Improving Honesty & Integrity in Your Organization with Ron Carucci
//With our societal experience of honesty in freefall, the close alignment of our words and actions is more necessary than ever if we want to establish ourselves as trustworthy.
Ron A. Carucci has a 30-year track record helping CEOs and executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership in 25 countries at more than 100 companies. He is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent and is based in Seattle, Washington. He serves on the advisory board of Ethical Systems at New York University, previously served as associate professor of organizational behavior at Fordham University Graduate School and adjunct at the Center for Creative Leadership.
He is a sought after speaker, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, and author/co-author of eight books, including his newest book To Be Honest: Lead With the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose.
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Transcript
Hey there! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I’m excited to have with me Ron Carucci. And Ron is a prolific author of many different books, and he writes for the Harvard Business Review and for Forbes. He has his own consulting business, and we’re here today to talk about his latest book, To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose.
Ron, it’s great to have you back on the Voice of Influence podcast!
Ron Carucci: Andrea, what a pleasure! Thanks for having me!
Andrea: So, your basic idea here is that honesty requires truth, justice, and purpose. You use a Venn diagram at the beginning to kind of describe that. What led you to those three things in particular?
Ron Carucci: So, you know, the research for the book was based on a fifteen-year longitudinal study of about 3,200 leaders and interviews with them to see if we could predict under what conditions people would be honest. And using some really cool AI technology to sort of statistically model the data, what we found was that the correlations between people saying the right thing, doing the right thing, and saying they’re doing the right thing for the right reason were highly correlated.
And it became very difficult to separate those because today, I think you don’t have to look very far to see that our experience of honesty is in a freefall, which turns our expectations of honesty into a much higher bar. So, it’s no longer enough for a leader to say, “I don’t lie,” to get labeled “honest.” You might get labeled as “not a liar,” or you might get labeled as “a nice person,” or you might get labeled as “well-intended.”
But if you want to be known as honest, there’s no longer any room between actions and words, between words and outcomes. And the whole “do the right thing for the wrong reason just to get it done…” no longer gonna get the same level of turning a blind eye anymore. It’s going to get scrutinized even more heavily. And it’s probably going to get publicized in social media. So, the connection between our words, our actions, and our impact have got to be far more aligned today than ever before if you want to set yourself apart and have a reputation of being someone who’s trustworthy, reliable, and honest.
Andrea: There are so many things for us to take a look at in the book. First, I want to talk about an article that you posted a couple of weeks ago that we had some interaction on on LinkedIn. You were talking about how easy it is for somebody who likes to help other people to become so consumed with, perhaps, helping that it kind of turns into ⎼ or maybe it always was, and they don’t really realize it… it becomes this sort of self-gratifying experience that’s really more about getting for themselves what they want out of that conversation, that gratification of helping rather than actually helping.
So, I think what I found so interesting about that particular article is that I definitely have experienced that and realized that about myself a number of years ago. But I think that a lot of people really struggle… they don’t necessarily see that in themselves, you know. The ability to be honest with ourselves about even what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, can you talk a little bit more about that?
Ron Carucci: You know, I think all of us ⎼ especially those in any kind of helping professional like therapists, coaches, or friends who love to be helpful ⎼ our own sense of significance becomes so tied to the help. The dopamine hit, you know, is so enriching. We don’t realize that our white knight syndrome is in play, right? It’s sort of our hero syndrome, you know. We need to rescue somebody. We need to be needed. And when we’re not needed or when someone doesn’t take our advice or when someone doesn’t ask us for our help the way we think they should, it’s an affront. And we’re triggered to a sense of uneasiness, and it happens in seconds. We don’t even realize it.
I think, especially for those in a profession that offers help or advice, you’ve got to become aware that you can’t care more than the other person about the outcomes, right? If you start caring about their change, their transformation, about the impact you want to have on them, about how much you know they can become more and get over whatever the problem is, you see a lot of enabling relationships between spouses of one who’s an addict or in an abusive relationship. Those are extremes.
But the reality is that those of us who find our sense of meaning in the world through helping others… which is there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a wonderful thing. But if the need to indulge helping becomes distorted in some way, if it becomes more about your need to help than the help you’re giving, you’ve warped the relationship, and you’re actually now weakening the other person. You’re not strengthening them, and you’re making them depend on you so that it feeds that cycle of self-significance.
Andrea: I think that that’s really important, I guess, come-from as we’re approaching the rest of this conversation, just how important it is for us to be honest with ourselves about those things. Because the people who listen to this podcast care. They care about being a Voice of Influence, but they want to have ethical influence. But they go through that struggle of, “What does that look like? What does it mean? Am I doing it right?” and all that kind of stuff.
And sometimes, I think, it does get a little muddy because we might be questioning some of our motives and that sort of thing. But it’s still so important to be clear about it and to be able to release it so that we can move forward and actually achieve the things that we’re trying to achieve. So, I really appreciate that article and you know, this conversation.
