember exactly what made the bad boss bad and how it made you feel—so that when the time comes for you to be a boss, you won’t do the same.

A leaders unending responsibility must be to remove every detour, every barrier to ensure that the vision is first clear and then real. The leaders must create a atmosphere in the organization where people feel not only free to, but obliged to, demand clarity and purpose from their leader.

Simplicity is an indispensable element of a leaders most important functions: Projecting a vision and demanding and rewarding boldness.. speed.. and passion.. as his or her people move closer to it.

Don't think that "this is not my job, this is the job of my boss, or my bosses boss," this is the responsibility of every leader within a organization that has front line people reporting to them.

If your not serving the customer, you should be serving someone who is serving a customer.

leadership law number 4. If your not fired with passion and enthusiasm, you will be fired with passion and enthusiasm.

People who are dedicated to a cause commit to it. If your a athlete you set the alarm for 5am, training takes place no matter what the weather, you push aside excuses for your dream to achieve your goals. You make sacrifices with a long term vision in mind.

If this all sound to hard then you probably dont have a strong enough dream. If staying in bed for a extra few hours is more enticing than your dream, than maybe your dream is to be who you are.

The same commitment that a athlete makes to achieving their goals is what a leader must make to continuous learning, development & improvement. We must train our brains each day with the same focus and dedication.

To be good at anything takes practice, motivation and dedication. We must reflect on what we have achieved and measure our success. To be great takes a even stronger commitment.

Turn the TV off. Set your alarm for a few hours earlier and commit to your goals. Put in place a strategy to achieve the goals, implement a plan and take action each day. Follow the GOSPA to greatness. http://www.whamond.net/4/category/gospa/1.html

It takes enormous self-confidence to be simple particularly in a large organization. Self-confidence does not grow in someone who is just another appendage on the bureaucracy, whose authority rests on little more than a title.

Bureaucracy is terrified by speed and hates simplicity. It fosters defensiveness, intrigue, sometimes meanness. Those who are trapped in it are afraid to share, cant be passionate, and eventually will fail.

Tap into the creative minds of everyone not just the group of managers. A employer once said "You paid for my hands over the past 20 years, you could have had my mind for free over the same time".

Create a environment and culture where you can listen more clearly to the idea's from the people on the front line. Liberate your workforce and give them the power to have a say. This is done through:

1. Developing trust.
• An employee should feel comfortable speaking to the boss.
• They would have the ability to speak frankly without worry about being dismissed or having career stunting ramifications.
• Candor would permit the company to benefit from the knowledge and idea's contained inside the heads of every employee.

2. Empower Employees.
• Those closest to the work and customers are more knowledgeable about it than their bosses.
•The single best way of having these workers pass on that knowledge to their supervisors was to give them more power.
• In exchange for the power, an employee would expect to assume more responsibility in  there job.

3.Eliminating unnecessary work.
• Higher productivity is a critical goal.
• So too, however, is jettisoning tasks that no one can justify.
• Getting rid of those tasks would provide employees with some fast, understandable dividends from the open candor.

4. Spreading the culture.
• An open candor policy would, once it is adopted throughout the company, help it defining and fostering the new business culture. A culture that has no boundaries and has its workers seeking speed, simplicity and self-confidence.

As you take down much of the clutter and scaffolding of layers and organizational structure, and get rid of the useless bureaucracy always generated, you can start to see deeper into the organization, and hear the voices of those who actually did the work, ran the processes and dealt with the customers.

Open candor central objective is growing culture where everyone's idea's have value, everyone plays a part in the success of the organization. Where leaders lead rather than control. they coach rather than Kibitz.

Open candor is the process of mining the creativity and productivity that we know resides within out organization.

The way to harness the power of your people is to protect them, not sit on them, but turn them loose, let them go. Get the management layers off their backs, the bureaucratic shackles off their feet and the function barriers out of their way.. Empower your people to be the best managers they know how, self managed.

Managing less is managing more..

One thing is certain. You need stars to win, and I have always advocated identifying your stars—that top 20 percent—and stroking and rewarding them in an outsize way.

