Tag Archive for: Honesty

Why “being nice” and avoiding hard conversations isn’t really “nice” at all

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Have you ever met a “nice” person who is polite, but hard to connect with?
There’s a difference between being nice and being kind. The chart illustrates an extreme dichotomy between the two.

Nice comes from insecurity, a lack of confidence
Kind comes from high self-worth and respect

Nice is polite aloofness
Kind is genuine benevolence

Nice is people-pleasing: negating your own needs to be liked and approved of
Kind is self-advocacy: standing up for your own needs; prioritizing your well-being

Nice has no personal boundaries; inability to say no
Kind has healthy boundaries; the ability to say no with compassion and respect

Nice is conflict avoidant – a desire to maintain harmony at all costs
Kind is honesty – being willing to communicate directly and compassionately about issues

Nice leads to courteous disconnection
Kind leads to authentic connection

Five Ways Leaders Accidentally Create Dishonesty In Employees

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Honesty is a key value for any organization. It sets the tone for the kind of culture you are committed to create. It provides consistency in behavior. And it builds loyalty and trust. Honesty is one of the most effective ways to establish the environment that will propel your organization to long-term success. As a leader, the importance you place on honesty can create a culture where your team members feel inspired, empowered, and validated.

Moral dishonesty, such as stealing, padding expense accounts, or lying about results can unfortunately be a part of an organization. More subtle and every bit as important, however, is psychological honesty.

  • What is the experience of your team members working in this organization?
  • Do people feel free to bring you their concerns, questions, or feedback without fear of reprisal?
  • How tense do people feel working around you?
  • Can people be honest with you about your leadership?
  • And how do you know if people are giving honest answers to these questions? How much are people on your team choosing to be merely polite rather being genuine?

Here are five ways leaders accidently create dishonesty in their team. I say accidently because no one sets out to create a dishonest work environment. Often, however, amid stress, demands, and particularly in a hybrid work environment where we may not be as connected to our team, we may inadvertently overlook some unintended consequences of our behavior.

  1. A lack of transparency with your team about why you made a decision. If you aren’t modeling honesty, it’s difficult to expect it.
  2. Unacknowledged stress, tension, and anxiety. It’s tough enough to be honest with your boss. But when you add emotional volatility to the mix, you are inserting a variable of instability which encourages being polite rather than genuine. It is for this reason that leaders must pay close attention to how they act and communicate. To create an honest workplace, you must attend to your inner state. Whether you see it or not, if you have unrecognised strain, tension, and anxiety, your team is likely going to hold back telling you the truth. Volatility breeds unpredictability. And unpredictability breeds dishonesty.
  3. Talking over people. When we interrupt others rather than sincerely listen, we give the message that we think we are smarter than they are, that they aren’t as valued, and aren’t needed. I, for one, am guilty of this when I’m feeling stressed, pushing for results, and forgetting about the importance of the people on my team.
  4. Ignoring people’s emotions. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to ignore your team members’ feelings. This error often occurs when a leader is either unable to deal with their own emotions or are overly focused on tasks and results. The key here is empathy: you will succeed only when you care enough to attend to those around you. You are less likely to increase anxiety in others if you consider how your actions impact them. It’s your responsibility to be attentive to how people around you are doing.
  5. Defensiveness. This is the big one. If you ask for feedback in these areas, you need to let go of needing to be right to protect your ego. As Steve Covey used to say, “seek first to understand…” That is our work. When people have the courage to bring anything to our attention that creates discomfort in us, our responsibility is to resist the tendency to get defensive and to listen to understand.

In summary, positional leaders impact their employees’ stress and anxiety levels. What they say, feel, and do hugely influences their team’s physical and emotional well-being and how they respond. But sadly, far too few leaders are aware that they have this power. And many are overconfident in their leadership skills, creating a gap between their perceived and actual levels of competence. This explains why even well-meaning bosses may inadvertently contribute to high anxiety levels in their team members and how they inadvertently shut people down.