Okay, so on page 53, you cite research that draws a correlation between companies who truly embody their stated purpose and higher levels of trust, innovation, employee autonomy, financial returns. But conversely, those who do not align their actions to their purpose have more distrust, cynicism, reduced opportunity. I’ve certainly seen this, and even when they do talk about that purpose or their desire to change something in their organization, it can start by just sort of stirring up frustration. Why is that? And why should we not be afraid of that? I’m assuming we shouldn’t be afraid of it, in my experience, but what’s your take on that?
Ron Carucci: But I think your question is really important because it can be intimidating. It can be frightening to think, “What’s going to happen if I poke this bear? And am I going to wake up a sleeping giant? And what if they don’t know how big the gap really is,” right? Many people will see this gap between actions and words, and they get cynically or fatalistically presuming that it’s intentional.
“You know you’re trying to pull a ruse over on me, and I want to know you can’t.” But I think for the most part, leaders have no clue. I don’t think any executive wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, “How can I really fool people into thinking that I care about the mission?” The converse conclusion is just as naive. They think, “Well, because I do care about the mission, it must show. And therefore, so must everybody else care about it, and therefore, all the systems that should embody that mission must align to it,” right?
That’s just silly. And if you say it out loud, you’ll be able to go, “Well, of course not.” And yet, if I asked you, “Well, what are you doing to interrogate that alignment? Where is your telemetry that would tell you where there’s gaps?” None. Or, “We have an annual employee engagement survey. Do you ask people, ‘How well do we embody our values or our mission?’” Some actually do ask that question. But when they get gaps, they think, “Well, 60% clear enough.” Well, that means 40% of your workforce doesn’t, and that doesn’t mean they have to.
And what that therefore means is that duplicity is okay. “It’s perfectly okay for us to say one thing and do another.” Well, don’t think that stops up the mission. If the broader statement of identity of who we are is perfectly okay to belie in our actions, what about my day-to-day accountabilities? What about my daily results? What about how I treat my colleagues, you know. It doesn’t just stop at, you know, “Oh, here it’s important to have a zero gap between my say-do behavior, but over here on the big stuff, it doesn’t matter.” No.
So, it’s important that you understand that those words you put on the wall, on the screensaver, on the mouse pad, on the, you know, posters, on the T-shirts, that telegraph to the world, “You believe in this purpose. You stand for these values, that you want to serve this mission…” you’ve handed people a yardstick, and they will hold that yardstick up to your behavior and your actions and the way the organization operates. And every time they find a gap, it becomes justification for why they don’t have to try.
It’s perfectly human to have those gaps. But if you don’t know what they are, and you don’t root them out and demonstrate your commitment to closing them, you can’t expect other people to do it either. So, why should people not be afraid to raise it? Because what if they don’t know, right? And there’s so much at stake. People’s souls, people come to work and spend the greatest majority of their time, whether it’s in their living room workplace or you know, through a screen, or actually now returning to a workplace.
Well, why would you not want to do everything you can to make sure everybody around you thrives? They can become the best version of themselves, do their best work, and align their own sense of purpose to that broader purpose. Well, that can’t happen if we’re not going to talk about the gaps. And so, you know, I encourage every leader, just as a starting point, take the mission or the purpose or the values off the wall, into your next team meeting, put it on the table and just ask, “Hey, how are we doing? This is what we say we stand for.”
We could be the customer service department. We can be a little team. It doesn’t matter who we are. We’re all laddering up to it in some way. Do we know how, and do we know the times we’re not? Just ask the question, “Where am I behaving in ways that would tell you’re not confident I stand for these things? How about those we serve in the organization, our internal customers or external customers? How would they rate us against this?” You should want to know.
And if you’re not asking the question, you can’t assume that all is okay. That’s a foolish conclusion to draw. Here’s a simple litmus test. For any leader, if you don’t have somebody coming into your office once or twice a week on a regular basis telling you something that’s difficult to hear, be very confident your leadership sucks.
Andrea: Wow, yeah. Because that means that people don’t have the guts. They don’t feel like you’re safe.
Ron Carucci: It doesn’t matter that you think you are. And it’s worse if you conclude, “Everything must be okay because, otherwise, I know they’d come and tell me.” That’s really dumb. You are the topic of conversation at their dinner tables at night at home. If you don’t know what stories they’re telling, you ought to get in on the conversation.
Andrea: So, what if a group of leaders wants to get that feedback? They want to hear it, but people only share it on a survey. What should that tell you, and what should you do about it?
Ron Carucci: Maybe that’s an okay starting place, Andrea. Maybe it’s okay to start with anonymity because people don’t quite feel comfortable that it’ll be safe to tell you to your face. So, start there. But put the results back in front of them, saying, “I’ve heard you, and thank you, and I’m sorry. And here’s what I intend to do differently, and here’s how you can help me.” It’s the humility with which you receive the feedback that will ultimately determine whether or not you’ll ever get it again, and whether you might ever get it to your face.