But stroking can backfire. A star’s ego can be a dangerous thing.

I’ve seen talented young people promoted too quickly and their ambition spin out of control. I’ve seen smart, capable individuals come to believe they are so indispensable that they should not be bound by anything, including the company’s values.

Stars can become monsters if you let them.

That’s why someone has to be on the lookout, namely the star’s boss, with support from HR. This job cannot fall through the cracks. The minute a star seems to be getting arrogant or out of control, someone has to call the person in to have a candid conversation about values and behaviors. You can never be afraid of your stars; they can’t hold a company hostage.

Now, sometimes stars surprise you and up and leave. That can be a defining moment. Ideally, the star will be replaced within eight hours. That’s right, eight hours. This immediate reaction sends the message to the organization that no one is indispensable. It shouts out that no single individual is bigger than the company.

The only way to be able to replace a star swiftly is to have great people on your bench. That’s where good evaluation systems come in, in particular, career development planning. That process can surface one or two in-house candidates to replace any star who departs.

Just don’t wait until the star leaves to start the replacement process. By then it’s too late to make the point.

Change in business nowadays is inevitable. New products come to market that your customer look more favorably on. New competition moves into your area, Your customers needs and requirements change and not in your favor.

For some people its hard to let go of the old practices, the old ways "this is the way its been done for years" "there is still value in this ABC product, we just need to re train our sales staff".

Sure change for change sake is stupid and I'm not advocating this, but I do feel that a lot of organizations today miss the boat. In some cases the boat has not only left the dock, its left the harbor.

The key to staying focused on what you need to change is to listen to what your customers are saying. Don't just get the information second hand, get out there and feel the waters. Don't ask to be taken out to see your top customers, see a good spread, the happy, the unhappy, the disillusioned and the down right angry. hear what they all have to say.

Once you know the direction that you need to move in, do it quickly.

Communicate the vision to everyone. get everyone on board, Create a culture of change.

Communication about change does get a lot more challenging as a company gets larger. It’s one thing if you are the owner of a two-hundred-person machine tool company to walk into work one day, call a meeting, and say, “OK, everyone, I just got back from a sales trip, and guess what, we’ve got brutal competition from a really innovative new company in Hungary. Things are going to have to change around here.” It’s another thing entirely to make the case for change to a company with a hundred thousand people in multiple business units in multiple countries.

In big companies, calls for change are often greeted with a nice head fake. People nod at your presentations and pleasantly agree that given all the data, it sure looks like change is necessary. Then they go back to doing everything they always did. If the company has been through enough change programs, employees consider you like gas pains. You’ll go away if they just wait long enough.

This pervasive skepticism is all the more reason that anyone leading a change process must stay far away from empty slogans and instead stick to a solid, persuasive business case.

Become a change agent, if you cant then find some one who is a true change agent and employ them to work with you on the change's you see.

A Change agent are the true believers who champion change, know how to make it happen, and love every second of the process. They’re typically brash, high-energy, and more than a little bit paranoid about the future. Very often, they invent change initiatives on their own or ask to lead them. Invariably, they are curious and forward-looking. They ask a lot of questions that start with the phrase “Why don’t we…?”

These people have courage—a certain fearlessness about the unknown. Something in them makes it OK to operate without a safety net. If they fail, they know they can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on. They’re thick-skinned about risk, which allows them to make bold decisions without a lot of data.

If this is not you, then find a person who is and sit them next to you in the organization. These people will be your mentor and advisory, your energizer and visionary during the change process.

Next you must start to uncover and remove the "resisters". In every major change there is a core of people who absolutely will not accept change, no matter how good your case. Either their personalities just can’t take it, or they are so entrenched—emotionally, intellectually, or politically—in the way things are, they cannot see a way to make them better.

These people usually have to go, even if they are your star performers.

Maybe that sounds harsh, but you are doing no one a favor by keeping resisters in your organization. They foster an underground resistance and lower the morale of the people who support change. They waste their own time at a company where they don’t share the vision, and they should be encouraged to find one where they do. I have seen managers hold on to resisters because of a specific skill set or because they’ve been around for a long time.