Acceptance is the cornerstone to belonging

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Acceptance is the cornerstone to belonging and becomes part of the foundation of a psychologically safe place to live and work. Our awareness of the importance of psychological safety to create high trust, highly engaged, productive organizations, has increased dramatically in recent years as employees demand better workplace cultures.

Building a sense of acceptance and belonging with your team is a critical factor in building a high-performance culture in your organization.

I suggest three critical strategies for ensuring that you are building belonging around you:

  1. Take time to think about belonging on your team. Reflect on whether every team member knows that they belong, that their contribution is recognized and appreciated, and they feel accepted as a valuable member of the team.
  2. Reflect on your own inner state. Pay particular attention to how you handle stress, and how your emotional state creates either tension or inspiration in the people who depend on you.
  3. Look at your own values. Take an honest inventory of how you feel about the people on your team. Examine carefully where you have judgements and how it’s helping or hindering your success.

 

How To Inspire People Through Basic Human Goodness

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John Coltrane, the American jazz saxophonist and composer, once said that to be a better artist you have to be a better person. He could have been talking about leadership. We understand that leadership is too important to be diminished to techniques or titles. Leadership is about the character and integrity of a person. It’s about presence, not position. It’s about being, first and foremost, a good person.

I don’t think enough is said about what it takes to develop that presence, what it means to be a good person first before you can be a good leader.

Here are some of my thoughts about what it means to be a good person and what it takes to get there.

Humility. Humility is a true evaluation of conditions as they are; a willingness to face facts. One fact of leadership is that while you might get promoted to being a boss, you don’t get promoted to being a leader. You aren’t a leader until someone declares you one. You have to earn it. And you start to earn it by being willing to face the reality of how people perceive you.

Honesty. Being a good person doesn’t mean being perfect or trying to make the impression that you have it all together. It means that you are willing to see your blind spots, willing to see how your actions impact others, and have the courage to make the necessary changes.

Accountability. Accountability is the ability to be counted on. It means showing up. It means never making a promise you don’t intend to keep. It means deciding, once and for all, that all blame is a waste of time and that complaining is a defense against the courage to act.

Caring. Caring is everything. People will cut you a lot of slack if they know you care. And they won’t give you room for error if they know you don’t care. You can’t fake caring. It goes back to honesty.

Don’t Mistake Spontaneity For Authenticity

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This week, in my friend and colleague, Corey Olynik’s weekly column (go to www.coreyolynik.com to subscribe; I highly recommend it), he poses some great questions about authenticity and authentic leadership. To quote Corey, “We hear so much about being an “authentic” leader. I believe that fully. You must lead from who you are; at the same time, authenticity does not give you permission to be a jerk. The most productive leader leads from her strengths and dials back those tendencies she has to react poorly… When might you mistake spontaneity for authenticity? When might your words or actions work against you or your organization? How do you protect your “inner jerk” from surfacing as you interact with your people?”

Authenticity is not the same as spontaneity. Being an authentic leader goes far deeper than living emotionally and compulsively with no constraints. There are at least six fundamental requirements to be authentic:

  • Self-awareness. When the seventy-five members of Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was almost unanimous: self-awareness. To be authentic you have to be self-aware. You have to be aware of how your choices and behavior impact yourself and those around you.
  • Disciplined Action. With self-awareness, authentic people understand that there is a space between an impulse to act and their actual behavior. Within that space is found disciplined choice – to act in a way that will lead to the betterment of all constituents.
  • Care. Not only do you have to be self-aware, you have to care. Caring is everything, I write in my book (by the same title http://www.irvinestone.ca/shop/) To be authentic, you have to care about how your choices and behaviors impact those you serve. A service mindset is vital to authentic leadership. You have to be committed to add value to others. Authentic leaders are builders. They are continually looking for ways to encourage others. Do those around you feel supported, encouraged, and served by you?
  • A commitment to inner work. You have to be willing to invest in your own development to know yourself and your blind spots. Authentic people invest heavily in their own development, whether it is through study, personal therapy or coaching, being mentored, self-reflection, or a combination of these. They see all blame as a waste of time, and make it a habit to look at their side of the street when relationship problems arise. They see all opportunities to learn amidst the challenges of life. By looking within, you discover a sense of purpose along with your unique gifts, passions, and values. Finding your voice and helping others to find their voice is what authentic leaders are committed to. If you don’t go within, you’ll go without.
  • Honesty and respect. Being authentic means being honest. But honesty without respect – for yourself and others – is brutality, not authenticity. Authentic people are continually wrestling with the challenge of being both honest and Not only is being a jerk disrespectful, being a jerk is dishonest because it’s not taking responsibility for what’s going on inside of you.
  • Character. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “a [person] cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.” Behavior in any relationship impacts every relationship. Authentic people set a high standard of behavior for themselves in all areas of their lives and that includes having a personal code of moral conduct. I wholeheartedly concur with Corey. Living congruently and with integrity in all aspects of one’s life excludes being a jerk or a bully to anyone at anytime.