And then task them to accountability. Task them to say, “Hey, I’m gonna be working on being more empowering and less micromanaging. I’m gonna be working on being more decisive, so you don’t have to wait for decisions anymore. I’m gonna be working on, you know, not hogging all the airtime in the meeting and letting you talk. Would you please commit to helping me when I fail, saying, ‘Hey,’ give me a signal. Give me some cue that says, ‘Not doing it?’ And when I actually do it well, would you also tell me so we can reinforce it?” Ask them to be your eyes and ears on you because they’re going to be anyway, and they are going to talk about it anyway.
Now, here’s the trick that’s hard for leaders. When you change your behavior to some way to better serve those you lead, what they are not bargaining for is what it requires of them. And that can become very frustrating to leaders. So, you become more empowering, they have to become more included. You become less talkative; they have to participate and open their mouths. You become less micromanaging; they have to become more self-sufficient. They’re not bargaining for that part.
Andrea: That is so, so true. That is so true. Go on, keep going.
Ron Carucci: So, suddenly you start behaving in the ways they told you they want you to change, and they don’t step up. And suddenly, they start behaving in ways that almost push you back into the very behavior they asked you to change, because these are not dependent variables, right? They’re very interdependent variables.
And so, you have to talk about the fact of, “Hey, you know, if I become more empowering, here’s what I expect of you. It’s not a quid pro quo. It’s a natural byproduct of when I change behavior. So, I’m not asking you to reciprocate. I’m asking you to accept the fact that it’s going to be required of all of us. How are we going to support each other? How are we going to help each other with this change? If we’re going to change our conversation dynamics or conflict dynamics or decision-making dynamics or inclusion dynamics, it’s going to require something of all of us, not just me. I’m happy to go first. That’s my job. I should set the example.
“But shortly after that, what’s going to happen when some of you struggle? How are we going to talk about that? Because I don’t want you to feel like I’m sort of retaliating against you because I had to change, or I don’t want you to think I’m picking on you. I want to encourage you. So, how is that conversation going to go?” Just be open and honest about it, and you will set the stage for great transformation and great alignment between what you say and what you actually do.
Andrea: How committed does a leader need to be to honesty and transparency and aligning in order to actually see the change?
Ron Carucci: Committed. Very committed and over time. This is not going to be a silver bullet. It’s not going to be quick. And you may sort of declare premature victory because you see some early changes, you see some excitement upfront, you see some early reinforcement. But then there’ll be something hard. There’ll be a crisis, or there’ll be a problem or there’ll be an unforeseen, you know…
Andrea: Pandemic.
Ron Carucci: And a pandemic. And that’s when you really get tested, right? That’s when the fortitude of what you really say you wanted to become will get revealed. The pandemic didn’t cause half of the things they blame it for. It just revealed a lot of cracks that were hiding. So, you have to recognize that the journey will be three steps forward, two steps back. And the real question is, who will you be in those two steps back? Will you be humble, gracious when your team takes two steps back? Will you hold them accountable with grace and dignity or will you give up? Will everybody go, “See, I knew it. I knew it wasn’t going to last. I knew he didn’t mean it?” And that will happen. It’s not, hope I can avoid that, it’s inevitable. The question becomes, will you have been well-rehearsed in advance and prepared for what you want to do when that moment happens to be able to circumnavigate it effectively to continue to move forward?
Andrea: Hmm, that’s really good. Okay, you talked about a CEO who… like, their company produced home care products ⎼ so, Blake ⎼ and he reached out to you to help them rehumanize their hostile work environment. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sharing with us that story?
Ron Carucci: Yeah. So, Blake took over as CEO in a very cluttered market, a very stoic category, very overcrowded consumer product kind of thing. And they had ignored the dynamics of becoming less relevant in their categories. The previous regime had decided that they’d do the classic, “Let’s change the culture,” and they usually do that with a set of weaponized values, right? “We’re slow; let’s make speedy a value. We don’t have a lot of respect, we have lawsuits; let’s make diversity a value. We haven’t launched a new product that’s stuck to the market in years, let’s make innovation a value.”
So, we make all these new things that are clearly saying to the workforce, “These are meant to fix you,” which is the last thing that is going to happen when you do that, right? You’re just going to weaponize them, and they’re going to beat you with it. And so, the environment had just become worse and more toxified. People were doing all kinds of things. They had become weaponized, you know. If you want to get somebody fired, just say, “Well, they’re not living the principles. I can’t support them.”
So Blake, when he inherited the empire, had to make some hard calls around, you know… Well, he said to me, “Whoever said talk is cheap never inherited a company that only lived by it,” because, you know, in this case talk was very expensive because that’s all they had. So, he really had to dig deeply into that organization and rebuild it from the ground up in terms of processes, structures, product mix, talent, and culture. That was years of work and billions of dollars. It was not the transformation journey he expected when he took over, but he did it brilliantly, and the company is thriving now.
But the previous regime had tried to “spray on,” you know, change or the appearance of it. It’s like the classic lipsticking the pig, or Bondo-ing the rusted fender on a car. It was inevitably going to not stick, and it just made things worse because the employees knew what was happening and they just hijacked it for their own gain. So, it was a heart-rending story to watch, but a beautiful story to watch, because it took years of grueling work because they let it go so long.