Don’t!

Resisters only get more diehard and their followings more entrenched as time goes on. They are change killers; cut them off early.

A organizations mission and values, Everyone who is passionate about the organization should know them and live by them everyday. Do you know what your companies mission and values are and what they stand for?

I say that because these two terms have got to be among the most abstract, overused, misunderstood words in business.

Lots of companies have values but do they actually live by them or is it just a noble-sounding plaque that hangs in the foyer for when senior executives walk past they can feel good?

Too often, these exercises end with a set of generic platitudes that do nothing but leave employees directionless or cynical.

Who doesn’t know of a mission statement that reads something like, “XYZ Company values quality and service,” or, “Such-and-Such Company is customer-driven.” Tell me what company doesn’t value quality and service or focus on its customers! And who doesn’t know of a company that has spent countless hours in emotional debate only to come up with values that, despite the good intentions that went into them, sound as if they were plucked from an all-purpose list of virtues including “integrity, quality, excellence, service, and respect.” Give me a break—every decent company espouses these things! And frankly, integrity is just a ticket to the game. If you don’t have it in your bones, you shouldn’t be allowed on the field

By contrast, a good mission statement and a good set of values are so real they smack you in the face with their concreteness. The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.

Values are just behaviors—specific, nitty-gritty, and so descriptive they leave little to the imagination. People must be able to use them as marching orders because they are the how of the mission.

The executive team may come up with a first version, but it should be just that, a first version. Such a document should go out to be poked and probed by people all over an organization, over and over again. And the executive team has to go out of their way to be sure they’ve created an atmosphere where people feel it is their obligation to contribute.

Now, if you’re in a company where speaking up gets you whacked, this method of developing values just isn’t going to work. I understand that, and as long as you stay, you’re going to have to live with that generic plaque in the front hall.

But if you’re at a company that does welcome debate—and many do—shame on you if you don’t contribute to the process. If you want values and behaviors that you understand and can live with yourself, you have to make the case for them.

Example of strong values are:

•Never let profit center conflicts get in the way of doing what is right for the customer.

•Give customers a good, fair deal. Great customer relationships take time. Do not try to maximize short-term profits at the expense of building those enduring relationships.

•Always look for ways to make it easier to do business with us.

•Communicate daily with your customers. If they are talking to you, they can’t be talking to a competitor.

•Eliminate bureaucracy.

•Operations should be fast and simple.

•Value and respect each others time.

•We should know our business best, we dont need consultants to tell us what to do.

Clarity around values and behaviors is not much good unless it is backed up. To make values really mean something, companies have to reward the people who exhibit them and “punish” those who don’t.

It seems obvious, doesn’t it, that a company’s values should support its mission, but it’s amazingly easy for that not to be the case. A disconnect between the parts of a company’s framework probably is more a sin of omission than of commission, but it often happens.

Look, I realize that defining a good mission and developing the values that support it takes time and enormous commitment. There will be long, contentious meetings when you would rather go home. There will be e-mail debates when you wish you could just go do real work. There will be painful times when you have to say good-bye to people you really like who just do not get the mission or live its values. On days like those, you might wish your mission and values were vague and generic.

They can’t be.

Take the time. Spend the energy.

Make them real.. Good luck..

Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.

It’s a process that requires managers to assess their employees and separate them into three categories in terms of performance: top 20 percent, middle 70, and bottom 10. Then—and this is key—it requires managers to act on that distinction.

Some people feel that differentiation is "cruel and unfair" and they are right if its not done properly. Poor business allow differentiation to be corrupted by company policies and is just another way to separate the people who "Kiss the boss's rear" from those who dont.

It is true, without question, that at some companies, differentiation is corrupted by cronyism and favoritism. The top 20 percent are the boss’s head-nodders and buddies, and the bottom 10 percent are the outspoken types who ask difficult questions and challenge the status quo. The middle 70 are just ducking and getting by. That happens and it stinks, and it is a function of a leadership team lacking in brains or integrity or both.

