How to Amplify Honesty

It’s Thursday - time for another edition of my LinkedIn Newsletter! This week I’ll be sharing advice from the author of To Be Honest, Ron Carucci! And as always, be sure to join me for my interview series with Newsweek, Better, today at 12 pm EDT/9 am PT/5 pm GMT. I’ll be joined by the former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Company Douglas Conant to talk about how to be uplifting with your leadership! For a calendar reminder about today’s interview, click here.

In advance of my new book, The Long Game, I am offering a free strategic self-assessment that you can download to reimagine your schedule, learn how to focus where it counts, and create more time for the things that matter the most. You can download that workbook here.

For as long as I have known Ron Carucci, he has been studying the inner workings of how companies can become more ethical (and effective, in the process). One of the main themes I gleaned from Ron’s findings was that a company’s moral compass doesn’t simply stem from the top-down, but can be nurtured from the ground up. Here are a few suggestions from him about how we can all do our part- and if you’d like to see our talk in its entirety, it is available here on my YouTube channel.

Trust isn’t strictly based on geography:

“I think that people assume intimacy and trust are a function of physical presence. Physical presence certainly plays a role in trust-based intimacy, but it isn't the only role it plays. I think a lot of times, when people talked about the pandemic - that working from home and working remotely strained the trust in their team, I might have challenged them and said, ‘I think maybe it revealed a lack of trust on your team.’ Because teams that are cohesive, that are aligned, that really have created that sense of belonging, found creative ways to sustain it across the three-by-five screens we now look at each other through. So the question I would have for organizations who are struggling would be: What creative ways have you found to not make physical presence a factor in how you work cohesively? Collaboration, trust, and relationships are not a function of physical presence. They are a function of how well you know each other, how well you have each other's backs, and how well you understand what one another does."

The impact of accountability:

“You never hear people run out of a room saying, ‘Wow, I love my performance appraisal,’ or, ‘My one-on-one with my boss was great.’ The process that ought to be the most dignifying and honoring in our companies has become the most demeaning and dehumanizing. We've tried to neutralize sameness as if it is fairness, by neutralizing. The problem is today, my remit isn't repeatable work, my remit is my analysis, my insight, my creativity, my ideas. So the contributor and the contribution are so much more fused than ever. If I don't treat that contribution with dignity and fairness, and you feel invisible or unseen, you don't have an equal chance of success as everybody else, and you're four times more likely to have people lie and cheat. But if people perceive it to be fair, meaning with dignity and justice, you're four times more likely to have people tell the truth and behave fairly and serve a greater good."

Wielding the truth:

“I think truth-telling can't leave a wake of bodies behind you. There is a messaging talent to this, right? Walking into somebody in a meeting and saying, ‘Wow, that report really sucked.’ Well, is it honest? Technically, yes. But is it stupid? It's that too, right? So you have to know your audience. You have to know ‘What is my intended outcome of this message? What is my intended outcome of this act of honesty?’ And if it's self-serving, then it's really not honest, right? It's maybe blunt, but you have to ask yourself, ‘When they hear this message from me, do I want them thinking more about their own behavior, or do I want them thinking about mine?’ And if you can't be confident that it's going to be edifying to them, you probably need to rethink whether or not you need to say or do it."

Thank you so much for reading this week’s newsletter - Join me later today for my interview with Douglas Conant! The following week, I’ll talk with the author of Futureproof, Kevin Roose, about futureproofing yourself in the age of automation. For a calendar reminder, click here.

If you can’t make today’s interview, we always make a replay available! It’s uploaded to my YouTube page. If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success - 

Dorie