Everything starts from identity, right? It starts with strategy. If you recognize that your relevance is slipping… and nobody said those, right? “You’re losing margin. You’re losing customers share. Competitors are out-innovating you. You’re losing talent.” I mean, you’ll have all the signals, and if you don’t pay attention to the signals, then shame on you.
So, how are you keeping up? Even if you’re a BMS, especially if you’re a BMS, you got to start those changes earlier because it’s going to take longer. And if you ignore the signals, it’s no different than your body gives you feedback, right? If you ignore the pain, the pain gets worse. If you ignore the hard pain, the pain becomes crippling, and then it becomes fatal.
Andrea: Another case of self-honesty.
Ron Carucci: Yep. And so, I remember thinking with that company, when we did the diagnostic, you know… we do these forensic interviews, like ninety minutes of extraction of people’s souls. And they’re very good-hearted and courageous to tell us what they tell us. And all of that gets put back in front of leaders. They see everything and hear everything we heard. They just don’t know who said it because we have really sophisticated software that codes the data. But I’m always marveling, like, why would they tell us, perfect strangers, these really intimate vulnerable things? But when it matters most, why don’t they tell each other when something could actually happen? Like, years ago, they should have told each other.
It’s just fascinating to me that in the critical moments of truth, people will talk about each other, but not to each other. So many of these I’ve heard say, in the spirit of wanting to become more authentic, “I really want to be true to myself,” to which I always say, “Then you have to be true about yourself. You can’t be true to yourself if you’re not being true about yourself, and if you’re not willing to start there, then you want to be true to an illusion. You want the appearance of authenticity. You want the appearance of graciousness. You don’t want to actually do the work to take steps to become those things.
Andrea: So true. Okay, I always appreciate when people talk about helping people connect to their own personal purpose to the work that they’re doing and the purpose of the company. You say, “Creating a direct line of sight between work and the greater purpose that work serves is critical for leaders to enable others to live out their own purpose through their jobs.”
And you used an example of chefs and people ordering, and how when they were actually interacting with one another that there was so much more job satisfaction in general, because there was that connection. But when they were not looking at each other, when there was this ordering and then the chef is in the kitchen and there isn’t that direct line of sight, that connection and job satisfaction and satisfaction in general went down.
I mean, customer service can be a tough job, but for some people, it allows for direct connection to how they are helping people, and so they feel really good about it. They like helping others. But what about those who do not have that direct line of sight? How can it be created or navigated?
Ron Carucci: And I think that I love the example that you picked, Andrea, here because what I want people to understand is, essentially, the people who are in the lab trying to find cures for cancer ⎼ where it’s overt, right ⎼ short order shops or customer service call center reps can equally find great meaning in their work. I mean, we all know the Zappos stories of the customer service agents that spent fourteen hours on the call, right? The question is, how do you set the stage for that?
First of all, there’s two parts of it. One is, have you, as a leader, helped people see a direct line of sight between their work and how it impacts the mission of the company? Never assume it’s obvious. So, that’s the first step. Then have you created the conditions under which they can connect their own purpose, their own reason, their own sense, what stokes their own sense of significance to the work they’re doing, right? You have to have both parts in place.
And it’s a leader’s job to create the conditions under which both can happen. And it needs to happen intentionally and deliberately… and community. Purpose is not a solo act. Purpose is a communal act, even if I’m serving my own purpose, right? And the Best Buy story is a great one where when they, you know, Hubert Joly started out by asking, “When are we at our best at Best Buy?” And asking people on the floor in all their stores, through these really intimate workshops [got] people really thinking through how they wanted to touch these customers.
And their very first principle is, “We have to be human. These are people with problems, and they need our help. These are not people whose wallets we want. We’re not here to sell them TVs. We’re here to help them live their lives better through technology.” And you know, they reinvented the Geek Squad, and reinvented how people on the floor worked, and created this amazing customer experience because of what they believed they were there to do.
And they did it with each other too. You know, you had stories of managers in stores saying to people, “What’s your big dream? What is it you wanna do with your life? Go put it on the break room wall and write it out, and I’m gonna help you get there.” You know, really helping people in what others [would] see as menial retail hourly wage jobs. Why would you care about purpose? Well, they’re on their way somewhere, and they’ve chosen to stop on the train at your employ for however long that is. Why would you not want to make sure you leave them better than you found them? So, in turn, they leave you better than they found you and your customers.
So, it takes work, right? You have to do intentional work to make sure that those conversations between my reason for being and the work I do and the broader purpose it serves.. that there’s very clear pathways. And for people who don’t see it, you have to help them see it. And sometimes you might help people see that they’re in the wrong job. “This is not a place I meant to be or that I could become my best self,” which is great. That’s a great discovery to have, because then you can help them move on to something more appropriate and find somebody more suited for that role.