The only good thing I can say about a merit-free system like this is that eventually it destroys itself. It collapses from its own weight or has to change. The results just won’t be good enough to sustain the enterprise.

Differentiation abuse can generally be prevented by a candid, clear-cut performance system, with defined expectations and goals and timelines, and a program of consistent appraisals.

You cant just impose differentiation overnight, this needs to take effect over time and a full understanding of it structure needs to be implemented. Managers who "abuse" the system need to be removed and made a example off.

Leadership quote number 4 from my Book Key Leadership "Stop putting personal preferences ahead of organizational effectiveness."

Look at the 4E' and P for understanding where your team's site in the 20-70-10.

The First E. Energy. The ability to Go Go Go. Do people look at this person and say "how do they have the time to do that stuff"?

The second E. Energize. The ability to get other people revved up. Can they energize a group, a project, a team, a region?

The third E. Edge. Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can—and will—analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.

Some of the smartest people I know have a real difficulty with edge. In every situation, they always saw too many options, which inhibited them from taking action. That indecisiveness kept their organizations in limbo.

The Forth E. Execute. The ability to get the job done.

And lastly P. Passion. Do they show passion.

Do you people pass the Acid test? Integrity, Intelligence, maturity.

Grade your people on the 4E's & P. ask yourself, "do they pass the Acid test?" If the answer is no, they belong in the bottom 10 and should be managed accordingly.

I'll say it again as this is the most important thing in Differentiation. Integrity. DO NOT let your personal opinions enter into the evaluations. You have a responsibility to the organization, the people within the organization, their families, the share holders and yourself to have the best people in the roles that can enhance the organizations effectiveness.

That's your job as a leader.

Evaluate yourself on the 4E's & P. Do you pass the Acid test??

WHAT LEADERS DO. Jack Welch Management Institute

•Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
•Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
•Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism.
•Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.
•Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls.
•Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action.
•Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting the example.
•Leaders celebrate.

Any organization that has managers can normally assess these managers into one of four area's for success or failure. they are:

The first type - Deliver on commitments - financial and otherwise and shares the organizations values. "His or her future is a easy call: onwards and upwards"

The second type - does not meet commitments and does not share the companies Values. "Not as pleasant a call but equally easy"

The third type - misses commitments but shares the values. "He or she should get a second chance, possibly in a different environment"

The Forth type - delivers on commitments but does not subscribe to the organizations values. This type of manager is the most difficult to deal with.

This is the individual who typically forces performance out of people rather than inspires it. The autocrat, the big shot, the tyrant. Too often people look the other way. Senior leaders tend to stick there heads in the sand and hope that things will change. Tolerated these type 4 managers because "they always deliver" - at least in the short term.

Perhaps this type of manager is more accepted in easier times, but in an environment where we must have every good idea from every man and woman in the organization, we cannot afford management styles that suppress and intimidate.

Weather a organization can convince and help these managers to change - recognizing how difficult that can be - or part company with them if they cannot - will b ethe ultimate test of the organization....

Ive always been a advocate for candor, speeking your mind (respectfully). Ive felt at times that I was wrong, that I needed to "Play the game", that you can get more flies with honey than vinigar. And their is a degree of truth to all of these. In my management and leadership code one of my top quotes is: "never let personal preferances get in the way of organizational effectiveness/effeciencies.

Recentally started reading Jack Welch Book "Winning"

This is what Jack Welch has to say about candor. This is from the greatest CEO the world has ever seen.

I have always been a huge proponent of candor. In fact, I talked it up to GE audiences for more than twenty years. But since retiring from GE, I have come to realize that I underestimated its rarity. In fact, I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business.

What a huge problem it is. Lack of candor basically blocks smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.

When you’ve got candor—and you’ll never completely get it,mind you—everything just operates faster and better.

Now, when I say “lack of candor” here, I’m not talking about malevolent dishonesty. I am talking about how too many people—too often—instinctively don’t express themselves with frankness.

They don’t communicate straightforwardly or put forth ideas looking to stimulate real debate. They just don’t open up. Instead they withhold comments or criticism.

