Originally penned on February 19, 2020, but is possibly more valuable now than it was then.
One of the greatest challenges for leadership is to get people, in all parts of any organization, to tell the truth about how things are. It is not that they actively lie, but many never want to be bearers of bad news. This is true up and down the leadership hierarchy. Short-sightedness drives the teller to say what he or she thinks will make the hearer happy, at any level of the organization’s hierarchy.
This is not a new idea. In the Greek tragedy Antigone, penned 500 years before Christ by Sophocles, the concept is introduced with this simple phrase, “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” And it rages on today, from Wall Street to Main Street, in banks, in government and for us, on campuses from the classroom to the board room.
In political organizations, wholesale changes of “appointed staff” are part of the patronage culture of American politics, for better or worse. In public universities, where distinctive relationships between leaders, faculty and staff, are driven by the noble and powerful idea of shared governance, an even more pronounced scarcity of truth exists for the complexities of making sure that, in revealing a perceived truth about a situation, one is not scapegoated.
And without the truth, even given the idiosyncrasies of diverse perspectives, forward progress is nearly impossible. Organizations declared to be healthy are so, in part, because people wrestle with complex issues openly. It is a form of truth-telling.
Of course, only the numb, small-minded believe lies are better than truth, but they are enough to cause people interested in forward progress to have legitimate concerns. Reasons to be unwilling to tell the truth about the organization’s effectiveness abound. Self-protection, advancement, peer pressure, conflict avoidance, manipulation and resource allocations are all reasons that people withhold the truth in corporate and even family organizations. Copiers and coffee pots, when not kettles for gossip, are magnets for truth-telling, but you cannot lead armed with a coffee pot.
Leadership that reacts negatively to the truth, or wants to blame someone for unsatisfactory answers to questions, gets exactly what it demands… pandering lies and mealy-mouthedness. When leadership shoots messengers, active, outright lying proliferates rather than the equally destructive but seemingly less obtrusive, soft-soaping of reality. It is a matter of survival. Only openness and transparency will create truthful organizational relations.
Leadership without trust is like pie without crust: nothing holds the goods.
I worked for a fellow who, when somebody wanted to know what he thought about a particular issue, people always answered, “Ask the last person he talked to.” Leadership that demands yes men and women is not leadership at all, but a form of self-amusement.
Telling the truth about an organization, to quote The Lovin’ Spoonful is, “… not often easy and not often kind…,” The Blame Game drives us to that perspective. ” There is an old story about a high school teacher who blamed a student’s poor performance on the junior high school teachers, who blamed it on the grade school teachers, who blamed it on the boy’s parents. The principal went to talk to the student’s mother. She blamed the father. When the principal visited the father, he claimed he was unsure it was his child, so it couldn’t be his fault.
Blame, like water, is welded to the first law of plumbing.
If the organization prospers, long-term job security is enhanced.
In my own experience, getting people to tell the truth is tough. There are so many reasons not to. So many opportunities to lie your way through a difficult situation so you don’t have to be the culprit who shines a light on a broken aspect of the organization.
Nothing will kill progress and make for more meaningless talk – talk that some leaders call leadership – than working to please someone in a leadership position by telling the person what you think he or she wants to hear.
Soon, the organization will start to vibrate with meaningless chatter, nuts and bolts will begin to fall off, vibrations of all types will begin to shake the enterprise and then the whole thing will fall apart.
At our university, at every level, we should be truth-telling about things for two reasons: First, it moves the university forward. Second, it is almost a sacred demand of the leadership position, and everyone who works in any organization is, in some form, a leader, as students watch role models behave. We are working hard toward this end at WT.
Walter V. Wendler, President of West Texas A&M University. His weekly columns, with hyperlinks, are available at https://walterwendler.com/.