Andrea: As you mentioned ⎼ and I mean, we talk about this a lot as well ⎼ people really need to feel significant that what they do and say matters, that their work matters. And this seems to be tied to a desire for accountability, which I thought was interesting that you talked about that. I’ve seen that as well, where people don’t want to skip over their review. They would like to have that opportunity to be acknowledged for what they actually do. Because if you’re not going to help me accountable, then I must not matter. But sometimes accountability systems are not just or fair. So, how does this happen, and what does it look like to create a fair system of accountability?
Ron Carucci: Great question, Andrea. Gosh, this is a painful one, because we have all been on the receiving end of the horrors of this. I think, today, our systems are built around premises of scaling sameness as if it’s fairness, right? So, you know, up until the late 70s or early 80s, most people’s remit in the workplace was repetitive work ⎼ the number of units and number of outputs. And so, you know, as we’ve sort of scaled management systems for efficiency, so we’re scaling the measurement systems. And so, you want to be able to count objectively what people did and count the work that way, and then reward it accordingly.
Well, as our work and our economy shifted to much more knowledge-based outputs, our systems didn’t evolve with them. And so, the problem now with trying to [treat] people the same is that when their remits are their ideas, their analysis, their creativity, and their ingenuity ⎼ they’re a part of them ⎼ the connection between the contributor and the contribution is much more fused. And so, when you evaluate the work, you are evaluating the person. You can no longer say, “Don’t take it personally.” It’s personal.
When you try and scale sameness and fairness with that as the standard output when the output is not standard, that’s what makes it unfair… is that you’re doing this comparative analysis of work that is as unique in its output as it is to its contributor. And if you don’t acknowledge that, it’s undignifying. Have you ever heard anybody say, “Wow, can’t wait for my performance appraisal!” People dread them, right? “Today’s my quarterly review with my boss or my monthly check-in.” People don’t look forward to those because they’re undignifying. They’re demeaning. People feel invisible and unseen.
One executive I coached on a regular basis, he was a very, very highly valued employee on his way to succeeding as a top succession candidate for a very big job in the company. Our session happened to be right after his review. We were on virtual, and I could see the minute he came on screen… like, the veins on his neck were popping, and he’s red and he started pounding on the table. “She gave me a three! I’ve always been a four. In my last company, I was a five! But now HR said there’s a quota, so you can only have so many threes so I got a three! Who got the fours?”
Like, he was irrational, completely irrational. But he was offended and angry, and “I’ll show them.” So, I asked him to email me… I said, “Can I see the report?” And while he was venting, I was reading through it, and I was puzzled. The comments were quite fair. The language was really quite flattering. And the places where he was falling short or they wanted more development from him were accurate. They were not news to him. He was still the top candidate for this bigger job, and he was still on track to get it within a year, year and a half.
So, I was puzzled by this reaction. “I get you’re upset. People don’t like categories, whatever, but this was really overdone.” Well, as I dug in more, Andrea, I found out that there’s nothing surprising about his reaction at all. Our brains, our amygdalas are triggered by categorical thinking. When we get labeled, when we get pigeonholed, when any of us are put into a box we don’t feel like we fit in, our amygdala is triggered with a sense of threat. Our fight or flight instinct is pushed to a place where we feel unsafe. We feel invisible. We feel unseen, and we feel threatened by it.
And his brain was having the same reaction anybody would have by getting miscategorized or misjudged in a way that feels unfair or dismissive or making us invisible. And yet, we rely on these rating systems, and we put people in high potential boxes. We put people in category boxes. We give them these labels, and what purpose are they serving other than to demotivate and demean people?
The process that should be the most invigorating, inspiring, sacred conversation in any organization has become one of the most feared, anxiety-provoking, threatening, and useless processes. I mean, first of all, how many bosses say, “You fill it out first. I’ll add my things outside, and we’ll send it out to HR. And then, we’ll get together on it. Any questions?” “No.” “Good! Great!” That’s it. That’s the sum total of the worst ones.
The best ones at least have a conversation, but who knows who had input to it. Who knows what the data that they’re using. You know, Best Buy, _____ when he first got there, got all these forms and had numbers and ratings. He’s like, “Who would do this? I’m not doing this. Get them out of here.” He said, “I just want to ask them two questions. What’d you do, how’d it go? What do you want to do next, and how can I help?” He said, “That’s my performance appraisal.” And usually, he said, “They’re usually harder on themselves than I would ever be. They want things that they should want, and I will help them get there. What’s the point of all the numbers and boxes and categories?” He was like, “I don’t want to do any of that.” I love it. That’s perfect. Why can’t we just be human to human?
Here’s the thing. The dirty little secret, Andrea, is that most performance management systems are designed to neutralize, minimize lawsuits, right? They’re litigation avoidance is really what they are. You know, documentation of poor performance so you can take somebody out. The reality is that they’re not really meant to neutralize variance in performance. They’re meant to hide the variance in management skill, right? If I have a standardized, rigorous, robotic process, then if I’ve got a manager with poor judgment, I can probably neutralize that. You know, which, of course, is stupid, but that’s what I think they’re really designed to do.