They keep their mouths shut in order to make people feel better or to avoid conflict, and they sugarcoat bad news in order to maintain appearances. They keep things to themselves, hoarding information.

That’s all lack of candor, and it’s absolutely damaging.

And yet, lack of candor permeates almost every aspect of business.

In my travels over the past few years, I have heard stories from people at hundreds of different companies who describe the complete lack of candor they experience day to day, in every type of meeting, from budget and product reviews to strategy sessions. People talk about the bureaucracy, layers,politicking, and false politeness that lack of candor spawns. They ask how they can get their companies to be places where people put their views on the table,talk about the world realistically, and debate ideas from every angle.

Most often, I hear that lack of candor is missing from performance appraisals.

In fact, I hear about that so often that I always end up asking audiences for a show of hands to the question “How many of you have received an honest, straight-between-the-eyes feedback session in the last year, where you came out knowing exactly what you have to do to improve and where you stand in the organization?”

On a good day, I get 20 percent of the hands up. Most of the time, it iscloser to 10 percent.

Interestingly, when I turn the question around and ask the audience how often they’ve given an honest, candid appraisal to their people, thenumbers don’t improve much.

Forget outside competition when your own worst enemy is the way youcommunicate with one another internally!
THE CANDOR EFFECT

Let’s look at how candor leads to winning. There are three main ways.

First and foremost, candor gets more people in the conversation, and when you get more people in the conversation, to state the obvious, you get idea rich. By that, I mean many more ideas get surfaced, discussed, pulled apart,and improved. Instead of everyone shutting down, everyone opens up and learns.Any organization—or unit or team—that brings more people and their minds into the conversation has an immediate advantage.

Second, candor generates speed. When ideas are in everyone’s face,they can be debated rapidly, expanded and enhanced, and acted upon. That approach—surface, debate, improve, decide— isn’t just an advantage, it’s a necessity in a global marketplace. You can be sure that any upstart five-person enterprise down the street or in Shanghai or in Bangalore can move faster than you to begin with. Candor is one way to keep up.

Third, candor cuts costs—lots—although you’ll never be able to put a precise number on it. Just think of how it eliminates meaningless meetings and b.s. reports that confirm what everyone already knows. Think ofhow candor replaces fancy PowerPoint slides and mind-numbing presentations and boring off-site conclaves with real conversations, whether they’re about company strategy, a new product introduction, or someone’s performance.

Put all of its benefits and efficiencies together and you realize you justcan’t afford not to have candor.
SO WHY NOT?

Given the advantages of candor, you have to wonder, why don’t we have more of it?

Well, the problem starts young.

The facts are, we are socialized from childhood to soften bad news or to make nice about awkward subjects. That is true in every culture and in every country and in every social class. It doesn’t make any difference if you are in Iceland or Portugal, you don’t insult your mother’s cooking or call your best friend fat or tell an elderly aunt that you hated her wedding gift. You just don’t. What happened at a suburban cocktail party we attended recently is classic. Over white wine and sushi rolls, one woman standing in a cluster of five others started lamenting the horrible stress being endured by the local elementary school’s music teacher. Other guests chimed in, all agreeing that fourth-graders were enough to send you to the insane asylum. Fortunately, just before the music teacher was canonized,another guest entered the conversation, saying, “Are you guys crazy? That teacher gets fifteen weeks off a year!” She pointed to the doctor standing in the circle, who had been nodding away in agreement.“Robert,” she said, “you make life-and-death decisions everyday. Surely you don’t buy this sad story, do you?”

We are socialized from awkward subjects. Talk about killing polite chitchat. The new guest sent everyone scattering, mostly toward the bar.
CANDOR JUST UNNERVES PEOPLE

That was a light hearted example, of course, but when you try to understand candor, you are really trying to understand human nature. For hundreds of years, psychologists and social scientists have studied why people don’t say what they mean, and philosophers have been reflecting on the same subject for literally thousands of years.

A good friend of mine,Nancy Bauer,is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. When I ask her about candor, she tells me that most philosophers have come to the same conclusions on this topic as most of us laypeople do with age and experience.