Integrity: Be An Integrated Human Being

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In my leadership development programs I teach that if you want to make a positive impact on the world, your most important goal as a leader is to be an integrated human being. Being integrated means living with integrity. Integrity comes from the word integer, which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Integrity is about integrating your inner life with your outer life. Gandhi said that, “A person can not do right in one department of life whilst they are occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.” Because life is not compartmentalized, any area in your life where you breach integrity impacts every other area.

Dr. Henry Cloud defines integrity as, “the courage to meet the demands of reality.” He wrote a great book by the same title. Consider some of the ways people “go around” difficulties in front of them, and what the price is, personally and collectively, for these choices:

  • A recent study showed that 82% of the top 10% of academic students in the US said they cheated to get there. 70% of them said they turned in someone else’s work.
  • A group of high school athletes were asked, “If you were given a drug that would guarantee you a gold medal at the next Olympics, knowing it would kill you in five years, would you take it?” 68% said, “Yes.”
  • You spend more than you earn and end up living on credit card debt, trying to prove to yourself or others that you have more money than you actually have.
  • Weight lifters know about compromising the integrity of a lift by “cheating” when lifting a weight by “jerking” it up, appearing that you can actually lift more than you would if it was done properly. This is going “around” the lift rather than “through” it with the intent to make an impression.
  • You pretend to be putting in a full day’s work but are actually occupying a good part of the day surfing the internet.
  • People loose trust and confidence in themselves and seek to regain it through entitlement rather than applying the work required to rebuild themselves.
  • You avoid following through on a promise because it became “hard” to keep.

To master integrity, ask yourself three questions consistently:

  1. Are you being honest with yourself? Are there any areas of your life where you are lying to yourself? Are you struggling with an addiction that you aren’t facing? Do you have an issue with anger or control that is hurting someone else? Are you neglecting an area in your life that is important you? Are you living in alignment with what you say that you value? Self-respect and inner peace flow from a clear spring. If you don’t have honesty with yourself you will find that the relationships you are in – at work and at home – will all be contaminated. You don’t have to be perfect to be honest. But have the courage to take a careful inventory.
  2. Are you being honest with others? I coached an executive that confessed he was having an affair. He thought he was “getting away” with it because nobody knew. Yet every member of his team, on a recent 360 Feedback exercise rated him low in terms of being trustworthy and approachable. Even though people may not be consciously aware of a person’s lack of integrity, they still know. And most importantly, you Breeching integrity leads to distortions in your relationships. Where are the lies in your life? You will inevitably hurt people when you are not honest with them. Are you hurting anyone in your life? Are you hiding the truth from anyone?
  3. Are you keeping your agreements? Corporations and lives across the country are being littered with habitual excuse-makers and blamers. Think carefully before you make an agreement. Be careful to only make agreements that are in alignment with your values and your purpose. Then scrupulously keep the agreements you make, even the small ones. If circumstances prohibit you from fulfilling your promise, let the creditor know as soon as you know, that the commitment is jeopardized. Negotiate, at that point, to minimize damages and re-commit to a new course of action. Do you honor your promises? Do you have a recovery process if you are unable to keep an agreement – while learning from the experience?

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.