Well, train your managers better. Teach them how to be great coaches and interactors with people, and affirmers, and hard feedback-givers. People want hard feedback. They want to know where they can improve. They want to get better. Nobody comes to work to say, “Hey, I wanna coast.” And if they do, you should get rid of them anyway. People will want to excel, but they want to know that their work matters. And to the point you made earlier, they want to know that their work matters enough for you to tell them the truth about it.
Andrea: In the moment, closer to the time not just…
Ron Carucci: A year later?
Andrea: Yeah, not just a year later. Yeah.
Ron Carucci: Absolutely. Sure, is that uncomfortable sometimes? Absolutely! It’s your job. Again, as a manager, if you’re uncomfortable with that, I want to know what is it you think your job is. Because you’re not a technical expert anymore. You’re not the one doing the work. You’re the one guiding the work. So, if you don’t understand that your most important remit to the company in a manager or leadership or supervisory role is your fingerprint on the talent you’ve been charged to lead, to make them better at what they do, to make them more satisfied of what they do, and to ultimately get better results for the company… If that’s not your job, I don’t know why you’re doing the work. What do you there for?
If you’re just doing the budgets and you know, doing busy paperwork, you’re wasting your time. So, I’m always puzzled by, you know… Okay, so that part of the job is uncomfortable. Okay, get better at it. Practice more, you know what I mean? Like, just ignoring the fact that the stewarding of the talent is the most sacred remit you have… If you don’t find joy and gratification in that, learn to or change jobs.
Andrea: Hmm, I love that you call it sacred. I love that.
Ron Carucci: You’re holding people’s stories, right? You’re holding people’s aspirations. You’re holding their dreams in your hands. That’s what you’re doing. And you should hand them back better than you found them, and you should hand them back more able to be realized. And what a privilege, right?
Andrea: Oh yeah. 360 feedback and surveys are certainly an important part of accountability. And yet, there are inherent problems with them because they measure perception, not necessarily the truth. I’m curious what your thoughts are on surveys and how they can help to eliminate the truth, and do you see any limitations with them?
Ron Carucci: I’d rather have a decent one to none, because at least it gets some data into the hands of the leader, right? What many organizations do is they make their feedback the ad rather than the means to an end. The feedback should be a means to a great conversation between the person who received the feedback and the people who gave it, and more importantly, the ability to make more focused choices on how you’re going to aim your development, which includes how you’re going to leverage your strengths and optimize those more.
And also, too often, these massive instruments produce piles of data, and action plans that go on for days that nobody’s ever going to act upon. Obviously, the goal would be at some point to work yourself out of needing it, right? That the exchange of feedback, the exchange of ideas, and exchange of experiences that would be so natural and such an intimate part of a relationship, you wouldn’t need a piece of paper to write down on.
But if you need the scaffolding or the crutches to start ⎼ it’s like the training wheels on a bike ⎼ so be it. Make sure the instruments are valid. Make sure it’s validated against competencies that really matter. Don’t just use off-the-shelf instruments that don’t measure anything relevant to your company. Make sure you’re measuring the behaviors that you have proven, you know, or the behaviors that get the performance you’re asking them for. Or don’t include it as part of your performance appraisal system. Just make it developmental and separate it from your evaluation so that people can give honest feedback.
What most research would show is that what people fear… It’s not that people are overly harsh in their data. They’re actually so afraid of getting somebody in trouble, they’re too lenient. So, they dial it down. Or you know, in some cases, in really paranoid environments, it’s just a fear of retaliation, but usually those instruments are, you know… they’re pretty safely protective of anonymity.
I’ve worked with many organizations who introduced multi-rater feedback for the first time… And that’s not a one-time event. That’s a multiyear process to till the ground of the culture and get it ready for those kinds of conversations, to make sure there’s coaches available, that managers are available for those they lead ⎼ who are getting feedback for the first time ⎼ that they’ve gone first and received it themselves.
You have to really cascade and layer it over several years. If you just announce, “Hey, here’s our new competencies. Get ready for your 360,” it usually doesn’t go very well, even if people have come from other companies where it was standard. “In this culture, the first time I’m going to have use my voice in the service of telling you what I think about my boss or my peer when I’ve never had that experience before, or we’ve never as a culture valued that before,” can be really off-balancing for people. So, you have to till the ground and do it in a very thoughtful way and assume it’s a three-year journey to get to the place where it’s a stabilized process and expectations that, “Yes, we talk about each other’s contributions in a way that helps each other.”
I’ve seen companies do this brilliantly, where it’s very informal. The manager goes around to a lot of folks and ask folks and then sits down with the person. And you see everything and heard it, by name. You see who said it. So, there’s no anonymity. There’s no hiding. So, it strengthens your relationships so when there’s critique, I’m expected to go back to the person who gave it and say, “Hey, I got this feedback on my appraisal. Thanks so much for it. I would love your advice on how I can improve.” And it’s just a normal part of how we do business together.