Eventually, you come to realize that people don’t speak their minds because it’s simply easier not to. When you tell it like it is, you can so easily create a mess—anger, pain, confusion,sadness, resentment. To make matters worse, you then feel compelled to clean up that mess, which can be awful and awkward and time-consuming. So you justify your lack of candor on the grounds that it prevents sadness or pain in another person, that not saying anything or telling a little white lie is the kind,decent thing to do. But in fact, Nancy says, classic philosophers like Immanuel Kant give powerful arguments for the view that not being candid is actually about self-interest—making your own life easier.

Nancy tells me that Kant had another point, too. He said that people are often strongly tempted not to be candid because they don’t look at the big picture. They worry that when they speak their minds and the news isn’t good, they stand a strong chance of alienating other people. But what they don’t see is that lack of candor is the ultimate form of alienation.“There was a huge irony in this for Kant,” Nancy says. “He believed that when people avoid candor in order to curry favor with other people, they actually destroy trust, and in that way, they ultimately erodesociety.”

I tell Nancy the same could be said about eroding business.
FROM THEN TO NOW

The make-or-break importance of candor in U.S. business is relatively new, actually. Up until the early 1980s, big companies like GE and thousands of others operated largely without it, as did most companies regardless of size.These companies were a product of the military-industrial complex that grew up after World War II. They had virtually no global competition, and, in fact,companies within industries were so similar to one another that they could often seem more collegial than competitive.

Take the steel industry. Every three years or so, union workers acrossseveral companies would demand higher pay and benefits. The steel companies would meet those demands, passing their increased costs on to the automotive industry, which would pass their increased costs on to the consumer.

It was a nice party until the Japanese arrived at the door with their average-quality, low-cost imported cars that within a few years became high-quality, low-cost cars, many of them made in nonunion U.S. factories.

But until the foreign threat spread, most American companies had very little to do with the kind of frank debate and fast action that characterizes a candid organization. They had little use for it. And so countless layers of bureaucracy and old-fashioned social codes of behavior led to a kind often forced politeness and formality throughout most organizations. There were very few overt confrontations about strategy or values; decisions were made mostly behind closed doors. And when it came to appraisals, those too were conducted with a kind of courteous remoteness. Good performers were praised,but because companies were so financially strong, poor performers could beware housed in a far-flung department or division until retirement.

Without candor, everyone saved face, and business lumbered along. The status quo was accepted. Fake behavior was just a day at the office. And people with initiative, gumption, and guts were labeled troublesome—or worse.

You would predict, perhaps, that given all its competitive advantages,candor would have made a grand entrance with the Japanese. But Japan didn’t make it happen, nor did Ireland, Mexico, India, or China, to name a few of the big hitters in the global marketplace today. Instead, most companies have fought global competition through more conventional means:layoffs, drastic cost reductions, and in the best cases, with innovation.

Candor, while inching its way in, still remains a very small part of the arsenal.
IT CAN BE DONE

Now for the really bad news. Even though candor is vital to winning, it is hard and time-consuming to instill in any group, no matter what size.

Hard because you are fighting human nature and entrenched organizational behaviors, and time-consuming, as in years and years. At GE, it took us close to a decade to use candor as a matter of course, and it was by no means universal after twenty.

Still it can be done. There is nothing scientific about the process. To get candor, you reward it, praise it, and talk about it. You make public heroes outof people who demonstrate it. Most of all, you yourself demonstrate it in anexuberant and even exaggerated way—even when you’re not the boss.

Imagine yourself for a second at a meeting where the subject is growth and how to get it at an old-line division. Everyone is sitting around the table,civilly talking about how hard it is to win in this particular market or industry. They discuss the tough competition. They surface the same old reasons why they can’t grow and why they are actually doing well in this environment. In fact, by the time the meeting ends, they’ve managed topat themselves on the back for the “success” they’ve enjoyed“under the circumstances.”

Inside your head, you’re about ready to burst, as you tel lour-self, “Here we go again.I know Bob and Mary across the room feel the same way I do—the complacency around here is killing us.”

