Leading Without Authority by Keith Ferrazzi & Noel Weyrich

Author:Keith Ferrazzi & Noel Weyrich [Ferrazzi, Keith & Weyrich, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Make Candor Compulsory

Before we start collaborating on a project, we must first be ruthlessly candid with ourselves: “Do we trust each other? Do we feel safe sharing our boldest, most critical ideas openly? Have we done the necessary, important work, to serve, share, and care with the broader team to make this collaboration possible?” These are foundational questions we must confront if we expect to maintain candor moving forward.

We will most likely have work to do around candor with our teammates before diving in with them. It’s not necessary to be the official team leader in order to take a leading role in beginning the recontracting conversation. We just need to care enough about our teammates and team outcomes to take the plunge and advocate for more candid, engaged, and transparent collaborations.

Then, in the recontracting conversations, we must stress the importance of building a team culture of candor, on top of the permission we have created through serve, share, and care. The stakes are enormous, because nothing kills shareholder value in a company with more certainty than a culture of conflict avoidance. At most of the companies I work with, conflict avoidance is rampant and everyone knows it. Recontracting for co-creation is the perfect place to put a stop to the fear or avoidance of saying what we are thinking.

A culture of candor within your team unleashes everyone’s contribution to the fullest and ensures bold inputs. This is why wildly successful entrepreneurs like Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, champion a workplace with a radically transparent culture.

“The key to our success has been to have a real idea meritocracy,” Dalio writes in his book Principles. “To have a successful idea meritocracy, you have to do three things: 1. Put your honest thoughts out on the table. 2. Have thoughtful disagreements in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn. 3. Have agreed-upon ways of deciding if disagreements remain so that you can move beyond them without resentments. And to do this well, you need to be radically truthful and radically transparent, by which I mean you need to allow people to see and say almost anything.”14

These are open discussions we need to have with those on our team if we are to build a culture based on candor. Even after recontracting, our fear of conflict is guaranteed to start creeping back into the collaborative dialogue. To maintain the candor on your team, try this from time to time: Ask everyone in the room to write down privately on a piece of paper how they rate the candor level in the room, on a scale of 0 to 5. Have someone collect the ballots and tally the results. If the room average is 3 or below, that is a great opening to discuss getting some group candor about the group’s lack of candor! Something’s not being addressed. What is it? Why are you not being forthright? Use the CPS process and put these questions on the table with the group.

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