And you know, my son works for a company that does it that way, and the company was started that way. So, it’s just natural part of the roots. For large companies, you know, we depended on up and down thing, now, multi-directional can be a little disarming for people, but prepare them for it. And if you start getting great data, that’s the ultimate thing. Can people get an accurate sense of how others experienced them?
One of the hardest parts of my job, Andrea, is when I have to work with an executive who’s gone uncalibrated for a decade, sometimes more. Last couple of years, I’ve had two or three of these experiences in my firm. I actually wrote about this. It’s a piece I did on how to give feedback to somebody who hasn’t had it in years. Literally, you know, you’re causing trauma because their sense of themselves has gone uncalibrated for so long, and nobody’s told them how misguided their conclusions are about who they are and how they’re experienced. And it’s horrible.
So, when you’re about to put thirty, forty, fifty, sixty pages of data in front of them that you know is going to push them to an edge, it’s going to traumatize them… You know there are going to be tears. There’s going to be shock, and there’s going to be, you know, major existential crisis that you’re causing. Literally, it’s horrible, and it’s just cruel.
And one company I worked with last year, there was an executive. And for years, I’ve heard about her. I’d met her and interacted with her, but I had never experienced… I mean, you would have thought the words made Cruella look kind. But it was really clear she had no idea, and no one had ever told her. And I’m like, “This is horrific. I don’t know if she can be saved, what’s going on here, but someone’s gotta tell her.”
Ironically, months later, my firm got picked to do the work. I didn’t do the coaching because I wanted it to be a woman. And it was as traumatic and painful and was disruptive, and it was horrible. But she’s a very strong and determined woman, and she’s good-hearted. She’s not maliciously minded at all. She just deeply cares about her work but had no idea, and it’s very, very difficult job.
Well, you know, fast forward now, a year or so later, and she’s coming along nicely. She has worked really hard on herself, worked really hard on the behavior, and people are noticing. It didn’t need to take that long and that much suffering. And there’s more work to do, and the trust carnage that was behind her, so that needs to be repaired. But my gosh, if you’ve got somebody that everybody’s talking about, and they’re the only one that’s not in on the conversation, and you’re allowing that to happen, that is the ultimate cruelty.
Andrea: Be honest sooner. Okay, employee voice. You say, “Flip the hierarchy so that executives are being coached by employees. Tell employees the whole truth, even the parts that you think they can’t handle, and ask for their help solving problems. Honor truth tellers and stories and rituals, and hold yourself accountable to honesty through truly open forums and ongoing feedback.” And so, this is the kind of thing that we’re still talking about. But I think that the key here is this; it’s also about empowering the employee to use their voice and that it’s honored here. Do you want to tell us anything about that?
Ron Carucci: Yeah. So, going back to the Ginger Graham story at ___ when she was CEO there for ten years, and she showed up to a pretty broken company. And our opening move… it happened to be that she was showing up at the Global Sales conference. This was a high-flying cardiovascular company that had really high innovation in the pacemaker market, but they had lapsed. Their innovation has lagged.
And she got up in front of the entire global sales organization, gazillions of people. She said, “I’ve heard all great things about this company, and I could get up here, and try and cheer you on, and motivate you. But the truth is, I don’t see it. I see R&D Operations quarrelling each other. They haven’t talked in years. I see unmotivated faces. I see frustrations, and it kind of sucks because that’s not what I heard I was inheriting here.” And the salesforce was relieved. They were relieved that somebody told them that… you know, they all knew.
Andrea: Yeah
And over the years, she was there. She instituted some pretty rigorous and pretty high-risk interventions to make sure they told the truth. And one of them was everyone in her leadership team ⎼ which was the top two levels of her direct reports have never reported. Two levels ⎼ got a coach, but the coach hasn’t a professional executive coach from outside. It was an employee from two levels down, cross-functionally, so there was no hierarchy involved. And every month, that person would bring in data, and they had to sit and listen to it, about how they were experienced. Over time, they’d name names.
Andrea: How did the employee know this?
Ron Carucci: Because it was their peer getting it. So, you trusted your peers.
Andrea: So, they went to them, or the people knew that this was going on, and they needed to go tell them.
Ron Carucci: The coaches went and solicited it.
Andrea: Okay.
Ron Carucci: And you also knew at some point, if you had something to say, you’d go. And after probably six months, people were going to the coach and saying, “Hey, we got something for you.” So, it became the pathway, and then eventually you want to close those information pathways down, and they can go directly to the executive.
Andrea: Yeah.
Ron Carucci: But it wasn’t until people saw the executive acting upon what they heard ⎼ assimilating the feedback and actually turning it into active choices ⎼ that people believed it was even gonna matter. Then you open up the townhalls, right? And “Okay, we’re falling short of this goal. Let’s have an open conversation.” It became about tribal storytelling. So, as you brought new people into the company… because it grew from, you know, 200 million to 3 billion, you know. So, it was exponential growth, so as you brought on new employees, the elder tribal members would sit at the fire with them and tell the stories of honesty and truth telling, so that culture transmitted and people knew that it was expected on them.