Outside, all three of you are playing the game. You’re nodding.

Now imagine an environment where you take responsibility for candor. You, Bob, or Mary would ask questions like:

“Isn’t there a new product or service idea in this business somewhere that we just haven’t thought of yet?”

“Can we jump-start this business with an acquisition?”

“This business is taking up so many resources. Why don’t we get the hell out of it?”

What a different meeting! What a lot more fun, and how much better for everyone.

Another situation that happens all the time is a high-growth business with a self-satisfied crowd managing it. You know the scene at the long-range planning meeting. The managers show up with double-digit growth—say 15 percent—and pound out slide after slide showing how well they are doing. Top management nods their approval, but you’re sitting there knowing there’s a lot more juice in that business. To compound matters,the people presenting the slides are peers of yours, and there’s that age-old code hanging in the air: if you don’t challenge mine, Iwon’t challenge yours.

Frankly, the only way I know of to get out of this bind—and introduce candor—is to poke around in a nonthreatening way:

“Jeez, you’re good. What a terrific job. This is the best business we’ve got. Why not put more resources into it and go for more?”

“With the great team you’ve put in place, there must be ten acquisitions out there for you. Have you looked globally?”

Those questions, and others like them, have the power to change the meeting from a self-congratulatory parade to a stimulating working session.
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

Now, you may be thinking, I can’t raise those questions because I don’t want to look like a jerk. I want to be a team player.

It is true that candid comments definitely freak people out at first. In fact, the more polite or bureaucratic or formal your organization, the more your candor will scare and upset people, and, yes, it could kill you.

That’s a risk,and only you can decide if you’re willing to take it.

Needless to say, you’ll have an easier time of installing candor in your organization if you are closer to the top. But don’t blame your boss or the CEO if your company lacks candor—open dialogue can start anywhere. I was speaking my mind when I had four employees at Noryl, the smallest, newest unit of a hierarchical company that had a very dim view of straight talk.

It is true that candid comments definitely freak people out at first.

My bosses cautioned me about my candor. Now my GE career is over, and I’m telling you that it was my candor that helped make it work. I was too young and politically clueless to notice at the time, but I was covered because our business was growing by leaps and bounds.

If we had the guts to be candid, it didn’t feel that way at the time—we didn’t know enough to know what candor was. It just felt natural to us to speak openly, argue and debate, and get things to happen fast.If we were anything, it was crazily competitive.

Every time I got promoted, the first cycle of reviews—be it budgets or appraisals—was often awkward and unpleasant. Most of the new team I was managing wasn’t used to wide-open discussions about everything and anything. For example, we’d be talking about a direct report at a personnel review, and in conversation, we would agree that the guy was really awful. His written appraisal, however, made him look like a prince. When I challenged the phoniness, I’d hear, “Yeah, yeah, but why would we ever put that in writing?”

I’d explain why, making the case for candor.

By the next review,we’d already be seeing candor’s positive impact with a better team in place, and with each successive cycle, more and more people made candor’s case with me.

Still, it wasn’t like I was singing with the whole chorus.

From the day I joined GE to the day I was named CEO, twenty years later, my bosses cautioned me about my candor. I was labeled abrasive and consistently warned that my candor would soon get in the way of my career.

Now my GE career is over, and I’m telling you that it was candor that helped make it work. So many more people got into the game, so many voices, so much energy. We gave it to one another straight, and each of us was better for it.

It’s really very simple—candor works because candor unclutters.

Yes, yes, everyone agrees that candor is against human nature. So is waking up at five in the morning for the 6:10 train every day. So is eating lunch at your desk so you won’t miss an important meeting at one. But for the sake of your team or your organization, you do a lot of things that aren’t easy. The good thing about candor is that it’s an unnatural act that is more than worth it.

It is impossible to imagine a world where everyone goes around saying what they really think all the time. And you probably wouldn’t want it anyway—too much information! But even if we get halfway there, lack of candor won’t be the biggest dirty little secret in business anymore.

It will be its biggest change for the better.