And then, you know, every week in her senior team meeting, she put people in the hot seat. So, every week, another leader got to sit in the hot seat, and everybody in the team got to say, “Here’s what’s working. Here’s what’s not. Here’s my advice for you,” and just made it a routine part of how we talk about each other and the work. It was an incredibly courageous action she took to turn that culture around, and for that season, it was quite extraordinary.
You know, I think today, we’ve so conflated speaking your truth with speaking the truth, and we’ve conflated employee activism with employee voice. Do we want our employees active in civic discourse? Absolutely, but you’ve got to be prepared that you may become the object of their discourse, right? And so, when Wayfair employees take to the streets, when Google employees at the streets about you, that’s not telling you that you have activist employees. That tells you that there was no other place for their voice to be heard.
Andrea: Yes.
Ron Carucci: So, I wouldn’t be so excited about activism that’s aimed at you because that’s telling you that every other channel they might have thought about they exhausted or wasn’t available to them. But there has to be competence.
So, you know, James _____ is about how do you speak truth to power in a competent way. It’s not just about, you know, taking on the posture of big middle finger or complaining that someone else does something about it. You have to bring a competent voice. Now, I don’t mean political or positioned or couched or edited, but I mean competent. And then you have to have willing, listening, open-hearted receptors on the other side of a table. So, if you really want the voices coming in the room, teach your voice to be competent, and then make sure you’re a listening ear when they come.
Andrea: So good!
Ron Carucci: And you’ll get the most innovative ideas, the best thinking, the most committed folks, the most radical ideas. You’ll have access to material in their souls they’ve been hiding from you.
Andrea: You talk about how we are built for connection, and that when we do not have connection, it feels like physical pain. It actually is experienced in the brain as physical pain, which I have found really interesting for a while. And when you look at the future of work, knowing that hybrid is at least being discussed a lot and this model of people being on site and working from home, teams that are trying to find ways to connect, what are your thoughts on how leaders can help facilitate connection on these teams?
Ron Carucci: So, intimacy isn’t a function of being proximate. So, certainly, being proximate helps. But that isn’t the ultimate arbiter of intimacy, right? Relationship is. And yes, you may have to do more creative things to do it through the screen. But there’s already books out. Chris Littlefield’s book on 75+ Team Building Activities for Remote Teams. There’s already plenty of books being written about all the really fun rituals people are creating to strengthen intimacy across a screen.
So, the question is, do you want that? I mean, have you done the work to make sure that trust and vulnerability and empathy and the kinds of things that create connection, that create a sense of belonging have been established? If you haven’t, proximate won’t help you anyway, right? And so, if it’s an expectation… even if you have a team full of individual contributors who don’t have to collaborate, it doesn’t mean that you can’t create intimacy among them and a sense of belonging.
The question is, do you look around the table and does anybody feel left out? Are people of diverse identities or diverse cultural backgrounds, neurodiverse backgrounds, are they welcome? Do you have cliques? Do people assimilate onto your team as a new member readily? There are questions you can keep on looking for to say, “Does everybody have an equal shot here feeling a sense of belonging? And what are we doing to make sure that we all feel that we belong and that we belong to each other?” Cause that’s really the magic of a team is when I know my wellbeing belongs to these people. I want to protect them, and I want to protect that belonging. And so, there are plenty of ways to do that. You have to first decide that it’s what you want.
Andrea: So many things we could go on for quite a while, Ron. Thank you, first of all, for being here and for this book, To Be Honest. Where can people find it? Where would you like them to connect with you? What else would you like to request from listeners?
Ron Carucci: Yeah, thanks so much, Andrea. I appreciate that. I’d love for your listeners to help join the cause. So, the book has a website, tobehonest.net. You can learn more about the research. I’ve got a TV series called Moments of Truth, where you can meet all the heroes from the book in live and in person that I got to be part of and inspired by. It’s on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart, I’m told. Come visit me at navalent.com. And if you come to navalent.com/assessment, you can download the How Honest Is My Team survey. So, it’s an instrument based on the book’s research to find out, “Are you really getting the goods from your team or not?” Please follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and stay in touch.
Andrea: Love it! Okay, we’ll make sure to link all that in the show notes at voiceofinfluence.net/podcast. One last question; what last piece of advice would you like to give our listeners who would really like to be and have a Voice of Influence?
Ron Carucci: Two parts. Your voice really matters. You just have to start from the premise that your voice matters. It isn’t the most important voice in the world. And to have agency in the world, you don’t need to be singular, but you have to be convicted. And remember that speaking the truth doesn’t mean speaking your truth. But you can speak the truth to power, the truth to the world ⎼ those you want to influence ⎼ in a way that allows you to be heard and acted upon. And just don’t ever question whether or not it matters because it does.
Andrea: Thank you so much! Thanks for being a Voice of Influence for our listeners today!
Ron Carucci: Andrea, what a pleasure! Thanks so much for your great prep work and for engagement and for having me back!
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